Severin Matusek

According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

Lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff. This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a genuinely new managerial capability.

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

In Mythologies , Roland Barthes discusses how wrestling (and now, politics) uses kayfabe, the convention of presenting staged narratives and spectacles as real to capture attention and elicit a desired response from an audience.

The first recorded use of ‘worldbuilding’ was in an issue of the Edinburgh Review , December 1820.

The New Economics Foundation found that 82% of Uber customers would use a more ethical alternative to the ride hail service and 54% would pay more for their journey to give drivers better pay and conditions.

Has the use of AI tools allowed her to speed through the tedious parts of her work, freeing up time to focus on the more stimulating aspects? “Speed isn’t really the point,” she replies. “That discourse usually comes from people who don’t really use the tools in interesting or meaningful ways. There’s so much clickbait content, like: ‘How I set up... See more

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more

As Bogost himself puts it in a 2024 update on the state of social media: the rise of Bluesky “is a relapse, not a fix”.