Severin Matusek

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the... See more

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

If art has a duty, it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible. You see where I’m going here. If you want to make an artwork depicting a person, you would do well to use oil paint, a technology that, like human flesh, absorbs and refracts light, and can be pulled taut across the canvas or else... See more

About post-individualismWe’re not going back to collectivism. It’s a new state called post-individualism.Post-individuals define their identity by both their own individual traits as well as which groups and ideologies they voluntarily subscribe to.

The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share... 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

Put plainly, for Europe to succeed in realizing its most impactful contributions to the planetary computational stack, it must stop talking itself out of advancement and instead cultivate a new philosophy of computation that invents the concepts needed to compose the world, not just deconstruct it or preserve it like a relic.

Robert Shiller coined narrative economics, arguing that stories drive economic behavior. I think we are in a new iteration of all of this where the stories aren't just influencing economic activity, they are the economic activity. Attention is a precursor to wealth (in many ways) and speculation drives it.