Severin Matusek

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

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I... See more

O’Rourke is among a growing group of literary writers who have tried to answer the question in the first person, scoping out artificial intelligence’s encroachments from within the domains it most imperils. Their writing asks what AI-generated writing can or (much less often) can’t do, and how human writers can or (much more often) can’t respond.... See more

The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is the sense of meaninglessness that prompts some people... See more

The more the world fills with slop, the more human gestures stand out and reverberate with new meaning. Accessing glib simulations of information will have become commoditized, but someone actually telling you something, anything, will seem more important than ever.

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

It used to feel really chaotic to me. I used to be like, how do we make sense of all this stuff? There's so much stuff. There's so many different moods, tones, attitudes, no cohesive narrative. But then once you get enough distance and look in the rearview you realize: that's a body of work.

In fact, if I sense that an artist is creating, saying or doing things just to win public approval, or to yield to the demands of the market, well, that’s when I tend to turn away.