Severin Matusek

But it is far too late. Consensus reality is gone. We are blessed to live now, in the West, in a strange world without common sense.

With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.

“You can play games with it,” she said of stardom (in another unexpected place, “The Howard Stern Show”), “and I think that’s a very interesting part of being an artist as well, when you can use that thing — fame, publicity — as a tool.”

“Like we’ve created a really positive space on the internet,” Wylie added. How many people can really say that? A place where earnestness was a function not a bug, while managing to retain its cool. An almost impossible task, in other words, which Blackbird Spyplane continues to make look easy.

The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical society that created them (for good and for ill).

Artificial intelligence can generate abundance in creation, it can even create new currencies, but it cannot convert attention into currency. Only human beings can do that.

The ‘90s version of not selling out meant refusing to play certain spaces or not letting your song be in a beer commercial. The ‘20s version of selling out means making things in limited quantities to play against mass culture. Though different, the responses come from a similar place. They’re both sensing a culture where, to quote Claire L. Evans... See more

Fringe ideas are no longer fanciful theories but have become real political projects.