Severin Matusek

I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app—except it’s devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company’s large language model to illustrate their ideas.

Coffee preferences are personal and abundant. The world is big enough for espresso machines and French presses. And which machine the barista uses depends on who they’re serving.

Art preferences are similar. So when I hear talk about how AI is going to replace artists, I think to myself, the world is big enough for both. Or when I see tweets about... See more

“The hunger for something shared is going to increase,” writes Stratechery’s Ben Thompson about the solipsism of the AI era.

What people such as Altman and Andreessen envision is the logical end point of technology itself—a push to eliminate cognitive resistance and bridge the gap between imagination and reality.

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are.

Thus, the expats of our age will be those who move offline, as much as it is those who move abroad. Living offline is the real luxury: something that is only affordable to elites. It is only by getting off our phones that we will ever collectively conquer our learned helplessness.

I would love to have a proper staff, but the reality is that it’s taken me this long just to get the newsletter to a point where it’s feasible to financially support just me, and only at a very moderate level. Until quite recently, my salary at XLR8R, when I left in 2015, was actually higher than my annual income from First Floor. I’ve finally... See more

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more