Severin Matusek

Today's sincerity is less about saving the world and more about building a world worth saving, starting with your own corner of it.

It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy. 

By volume alone, slop may be the most visible and successful by-product of the generative-AI era to date. It is also a hallmark of what I’ve previously described as a collective delusion around artificial intelligence—where the breathless hype and imagined future of building a godlike superintelligence and curing cancer collides with the dull... See more

AI tools were meant to automate the boring bits and free up time for meaningful work. Instead, creatives speak of endless iterations, escalating client demands and entirely new categories of digital drudgery. Are we thinking about AI’s place in the creative process all wrong?

I argued before that “social media” was an alibi for injecting more TV into people’s lives to take advantage of increased network connectivity — that we had to be persuaded that it was a pro-social thing to do to carry little TVs around and watch them at every possible moment. Conflating friendship and entertainment was part of that campaign. Now... See more

The traditional boundaries of profession and practice blur not because they're being forcibly eroded, but because they're becoming irrelevant to how value is actually created.

Watching the new Miyazaki documentary ("Miyazaki and the Heron" on Max) and just getting hit by haymaker after haymaker

This point of view – which troubles the official narrative being rolled out by AI companies – is not rare. In his newsletter “How to Survive the Internet” the author and journalist Jamie Bartlett paraphrased a recent conversation he’d had with someone he described as an “AI power user”: “‘So are you producing more stuff per day?’ I ask.... See more

As a more right-leaning crowd of tech elite and terminally online Gen-Z founders emerged, they turned against politics in the workplace and globalism. Sharing technology globally had put Silicon Valley’s tech leadership at risk of being overtaken by China, some said.