Severin Matusek

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.

As the rest of the internet gets overtaken by bots and AI-generated content and oligarch-owners livestreaming megalomaniacal presidential candidates, the self-contained publications controlled entirely by professional humans win out.

And that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.

McLuhan was the prophet of cool, and as much as he personally despised contemporary media culture, he knew that the only way to critique it was to ride the wave; hence, The Medium is the Massage , a beautifully designed book of aphorisms condensing the ideas he worked out in detail in Understanding Media .

In 2024, an online experiment with 36 ChatGPT users found that use of AI can expand how many creative ideas an individual user has, but at a group level, “users tended to produce less semantically distinct ideas”. That same year, another study reached similar results; this time it was a group of short-story writers who each managed to independently... See more

‘lore’—it’s a model of knowledge that is able to interface with both reality and fiction.