Severin Matusek

“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.”

The voices that helped shape Light and Shade include: Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow at MIT; James Bridle, artist, writer and technologist; Alex de Vries, PhD candidate at VU Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies and founder of Digiconomist; Linda Dounia Rebeiz, artist, designer and writer; Shaolei Ren, associate... See more

Systems Ultra goes beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to explore how we experience the complex systems which influence our lives, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.

One significant thing these organizations and social technologies share is that they all seek to create new social paradigms, to stand apart from legacy institutions of finance and care.

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

Williams also wrote that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite - something that doesn't need you to feel desperate in order to work.

On TikTok, as The Washington Post has reported, some creators are making $5,000 a month using AI tools to write scripts and animate extremely dumb viral videos where old men talk about soiling themselves.

Early tokenization efforts had smart ideas; they built new markets and created new ways for artists to make money. These experiments proved particularly valuable for artists with dedicated fan communities but often created parallel economies operating separately from traditional distribution channels.