Severin Matusek

But what we’re not talking about, what we’re not worrying about nearly enough, is the other side of the coin. If we’re running at speed at this, if we’re pushing everyone to use AI because we think it’s some sort of panacea to every business challenge we have, what about atrophy? What about the erosion of expertise, of knowledge, of critical... See more

If you’re lucky, perhaps something you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The... See more

People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.”

There is a clear pattern for all four companies [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google]: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be... See more

In a work featured in this section, American artist Joshua Citarella trawls the message boards of 4chan, Reddit, and other such platforms, collecting designs for flags that express young people’s political self-identifications. The designs he has collected combine wildly opposing discursive systems in a sort of schizophrenic mélange: “Islamic,... See more

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch.

To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.