Severin Matusek

As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing... See more

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2. Decreasing trust in large social and search companies. Concurrent with the rise of creator-driven discovery is a general sense of dwindling trust in the companies consumers have historically relied on to find online content and products.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more

But mostly they just drop cool pictures and funny memes, and discuss or riff on them. “There’s an understanding that, like, you’re not going to kick each other, you’re not going to judge each other,” he said. “You’re not here to represent your identity; you’re just here to chill.”

In the face of a monolith-in-the-veldt-level era-heralder, what surfaces is an earnest, almost midcentury humanism, interested in charting the distinctions between man and machine.

3. The increasing importance of online identity, and the rise of “nicheworks.’’ As online identity becomes increasingly important and consumers are more bought in than ever to their online identities and communities, curation has emerged as a form of self-expression that sits in between consumption and creation, reports Brian Solis for Fast... See more

Donning a Milady PFP (profile picture) on Twitter enters you into a distinct cyber universe: a universe where up is also down, schizzed is normie, hackers are white knights, and — crucially — art is finance.