Severin Matusek

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.

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.

Artificial intelligence can generate abundance in creation, it can even create new currencies, but it cannot convert attention into currency. Only human beings can do that.

As the rest of the internet gets overtaken by bots and AI-generated content and oligarch-owners livestreaming megalomaniacal presidential candidates, the self-contained publications controlled entirely by professional humans win out.

This report, which will drop over the course of five days, also marks the launch of Season 1 of $STREAM — our new research token designed to incentivize and reward collaborative research, knowledge-sharing and community-building in music and technology.

The internet works but not for us. This much is painstakingly obvious and has been for years. And yet, where are the better alternatives?

Speculation. The token acts as an investment into a project that might increase in value as it becomes more popular.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.