Severin Matusek

To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.

Digital belongings exist on the internet, but there aren’t that many types of them. On Fortnite you can acquire guns and outfits. On Reddit you gain badges. Point is: There’s a lot of stuff on the internet, but there isn’t much stuff that’s yours.

Held at the Bradbury Building and the historic Hearst Estate, the Imaginative Assemblies used blindfolded deep-listening, tactile modeling, and facilitated dialogue to probe this central question. This process collected 30 hours of audio (18GB), 4,500+ photos (16GB), and 60+ hours of film (6.7TB) across all sessions. The resultant report documents... See more

Local communities: we are connecting local communities, so that they can showcase their scenes and artists to the wider COLORS community around the globe.

At the same time, we are often told these systems are impossible to fully comprehend and are far beyond our control.

It’s not just the party that is over. The culture war is over. So...the right won? No, but the liberals’ media empire is over.

Metaphors mixing mind with machine proliferate across pop psychology—not least in subliminal fan communities, where the videos are seen as programmes that can delete, rewrite, and generate new “programming.” That a behaviour can be ‘soft-’ or ‘hard-coded’ is useful shorthand for nurture and nature—programming from parents, society, and environment... See more

To me, it’s very important to think about speculative fiction and worldmaking as two approaches for better orienting ourselves to the present, rather than conjuring escapist utopian futures that will never arrive.