Severin Matusek

Metaphors mixing mind with machine proliferate across pop psychology—not least in subliminal fan communities, where the videos are seen as programmes that can delete, rewrite, and generate new “programming.” That a behaviour can be ‘soft-’ or ‘hard-coded’ is useful shorthand for nurture and nature—programming from parents, society, and environment... See more

Changing how we think of value requires changing how we think of self. Bentoism is an answer to that, a practical framework to think about the Now Me, Now Us, Future Me, Future Us.

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

The debate over “is it real or fake” is somewhat ironic, because so much of what we experience as reality even within our own bodies is actually simulation.

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 real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock,... See more

“I think we've entered a space now in the world where technology has become political and basically every one of us is conflicted,” Moss said at the beginning of the discussion.

Zines are best when they are about the artistic process, when you can see the marks of another human being making stuff in our human beingy ways.

In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them.