Severin Matusek

Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.

“It seems like Gen Z is getting really tired of presentation culture, as you might call it,” Zeke, a 21-year-old biologist and frequent Discord chatter, told me. “The idea that everything you do has to be a representation of your personal identity.”

One of the keys to NFTs will be portability across mediums. A Twitter blue check can’t exist on Instagram, but the NFT equivalent of a Twitter blue check can — and deliver credible authenticity, thanks to that NFT deed. This is the metaverse vision of interoperability that could help make digital belongings feel similar to physical belongings.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re so fiercely protecting our intellectual property in an era when it’s harder and harder to purchase physical property.

From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

Has anyone wrote anything good on the technological effects on human affectivity? The ability of humans to feel?

If LLMs can now ace the IMO, why not make them president and CEO too? They should run the institutions, not us. Relatedly: the idea that Mars colonization or Cluely or whatever is some kind of natural, inevitable endpoint to humanity; that regardless of whether a product is something we want, there is a moral duty to bring it into existence—to... See more

So how is it that we have entered into our most digitally connected age ever yet loneliness is at an all-time high?

A few things come to mind:

• The new ways we connect lack depth


• We face information overload from too many people we don't care much about


• We move locations and jobs more often


• Information is decentralized: we go to technology for

... See more

Pushing a product is a no-no, she said. Instead, “Being there in a way of informing people and wanting to educate on a certain product is great.”