Severin Matusek

Now, as the newly minted CEO of the brand, he’s taking the reins as it continues into its next chapter: one defined by IRL spaces, physical products, a community-first token, and a new AI platform called DreamNet.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more

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

For 90 days, I’d meet one new person every day. By the end of each conversation, I’d ask them to introduce me to at least one new person relevant to where I was trying to go. And then I did it. By the end of the summer, I had almost 100 new contacts. Every person is an open door, a potential opportunity, even if it’s not obvious at first. So many... See more

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor... See more

The cutesy image of the Shiba Inu, the ambiguous volatility of Pepe the Frog, and the militant bravado of Trump meme coins do not contest economic logics so much as offer a cathartic participation within them. They perform precisely what Rieff recognizes as the function of “releasing symbols”—forms of engagement that facilitate emotional discharge,... See more

The value is really in the creator communities, and one of the fundamental reasons why Channel was what we ended up building is that it allowed us to re-bundle around ready-made communities. Our entire approach to re-networking a media system is based on how new media functions now.