Severin Matusek

NFTs offer the promise of scarcity and authenticity for digital goods. NFTs aren’t the only way to create scarcity and authenticity online — trusted, centralized entities such as banks (and platforms such as Twitter and Apple) do it within their verticals, and blockchain tech is evolving to address myriad environmental and security concerns. So the... See more

Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.

ne side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins.

Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

the feeling of regaining control and autonomy is empowering to the point where I rediscovered a sense of creativity that I hadn’t had in many years.

This is Vibe Theory: an expression of elite anxiety masquerading as a politics of resistance. It is also exemplary of what the tragic ur-European philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the “aestheticization of politics,” which in this case is the result of the odd incentives that ensue when the art world makes the invitations, pays the speaker... See more

Rather than building tools that compete with them, the smarter strategy is to create incentives for their participation.

So is it possible to build AI tools that can help us all, rather than simply bolstering the dizzying wealth of a small number of tech companies? Is it possible to create an AI that democratises more than just financial insecurity for the majority of people—simply shifting a greater percentage of people below the wealth disparity gap rather than... See more

It’s 6:52AM, coffee is brewing, we’re on page 666, Jon Baskin is reading, it’s a sunny day, we’ll be here at EARTH for the next 12 hours or so, everyone’s welcome: 49 Orchard/ https://youtube.com/@earth_net49/streams…