Severin Matusek

Participation. The token gives me permission to participate in the project and/or its culture, in whatever way that may be defined.

Encampments are not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but on my visits to Sproul Hall I was struck, nonetheless, by the tents, and what they seemed to evoke.

A sponsored Instagram ad leads me to schedule a demo with a health-tech startup selling a headband that will stimulate my brain with little electrical pulses to make the worries disappear. It’s marketed as a life hack for people who are too busy to meditate.

Fringe ideas are no longer fanciful theories but have become real political projects.

Editorial: the community collates notes from our weekly talks and turns them into brief bulletins. These bulletins align the community and helps us build bridges across our community to be inclusive of non-English speakers. Editorial pieces by COLORS also feature calls to participation, which allows us to explore how to create dynamic communities... See more

Still, a synthetic feed is theoretically much simpler—an endless scroll of dopamine-triggering engagement for users and grist for other social networks and group chats. As the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal mused on X recently, there’s a poetic coherence to this evolution: “The emergence of ‘slop’ was foretold as soon as we started... See more

And that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.