Severin Matusek

AI tools were meant to automate the boring bits and free up time for meaningful work. Instead, creatives speak of endless iterations, escalating client demands and entirely new categories of digital drudgery. Are we thinking about AI’s place in the creative process all wrong?

According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

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.

When speaking with founders and creators, a common thread emerges: the fear is no longer about meeting standards, but about optimizing every variable in an increasingly complex equation. A senior engineer at a major tech company recently noted that his team's productivity metrics had improved, yet satisfaction scores had declined. The tools that... See more

I was a serf, a voiceless and expendable user at the base of a virtual fiefdom. The longing for sovereignty over my networking stack was connected to deeper desires. I may not own my own home or feel that I have much say in the direction of the country, but online, at least, I would have both freedom and agency.

My new piece is live. I think it's one of the more important things I've ever written.

However, with the trend of deglobalisation, major powers are now placing greater emphasis on self-strengthening and self-reliance. Their competitive strategies have shifted toward enhancing their relative advantage by restricting the development of rivals. Even if their own growth slows, they aim to ensure that their competitors develop at an even... See more

When people bring up the specter of generative AI as relates to creative work, my mind goes in a few different directions. But the point that feels most salient is the simplest: Actually doing things is fun.

Held at the Bradbury Building and the historic Hearst Estate, the Imaginative Assemblies used blindfolded deep-listening, tactile modeling, and facilitated dialogue to probe this central question. This process collected 30 hours of audio (18GB), 4,500+ photos (16GB), and 60+ hours of film (6.7TB) across all sessions. The resultant report documents... See more