Severin Matusek

“You can play games with it,” she said of stardom (in another unexpected place, “The Howard Stern Show”), “and I think that’s a very interesting part of being an artist as well, when you can use that thing — fame, publicity — as a tool.”

closed net cultures such as One Direction fandom do produce a lot of creative work, but it’s basically like the inside jokes you come up with at summer camp rather than innovations that will diffuse into the mainstream.

Weekly Talks: every Wednesday we host a call to talk about what’s happening inside our community. We listen to music NFTs before the start of the hour and in the second half of the hour we are joined by an artist to talk about their creative journey. Artists who have joined us already include Adria Kain, Erick the Architect, Haleek Maul, Iman... See more

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

Holly+ represents the future that Herndon and Dryhurst anticipate for music, art, and literature: a world of “infinite media,” in which anyone can adjust, adapt, or iterate on the work, talents, and traits of others.

Still, a synthetic feed is theoretically much simpler—an endless scroll of dopamine-triggering engagement for users and grist for other social networks and group chats. As the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal mused on X recently, there’s a poetic coherence to this evolution: “The emergence of ‘slop’ was foretold as soon as we started... See more