Severin Matusek

Encampments are not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but on my visits to Sproul Hall I was struck, nonetheless, by the tents, and what they seemed to evoke.

Web3 is about the freedom to opt-in to systems and to opt-out of them.

A lot of people say kids don’t have subcultures anymore. I don’t think that’s true. You just don’t have to commit to it like you used to. You don’t have to put on clown paint to find an identity anymore. Identity is being served around you, shaped whether you like it or not. Also, we didn’t have a number over our head every day showing our value,... See more

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money,... See more

. I did marketing there, which basically amounted to drafting tweets that promoted a hypothetical product in unflinchingly positive terms. I remember on several occasions being reprimanded for not using enough emojis in my tweets.

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

Part of being part of a group is to adopt their worldview. We carry multiple identities all the time. Group-derived identities are just as important to us as personal identities.