Severin Matusek

By having that freedom you can find the spaces you align the most with.The desires of the post-individual are different than what we had in the past.

So a lot of the scenarios in my projects that seem to hinge ludicrously across dystopia and utopia—another set of unproductive binaries we’ve created—are actually machine-generated.

On TikTok, as The Washington Post has reported, some creators are making $5,000 a month using AI tools to write scripts and animate extremely dumb viral videos where old men talk about soiling themselves.

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”

The voices that helped shape Light and Shade include: Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow at MIT; James Bridle, artist, writer and technologist; Alex de Vries, PhD candidate at VU Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies and founder of Digiconomist; Linda Dounia Rebeiz, artist, designer and writer; Shaolei Ren, associate... See more

Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale.

But cognitive atrophy - that can happen instantly. Someone can start reflexively outsourcing their thinking today, and the degradation begins immediately. No approval process required. No implementation timeline. No procurement cycle. Just a quiet erosion of capability, person by person, decision by decision. And it compounds. Every month of... See more

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more