Severin Matusek

If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

What the internet allows us to do is to see what we have in common. This resulted in a new experience of what it means to be a person. We have multiple lenses and identities ready to be activated at any given moment. They are meaningful. Digital avatars are just as meaningful to us as other identities.

Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance and Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach to AI is not working.

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

The Trump Administration has taken full advantage of this algorithm brain. We’ve entered the pure extraction phase of the economy, where things are created solely for consumption rather than purpose. I don’t mean this as a moralistic argument, it’s purely incentives, but it’s puzzling.

“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

My main concern is both the loss of authenticity, but also technological dependency, like relying on AI too might reduce an artist’s creativity. Think of the TikTok effect, or using Chat GPT too much. These systems are so easy and useful, but you do end up using your brain less at the end of the day.

What is needed, Citarella’s strategy suggests, is an understanding of a kind of post-internet politics, where, like it or not, online life is embraced as part and parcel of how modern belief systems are formed.