Severin Matusek

The value is really in the creator communities, and one of the fundamental reasons why Channel was what we ended up building is that it allowed us to re-bundle around ready-made communities. Our entire approach to re-networking a media system is based on how new media functions now.

1. The emergence of creators as vertical-specific search engines. Creators are often the entry point of choice for people on the internet.

Creative work by inspiration is seen as unpaid and without value. Creative work for commercial purposes is worth compensation if it meets the brief. Institutions remain the primary mediators of payment, whether they're museums, corporations, or technology platforms.

There's a very brief window of time. In this moment, right here and right now, some folks are eagerly starting projects, building assets and creating values. Others, in a pattern we've seen again and again, are waiting, fearfully, ignoring what's happening and hoping for the best.

They recast speculative investment as a valorized form of cultural participation—transforming economic risk into a mode of self-expression, and volatility into a kind of gamified solidarity.

If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.

A sponsored Instagram ad leads me to schedule a demo with a health-tech startup selling a headband that will stimulate my brain with little electrical pulses to make the worries disappear. It’s marketed as a life hack for people who are too busy to meditate.