Severin Matusek

Second, there are early cohorts of founders who will aim to find vibe-alignment with their capital. This is the bull case for more opinionated or smaller firms at the early-stage. I’m talking my own book here, but as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then... See more

When speaking with founders and creators, a common thread emerges: the fear is no longer about meeting standards, but about optimizing every variable in an increasingly complex equation. A senior engineer at a major tech company recently noted that his team's productivity metrics had improved, yet satisfaction scores had declined. The tools that... See more

A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a “stereotype”—a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake—of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.

The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share... See more

The word for world is forest1. The word for world is mother2. The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5. The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after. The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders. The world is autonomous and... See more

Moving “the future” away from ideologies of dominance and control has become imperative. One promising model can be found in the collective known as the Tropical Futures Institute, founded by designer and gallerist Chris Fussner. Based on the party island of Cebu, Philippines, the “institute” is in fact a decentralized, roaming think tank that... See more

Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he... See more