Severin Matusek

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving

Put simply, a network state is an online community that materializes in the physical world with the goal of achieving meaningful collective action.

Digital belongings exist on the internet, but there aren’t that many types of them. On Fortnite you can acquire guns and outfits. On Reddit you gain badges. Point is: There’s a lot of stuff on the internet, but there isn’t much stuff that’s yours.

“I can see from the little acquaintance that I have with using AI programs to make music, that what you spend nearly all your time doing is trying to stop the system becoming mind numbingly mediocre. You really feel the pull of the averaging effect of AI, given that what you are receiving is a kind of averaged out distillation of stuff from a lot... See more

In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them.

Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work , Luddism—born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital—was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society... of which machines were the chief weapon.”