Severin Matusek

For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves... See more

Changing attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have expressed skepticism about these... See more

Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

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.

The rise of Onlyfans can be interpreted as a “commodification of intimacy” where, unlike porn, adult creators can now provide lonely men intimacy at scale over DMs.

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

For some people, in considering this possibility, the question naturally arises: “That sounds nice, but how is a tiny software company supposed to compete with huge and well-funded companies?” The answer is that you don’t really have to. You just have to get an understanding of the proper pace and scale of whatever your endeavor is. Get there, and... See more

Where do we find the much-needed alternative? While researching my latest podcast, A Sense of Rebellion, I stumbled on a series of debates that took place in the 1970s and pointed in the right direction. Back then, a small group of hippy radicals were advocating for “ecological technology” and “counter-technology”. They weren’t satisfied with... See more