Severin Matusek

What is needed, Citarella’s strategy suggests, is an understanding of a kind of post-internet politics, where, like it or not, online life is embraced as part and parcel of how modern belief systems are formed.

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.

“Every day, people learn more about the ways AI is impacting their lives, and it can often feel like this technology is happening to us rather than with us and for us,”

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been... See more

The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.