Severin Matusek

A decentralized brand is a fiction made real, an egregore, a self-sovereign entity that lives through the imagination and belief of many. One does not simply decide what a decentralized brand "is." It is not something that can be created by focus groups, strategists, and identity designers. Like Bitcoin, a decentralized brand has its own autonomy,... See more

Kelin’s students are already power users. “I had one student who has three Claude subscriptions because they keep hitting the rate limits,” she says. “They get timed out of one, switch to the next. Timed out again, switch to the third.” By the end of the semester, several students told Kelin that her AI course was the most practical class they’d... See more

Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok.

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are.

Robert Shiller coined narrative economics, arguing that stories drive economic behavior. I think we are in a new iteration of all of this where the stories aren't just influencing economic activity, they are the economic activity. Attention is a precursor to wealth (in many ways) and speculation drives it.

In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their... See more