Severin Matusek

I am old enough to remember the old Silicon Valley dictum that if you’re not talking to users and you’re not solving an unmet need, then your startup is dead on arrival. Funny thing is, I actually believe this techno-gospel. I’ve lived this out and found it to be true. Good user research is gold. You must be led by the user’s needs, no matter how... See more

Today’s great-power competition is unfolding in the digital era, with the focus shifting to innovation in digital technology rather than ideological competition. The U.S. government has increasingly recognised that ideological intervention yields little practical value and does not substantively enhance its technological competitiveness. This... See more

So, if the Internet has effectively become cable TV, what is the new information frontier?

In 2021, Ethiopia actually began building its own social media site as a response to Facebook’s alleged incitement of ethnic massacres. And more recently, Japan funnelled taxpayer money into the dating app Tapple, in a bid to fix the nation’s declining marriage and birth rates.

And as I’ve spent more time reporting on Silicon Valley culture this year, one of the trends I’ve been most surprised and disturbed to observe is not merely a shift to the right, but the emergence of a nihilism about whether tech should serve humans at all.

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

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,... See more

Marie Berger