Severin Matusek

The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk.

What the internet allows us to do is to see what we have in common. This resulted in a new experience of what it means to be a person. We have multiple lenses and identities ready to be activated at any given moment. They are meaningful. Digital avatars are just as meaningful to us as other identities.

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

In today’s post-therapeutic market, irony, detachment, and self-optimization have become substitutes for justice, truth, morality, or political resolve.

I would love to have a proper staff, but the reality is that it’s taken me this long just to get the newsletter to a point where it’s feasible to financially support just me, and only at a very moderate level. Until quite recently, my salary at XLR8R, when I left in 2015, was actually higher than my annual income from First Floor. I’ve finally... See more

I’ve noticed a new trend among the chattering classes of online AI guy hypebeast. Their current stage of grief over AGI not arriving or having very little to show in the way of ROI for their LLMs has shifted to blaming the users. To them, it’s not that AI is not working as they intended; it’s the people who are too stupid to understand how to use... See more

The traditional boundaries of profession and practice blur not because they're being forcibly eroded, but because they're becoming irrelevant to how value is actually created.