Severin Matusek

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

The final notes of the AI-and-I essay are cowed resignation, awed acquiescence, and what Trotsky called the “terrifying helplessness” of cultural production at “the beginning of a great epoch”

I love that summary, particularly how it catches the message of hope. Filterworld isn’t a wholesale complaint about social media; it’s a quest to figure out how we can have something better than our self-reinforcing and flattening algorithmic feeds. That is what I want people to get from reading the book, in the end. Even though digital platforms... See more

A network of Moving Castles allows us to escape binary thinking of dark forests and clearnets to instead think about many publics as one network.

Blockchains are the internet’s native financial layer.

All these points in AI’s favor prompt some nervous reappraisals. Essays that began in bafflement or dismay wind up convinced that the technology marks an epochal shift in reading and writing.

For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul.