Severin Matusek

At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.

Now there’s a fifth way: Be a part of entire large nomadic scenes with no particular geographic base, but with highly complex organizational capabilities and internal economic engines. The Ethereum ecosystem is a very good example of this phenomenon. It has the scale, operational complexity, and economic mass of a major multi-national corporation,... See more

Lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment.

It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy. 

Changing attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have expressed skepticism about these... See more

Looking back five years after the initial Dark Forest essay and pangs of concern, what most stands out is something that those of us who are drawn to Dark Forests have felt longer than most: that the internet is real life. What we do “in here” matters just as much as — and for some of us, problematically, even more than — what happens “out there.”... See more

That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

The Channel NFT acted as a token that opened up a few things for me: