Severin Matusek

Marx’s core mistake is not that money influences culture — it always has — but that he mistakes the visibility of mass taste for the dominance of mass taste.

Before social media:

• Most people liked basic, commercial things too.

• You just didn’t see them.

• Culture was filtered through critics, editors, curators, and tastemakers.

After social media:

•... See more

Blank Space is, in many ways, a testament to W. David Marx’s extraordinary ability to marshal vast bibliographies, track intellectual lineages across cultures, and stitch together patterns with impressive fluency. A decade ago, this method—an almost virtuosic accumulation of references, quotes, and cross-disciplinary comparisons—would have felt... See more

On May 28, we’re gathering 500 of the most creative storytellers, builders, and media entrepreneurs for The Hollywood Creator Summit , a one-day summit for creators building the future of entertainment.

For the last decade, the conversation has centered on what happens when Hollywood and creators “converge”. That conversation is behind us.

Creators... See more

A common critique suggests this convergence of betting and browsing is a joyless, clinical exercise—that reducing our interests to "investments" strips away the inherent fun of discovery. This view posits that most people don't actually want to "make things happen" or carry the burden of being right; they just want to be entertained. But my data... See more

Last year @ibraaz_london, I had the privilege of inviting one my favourite thinkers in the world — @jaya.papaya — to curate an ongoing series about perhaps the most pressing emergent topic today: the vexed and violent relationship between technology and power. Jaya’s series examines what it means to inhabit a world of extreme contradictions and to... See more

Williams also wrote that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite - something that doesn't need you to feel desperate in order to work.

But just as individuals use various things to simulate control, institutions are increasingly using spectacle to simulate stability they can no longer guarantee. Spectacle is the solution9, because seriousness requires accountability and accountability requires consequences and consequences require institutions that are willing to enforce them.... See more

Is there that much difference between the (1) manosphere playbook of extracting value from people weaker than you, taking no responsibility for the damage, and moving to the next target and the (2) private equity model of identifying undervalued assets and extracting operating efficiencies and returning capital to shareholders?