Severin Matusek

About MetalabelAbstracting the concept of a label away from the music industry: it’s a hyperstructure (borrowing the term of Jacob Horne from Zora) that I call the metalabel. It’s a person or group of people creating a common identity for a shared purpose producing public releases that manifests their point of view.

The New Economics Foundation found that 82% of Uber customers would use a more ethical alternative to the ride hail service and 54% would pay more for their journey to give drivers better pay and conditions.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing, consolida

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AE: Reflecting back on the past year, one project that stands out for me is Mitchell F. Chan’s The Boys of Summer (2023) because I’m interested in how we are all folded into gamified networks. Which works or exhibitions have resonated the most with you over that time? ‍

Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.

Now our President, along with his lieutenant content-generator Elon Musk, is working at the pace of an internet that has been relentlessly accelerating for eight years.

t’s key to research the need for an idea, not only focus on the solution, but what it actually solves. Get intimate with that problem and its many dimensions, understand how it shows up in people’s lives.