Severin Matusek

Web3 creates tools where this becomes practical. Allowing us to opt-in and out of value systems that add to our identities and contribute to understanding who we are and what is important to us

According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

I describe us not as a media company, but as a culture-forward media company, meaning that we view culture as the most important thing that’s feeding the planet.

If you look at any one Substack newsletter in comparison to its peers, it does appear banal and repetitive. But they are not experienced as a landscape; they are experienced individually. Each one is its own tiny world.

Local communities: we are connecting local communities, so that they can showcase their scenes and artists to the wider COLORS community around the globe.

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more

The Trump Administration has taken full advantage of this algorithm brain. We’ve entered the pure extraction phase of the economy, where things are created solely for consumption rather than purpose. I don’t mean this as a moralistic argument, it’s purely incentives, but it’s puzzling.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it... See more

For some people, in considering this possibility, the question naturally arises: “That sounds nice, but how is a tiny software company supposed to compete with huge and well-funded companies?” The answer is that you don’t really have to. You just have to get an understanding of the proper pace and scale of whatever your endeavor is. Get there, and... See more