Severin Matusek

“I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

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.

the ‘collaborative play’ (as Default Friend phrases it in the above tweet) aspect of TikTok really becomes apparent.

According to an advertising agency I consulted, for example, a weekly podcast that generates thirty thousand downloads per episode should be able to reach Kelly’s target of generating a hundred thousand dollars a year in income. Earning a middle-class salary by talking through a digital microphone to a fiercely loyal band of supporters around the... See more

The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own.

Young romantics working at the "intersection of art and technology" launched endless criticisms of big tech's overreach and in the process created the foundations for an entire scene of left-field internet aesthetics.

That's the interesting thing about AI: it is based on historical data sets, on the entire corpus of human creation. This is an opportunity to examine our past: Who are we? What does this data represent? How can we prevent ourselves from repeating the same problems? Sure, the amount is overwhelming – but much like with our history, we can analyse it... See more

Mamdani proved attention is the path to institutional override. Just like Trump, but from the other side.