Severin Matusek

How will these changes filter through to the ways our attention is captured, and where it’s directed, in years to come?

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.

With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.

If you try to make your online presence more lore-worthy in order to be legible to these platforms, you could end up falling asleep at thewheel of the algorithm. You might even wake up one morning to find that the fancamyou liked to imagine watching you has suddenly become real.

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”