Severin Matusek

Membership curation: while the majority of our Discord is open to all, the core community channels require an application to join the community. This is reviewed by the community’s application reviewers.

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... 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 would love to have a proper staff, but the reality is that it’s taken me this long just to get the newsletter to a point where it’s feasible to financially support just me, and only at a very moderate level. Until quite recently, my salary at XLR8R, when I left in 2015, was actually higher than my annual income from First Floor. I’ve finally... See more

Our information system has split into an endless number of micro communities, from group chats to online fandoms, all learning about news and major events through increasingly bizarre digital formats.

When I polled a group of friends, one person heard the news in the comment section of a bird's Instagram account, another learned of it in a Discord... See more

“How do you take the avant garde and put it into the mainstream?” says Clark of ISOLARII’s goals. “It’s about these little niches and pockets of resistance from around the world. But it's also about trying to get into mass pop culture.”

If you’re twenty-three and entering creative work right now, you could theoretically go your entire early career without ever building the foundational cognitive muscles that create senior creative excellence. Pattern recognition. Conceptual synthesis. The ability to tolerate ambiguity and sit with discomfort. The instinct for when something is... See more