Severin Matusek

A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a “stereotype”—a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake—of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.

This is an answer to the individualism of the creator economy.

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more

We're all participants in a cognitive economy that trades in attention, belief, and behavior. Shape the feed, shape the future. What happens when everything becomes an attention-speculation machine?

This report, which will drop over the course of five days, also marks the launch of Season 1 of $STREAM — our new research token designed to incentivize and reward collaborative research, knowledge-sharing and community-building in music and technology.

In 2021, Ethiopia actually began building its own social media site as a response to Facebook’s alleged incitement of ethnic massacres. And more recently, Japan funnelled taxpayer money into the dating app Tapple, in a bid to fix the nation’s declining marriage and birth rates.

The internet works but not for us. This much is painstakingly obvious and has been for years. And yet, where are the better alternatives?

If art has a duty, it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible. You see where I’m going here. If you want to make an artwork depicting a person, you would do well to use oil paint, a technology that, like human flesh, absorbs and refracts light, and can be pulled taut across the canvas or else... See more