Severin Matusek

A decade ago, lorecraft was largely limited to edgelords haunting online fora thinking up the next troll for lulz and electoral mayhem. Now lorecraft is being used to manage treasuries worth millions, launch complex commercial projects, and design automation deathstars for fun and profit.

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

What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?

Though “Breaking Points” makes some money from podcast and YouTube ads, the bulk of the revenue comes from a premium-subscription model. If you subscribe at a cost of ten dollars a month, or a hundred dollars for a full year, you gain access to an uncut version of each episode, free of ads, in both audio and video formats.

Meme coins perform what Wernick identifies as the “double function” of contemporary promotional forms: they serve simultaneously as products and as advertisements for themselves.9 Their appeal rests in the affective atmosphere that they generate across Discord servers, forums, and social posts: the promise of sudden wealth, the pleasure of... See more

Now that internet culture is mainstream culture, virtually anyone can create a trend, but vanishingly few make a career from or even briefly monetize it.

If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.