Severin Matusek

—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The final notes of the AI-and-I essay are cowed resignation, awed acquiescence, and what Trotsky called the “terrifying helplessness” of cultural production at “the beginning of a great epoch”

4/ The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple — some say parallel — realities.

As you can tell from my attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.

So how is it that we have entered into our most digitally connected age ever yet loneliness is at an all-time high?

A few things come to mind:

• The new ways we connect lack depth


• We face information overload from too many people we don't care much about


• We move locations and jobs more often


• Information is decentralized: we go to technology for

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And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter - the increasing randomness of reach - is just too hard to accept.

Artists using these platforms ended up managing two disconnected worlds – their mainstream streaming presence on one side and their web3 collectors on the other.

And while the mainstream discourse around AI continues to revolve around speed and productivity, it’s not surprising that the most interesting stuff seems to occur when creatives reject this framing entirely.

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.