Severin Matusek

Like any new technology, crypto is far from inevitable—no matter what its boosters claim. More precisely, decentralization—crypto’s core principle and its most significant contribution to reshaping markets—is far from a sure thing.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

Put plainly, for Europe to succeed in realizing its most impactful contributions to the planetary computational stack, it must stop talking itself out of advancement and instead cultivate a new philosophy of computation that invents the concepts needed to compose the world, not just deconstruct it or preserve it like a relic.

I was a serf, a voiceless and expendable user at the base of a virtual fiefdom. The longing for sovereignty over my networking stack was connected to deeper desires. I may not own my own home or feel that I have much say in the direction of the country, but online, at least, I would have both freedom and agency.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument.

In 2023, we launched an editorial series about AI called Shades of Intelligence. We learnt a lot about the way creatives were beginning to work with this new tech, harnessing it for tasks ranging from creative direction to project rollout. Since then, the needs have shifted. After two years of rapid change, Light and Shade focuses on the wider... See more

Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, meme coins have no intrinsic utility and derive their market value almost entirely from collective behavior, making them highly susceptible to volatility.

“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

Palantir is a fascinating conundrum. A company "everybody" hates, unapologetically right-wing, nerd-y and striving for coolness, both (the "chore coat" is a dud but the "software that dominates" tagline is not; the sheer cheek of it!).

It releases (derivative merch), hosts pop-ups in Seoul. It is essentially a poster boy for the whole “taste is the... See more