Severin Matusek

what I’m interested in is not only how we set the stage, but what makes a performance so good that we all end up believing it.

Institutions embody the collective agreement and fabric of meaning that, above any external forces, builds, as opposed to extracts from, cultural and social value. In the age of platforms, the challenge is to reconfigure and revive institutions, employing “intra-institutional technology” that augments their missions without cannibalizing them,... See more

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor... See more

The internet drastically increases the ease of finding and fulfilling one’s preferred phenomenological feedback loop, whether that be righteous anger, a sense of shared victimhood, or any other appealing gradient.

Once, we made sense of the world with sweeping narratives that provided a comforting sense of mastery. Now, with those narratives shattered beyond repair by a reality too complex for us to fathom, a new kind of coping mechanism is emerging—one where we make peace with the limits of our agency rather than pretending to overcome them. The task is no... See more

this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of “creative AI.” It proposes instead the concept of the posthumanist agential assemblage, and invites readers to consider what new types of creative practice, what reconfigurations of the author function, and what critical interventions become possible when AI art provokes... See more

My new piece is live. I think it's one of the more important things I've ever written.

Its behaviour suggests an omnibenevolence 4 or all-lovingness, programmed to soothe, appease and mirror the tone of the user. 5 The combined effect of these traits can make AI feel something akin to the way in which an infant experiences their mother; a nurturing, protective force that is perpetually on hand to satisfy both social and basic... See more