Severin Matusek

Our sense of it being effective to stick together, to do things like loan each other sugar, proactively participate in building neighborhood safety and infrastructure, or babysit each other’s children is dissolving, because in fact it is no longer effective or efficient to do many of these things.

I should also reiterate here that my work is absolutely not trying to future-cast a singular vision or offer immediate solutions to the present, which is an impossible and dangerous brand of solutionism that we know well enough already from the technosolutionists in Silicon Valley. Rather, I’m using speculation to expand the atlas of shared... See more

technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us,

I love that summary, particularly how it catches the message of hope. Filterworld isn’t a wholesale complaint about social media; it’s a quest to figure out how we can have something better than our self-reinforcing and flattening algorithmic feeds. That is what I want people to get from reading the book, in the end. Even though digital platforms... See more

A lot of people say kids don’t have subcultures anymore. I don’t think that’s true. You just don’t have to commit to it like you used to. You don’t have to put on clown paint to find an identity anymore. Identity is being served around you, shaped whether you like it or not. Also, we didn’t have a number over our head every day showing our value,... 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

If a technology has emancipatory potential, it is not the would-be feudal lords who will realize it: It is the community of power-users, the weirdos and dreamers—working together—who will bring it to fruition.

Part of being part of a group is to adopt their worldview. We carry multiple identities all the time. Group-derived identities are just as important to us as personal identities.