Severin Matusek

Right now AI is fun parlor trick; it’s closer to personal tool than anything that will be deployed reliably enough to do the kind of economic shifting that its investors are betting it will.

what I’m interested in is not only how we set the stage, but what makes a performance so good that we all end up believing it.

If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, meme coins have no intrinsic utility and derive their market value almost entirely from collective behavior, making them highly susceptible to volatility.

No topic—not the genocidal war and famine in Gaza, not Trumpian authoritarianism—has magnetized bien-pensant attention this year in the way that AI has. Writing on AI thus comes in every mode: muckraking (“Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to ‘Munch’ Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health”), scholastic (“Deep Learning’s Governmentality”), polemical... See more

This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.

Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more