Severin Matusek

Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values.

Meme coins use visual and rhetorical cues like humor, irony, and absurdist lore to position themselves as accessible antidotes to traditional financial systems. They commodify our collective desire for economic empowerment, emotional gratification, and social belonging. It could be said that meme coins aestheticize financialization itself, using... See more

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.

Today, the artistic prompt typed into a chatbot is itself becoming a form of expression. The difference between a clunky query and an inspired one is as wide as the gap between a finger painting and a Van Gogh. Ask an LLM to “write a poem about sadness,” and you’ll get bland, derivative, sentimental drivel. It takes skill and creativity (not to... See more

O’Rourke is among a growing group of literary writers who have tried to answer the question in the first person, scoping out artificial intelligence’s encroachments from within the domains it most imperils. Their writing asks what AI-generated writing can or (much less often) can’t do, and how human writers can or (much more often) can’t respond.... See more

That said, I’m not concerned about AI and creativity, because it does give images this very homogenous look that can look a little basic, too hyperreal. What does worry me is everything around that, for instance, corporate photography and commercials, things like that. For me, it’s the loss of authenticity that frightens me, this is why I want to... See more

Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism, for example, raise the query, what would science, technology, and industry look like if it did not depend—as it does now—on environmental extraction and human subjugation? Yet others, such as Sinofuturism and Gulf Futurism, simply ask, how would we see the future if the core concepts of “progress” arose from... See more