Severin Matusek

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more

Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) theorizes how modern societies undergo cultural transformation through moments of “engineered symbolic release”—structured breaks from normative social controls that absorb disruptive impulses rather than confront them. Every culture, Rieff argues, functions by organizing moral demands into... See more

The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share... See more

This is a chance to bring warmth and fun into an increasingly lonely and isolated world.

Taylor Swift, for example, is notorious for generating lore, putting easter eggs in everything she does, and readingand playing into fan theories about herself. She does this both in the ‘text’ of her songs (see: the fandom’s obsession around the Betty/August/James lore in the album /iterallycalled folklore), as well as in her activities... See more