Severin Matusek

With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.

This is an answer to the individualism of the creator economy.

Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

As Bogost himself puts it in a 2024 update on the state of social media: the rise of Bluesky “is a relapse, not a fix”.

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice.

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more

Both represent a form of aspirational displacement . This is the idea that when you can't afford a house, you buy mystery boxes that might contain a rare variant and then that’s good enough. It’s a way to perform relationship to consumer culture.

Dank memes, deep-fried memes, shitposting, feralposting, goblin mode, doomscrolling, or whatever insinuates seemingly senseless online content consumption were all essentially describing brainrot. The term, however, is iconic because it marks a significant turning point. It aptly describes the beginning of our biological coalescence with the... See more