Severin Matusek

Rather than building tools that compete with them, the smarter strategy is to create incentives for their participation.

While people want borderless money in principle, what they really want is to be a part of something.

Functionalist theories, building on Durkheim’s insights, analyze totemism in terms of its social functions. From a functionalist perspective, totemism contributes to social cohesion by providing a shared system of beliefs and practices that reinforce group solidarity. The totemic system establishes social boundaries, regulates behavior through... See more

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are.

Being raised by TV is a walk in the park compared to being raised by apps.

As artist and AI collaborator Refik Anadol says, “This is pure collaboration , imagination with a machine.”

Belonging. The token makes me part of a group of 666 founding members that assigned the same value to the project / were willing to pay the same amount for getting involved.

This is where the labor issues of new media dovetail with those of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Amazon's planned worker chat app, "Shout Outs," bans a long list of worker-friendly words, including "union," "harassment," "grievance," and "injustice."