Severin Matusek

So what do we actually do about this? Because I’m not saying don’t use AI. That would be stupid. The genie is out of the bottle and there are genuinely transformative applications of this technology. I’m saying we need to be incredibly deliberate about how we integrate it. We need to slow down and think about what we’re optimising for.

If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.

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 Trump Administration has taken full advantage of this algorithm brain. We’ve entered the pure extraction phase of the economy, where things are created solely for consumption rather than purpose. I don’t mean this as a moralistic argument, it’s purely incentives, but it’s puzzling.

The more I use AI, the more I realize ignoring its creative potential is like dismissing the ‘90s internet as a porn delivery system.

At first, I saw using AI as a binary choice between soulless efficiency or becoming a luddite and preserving your authentic human creativity.

Over the last few months, Claude has become my dream creative partner, and I... See more

A contingent of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have spurred a rightward shift, leading to the rise of the “Liberaltarian” — a term coined by two Stanford political economists to describe the tech industry’s proclivity toward trumpeting liberalism in some social issues but maintaining antigovernment posturing in regulating businesses.

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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“How do you exhibit that? Does that create a new economy for artists? Does that require new governance structures between the institution and the artists exhibiting that work? How do we show people how exciting this is?”