Severin Matusek

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the Ameri... See more

Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values.

Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said... See more

Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in e... See more

“I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

As cultural researcher Victoria Buchanan points out, perhaps this is reflective of the much larger shift in the “junk-ification of our information.

As the rest of the internet gets overtaken by bots and AI-generated content and oligarch-owners livestreaming megalomaniacal presidential candidates, the self-contained publications controlled entirely by professional humans win out.

There is a clear pattern for all four companies [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google]: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be... See more

If you look at any one Substack newsletter in comparison to its peers, it does appear banal and repetitive. But they are not experienced as a landscape; they are experienced individually. Each one is its own tiny world.

The center of gravity is missing, so we seek out any foothold, any source of a perspective.