Severin Matusek

The internet is not a benevolent space for the exchange of meaning between humans. It is instead a battleground of hidden agendas, fought out under the ambiguous gaze of increasingly perceptive machines. The community intellectual, riding in on the horse of transparency and accountability, fights her honorable battles in the open. But honor has its... See more

The skills of infiltrators, obfuscators, traitors, mystics, spies, and all those who can walk in the dark, carrying their own agendas with them, are more prescient than the tactics of an intellectual used to open public debate.

As the internet shifts from a platform for discussion to a space populated by artificial agents with their own capacities, the stakes are different. The internet is no longer (just) where we persuade other humans; it is where we shape the behaviors of vast, increasingly agentic networks that, in turn, influence the psyche of their human users. Lest... See more

I gave tours of Strange Rules to most of the art world.

I asked the same question every time: are the consequential cultural actors today the people authoring protocols of interaction, or the people creating work inside them?

Despite a few winces, nobody picked the second.

Protocols are the substrate.

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.

Outstanding original content, for brands to survive in the feed and thrive in this new post-social age of media – from game shows, to video podcasts and educational reels, to those nerd slides you love to save and pass around.

I have come to accept that the tools of the present are not what many of us hoped they would be, but I continue to struggle with the terms we are using to label these platforms. I think that it’s time that we deprecate the label “social media” and begin to recognize that we are dealing with an era of “parasocial media.” I’m not looking to mourn the... See more