Severin Matusek

When speaking with founders and creators, a common thread emerges: the fear is no longer about meeting standards, but about optimizing every variable in an increasingly complex equation. A senior engineer at a major tech company recently noted that his team's productivity metrics had improved, yet satisfaction scores had declined. The tools that... See more

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.

And AI’s semivisible, infrastructural role in exploiting precarious labor (Uber’s nifty algorithm for suppressing driver wages), landlordism (RealPage’s widely used rent-hiking software), and neocolonial war (Israel’s high-tech civilian-bombing gadgetry) may already be too entrenched to stop. But professional readers and writers: We retain some... See more

A lot of people say kids don’t have subcultures anymore. I don’t think that’s true. You just don’t have to commit to it like you used to. You don’t have to put on clown paint to find an identity anymore. Identity is being served around you, shaped whether you like it or not. Also, we didn’t have a number over our head every day showing our value,... See more

Whoever controls AI infrastructure — compute, models, data and cloud — will shape the economic and political order of the 21st century. The U.S. and China understand this and are mobilizing every instrument of statecraft to secure supremacy. Europe must understand it too.

technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us,

closed net cultures such as One Direction fandom do produce a lot of creative work, but it’s basically like the inside jokes you come up with at summer camp rather than innovations that will diffuse into the mainstream.