Severin Matusek

The US kept interest rates at near zero from 2009 to 2022. This encouraged business models that promised world-changing outcomes, even if they were completely unrealistic and/or hostile to the public interest (eg the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse, AI). This came at a time of no regulation of tech and an accepted culture in... See more

In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization.

As others have said, influencing the world today is not about writing new manifestos, but instead, developing new protocols for how we operate and determining how things are produced, how they circulate, and in turn, how reality is materially composed.

I’ve noticed a new trend among the chattering classes of online AI guy hypebeast. Their current stage of grief over AGI not arriving or having very little to show in the way of ROI for their LLMs has shifted to blaming the users. To them, it’s not that AI is not working as they intended; it’s the people who are too stupid to understand how to use... See more

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

We also couldn't really participate in building Web2, in part because of our age, and because it was pretty localized who was building it.

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I... See more