Severin Matusek

“It’s unsurprising that ketamine has taken over as the ‘drug of choice’ for young people, because of its disassociating effects, which allow you to be close to one another, while being isolated in your individual k-holes. It also makes it harder to look at your phone.” Plus, let’s face it, it’s hard to look all cool and serious while K-holing.

A refusal of AI in creative work begins with a refusal of that product’s ideological packaging.

The startup was called Tlon, a name I later learned came from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” tells of a secret society that conjures a new world by describing it.

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.

the feeling of regaining control and autonomy is empowering to the point where I rediscovered a sense of creativity that I hadn’t had in many years.

Status. The token (visible through Opensea and my Twitter profile) signals my involvement in a project that I, and others in my sphere, deem relevant.

My friend Chris Beiser says that social forms are a kind of capital that is essential to the structure of society and production. To put it a bit differently, the repertoire of forms dictates the kinds of lives that are available to us.

People really desire community, so I’m trying to build a whole community around The Slowdown. In 2023, we celebrated our five-year anniversary and threw this big dinner at Eleven Madison Park, inviting more than 25 former Time Sensitive guests.