Severin Matusek

In short: a technologist is anyone who exercises agency to shape technologies toward their goals. It’s a mindset, not a job title; an orientation, if you will. It includes many software engineers and founders, of course, but also makers of home-cooked apps and clever Zapier workflows, hacktivists and traffic cam artists.

But I’m into the new kids who are trying to make the internet how they want it, like Zane with Silk. The future has to look like something, after all...

While recent albums from Dua Lipa, Grande and Lorde treated self-care and introspection as a kind of therapeutic salvation, Charli shifted hard into goblin mode, unfurling a litany of barely euphemistic drug references and proudly owning her messiest contradictions. (

The Slowdown is also a collective of editors, writers, photographers, filmmakers, producers, creative directors, and strategists who work on special projects for major companies and brands, from a podcast series with soundproof booth company ROOM to a short documentary film for Van Cleef & Arpels and a book with Molteni (as featured in PIN–UP 37).

We're all participants in a cognitive economy that trades in attention, belief, and behavior. Shape the feed, shape the future. What happens when everything becomes an attention-speculation machine?

To read these writers writing about AI writing is to witness, almost in real time, intellectual laborers assimilating a threat to their own existence.

The role of a successful place is to provide a catalytic context for missions.