Severin Matusek

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

Rather than building tools that compete with them, the smarter strategy is to create incentives for their participation.

Amid the breathless techno-optimist awe of artificial intelligence—and ahistorical dismissal of its novelty—it is easy to forget that the current crises of reading and writing are unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. “After Words” considers what’s actually different about today’s information overload and whether we’ve been postliterate for far... See more

Part of being part of a group is to adopt their worldview. We carry multiple identities all the time. Group-derived identities are just as important to us as personal identities.

People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.”

Moving “the future” away from ideologies of dominance and control has become imperative. One promising model can be found in the collective known as the Tropical Futures Institute, founded by designer and gallerist Chris Fussner. Based on the party island of Cebu, Philippines, the “institute” is in fact a decentralized, roaming think tank that... See more

Functionalist theories, building on Durkheim’s insights, analyze totemism in terms of its social functions. From a functionalist perspective, totemism contributes to social cohesion by providing a shared system of beliefs and practices that reinforce group solidarity. The totemic system establishes social boundaries, regulates behavior through... See more

Weekly Talks: every Wednesday we host a call to talk about what’s happening inside our community. We listen to music NFTs before the start of the hour and in the second half of the hour we are joined by an artist to talk about their creative journey. Artists who have joined us already include Adria Kain, Erick the Architect, Haleek Maul, Iman... See more

I argued before that “social media” was an alibi for injecting more TV into people’s lives to take advantage of increased network connectivity — that we had to be persuaded that it was a pro-social thing to do to carry little TVs around and watch them at every possible moment. Conflating friendship and entertainment was part of that campaign. Now... See more