Severin Matusek

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

I was a serf, a voiceless and expendable user at the base of a virtual fiefdom. The longing for sovereignty over my networking stack was connected to deeper desires. I may not own my own home or feel that I have much say in the direction of the country, but online, at least, I would have both freedom and agency.

That’s what you did with Glissant – you created this moment where you were able to bridge popular culture and philosophy, and put Glissant’s totally essential worldview into so many new hands.

Web3 creates tools where this becomes practical. Allowing us to opt-in and out of value systems that add to our identities and contribute to understanding who we are and what is important to us