Severin Matusek

So a lot of the scenarios in my projects that seem to hinge ludicrously across dystopia and utopia—another set of unproductive binaries we’ve created—are actually machine-generated.

If we want to choose how we are interpellated by neural media, that is, if we want to shape ourselves and our subjectivity through the apparatuses of neural media, now is the time to work. Doing so will require that we embrace the unique characteristics of neural media through literacy and experimentation, with a critical sense and a clear... See more

In fact, this points to something deeper than a mere recession, i.e. a cyclical downturn. Perhaps we’re looking at a secular change: a structural reordering of what “creative work” even means. The trad creative economies of ideas, taste, and differentiation are being replaced by economies of scale, prediction and synthesis. In this regime,... See more

Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale.

Consistency and quality are everything.

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.

For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves... See more

In Web1, because of our age and because of the technical skills that were needed, we couldn't really participate in it.