Severin Matusek

Zines are anarchist content-sharing. AI is opposite.

This point of view – which troubles the official narrative being rolled out by AI companies – is not rare. In his newsletter “How to Survive the Internet” the author and journalist Jamie Bartlett paraphrased a recent conversation he’d had with someone he described as an “AI power user”: “‘So are you producing more stuff per day?’ I ask.... See more

Creative Futures Counterstructures (CFC) is Mozilla Foundation’s 10-week cultural R&D residency where creative technologists and communities come together to imagine, test, and build alternative tech infrastructures.

Through critical learning sessions, hands-on workshops, collaborative play, and a public exhibition, residents will design and... See more

Another way of gaming the system, which I would argue is more dangerous, is to promise something that you either know you can’t deliver, or you’re not sure that technology can deliver, but by trying to essentially reengineer society around the technology, reengineer consumer expectations, reengineer user behaviors, you and your company are planning... See more

So a lot of the scenarios in my projects that seem to hinge ludicrously across dystopia and utopia—another set of unproductive binaries we’ve created—are actually machine-generated.

A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a “stereotype”—a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake—of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.

I can’t overemphasize the value of getting hands-on experience, combined with the time I’d previously spent on research. I think it’s unlikely I could’ve gotten to my current point of view just by reading and talking to developers. Through my initial work, I’d become very familiar with what developers think about open source. But in trying to turn... See more