Severin Matusek

Labubu and Fartcoin are the economy people can actually participate in.

And as I’ve spent more time reporting on Silicon Valley culture this year, one of the trends I’ve been most surprised and disturbed to observe is not merely a shift to the right, but the emergence of a nihilism about whether tech should serve humans at all.

Memecoins must graduate from being nonproductive images onchain to becoming productive and sentient social currencies that drive crypto forward.

What’s notable is the rhetoric about Sora introducing a Cambrian explosion of human creativity. Liberated from the bottlenecks of charisma, skill and craft, real creativity – i.e ideas – can now flourish and be channeled via text prompt.

> be me > Alexandr Wang, born January 1997 > age 19, drop out of MIT > co-found Scale AI > "what if we label data, but mid?" > convince every LLM company that this is fine > 2016–2023 > flood the market with barely-labeled goat photos... See more

We shifted from cyberpunk manifestos, to corporate networks and the commoditization of the user for economic extraction.

What, if anything, about this structure can and should change? We feel drawn to two ideas that feel deeply intertwined:

1) Increasing creative agency

2) Increasing economic control

By increasing creative agency , we mean freedom for creative people to move between quadrants. Artist, Creator, Institutional Artist, and Commercial Artist are all... See more

The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is the sense of meaninglessness that prompts some people... See more

I think everything you write has a purpose, and if you understand the purpose and the audience, you shouldn’t veer too far from what its intention is. I would like to be good at writing ad copy, writing press releases and writing articles in all their correct ways, but then also be able to experiment and expand the form.