Severin Matusek

The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own.

It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy. 

Institutions embody the collective agreement and fabric of meaning that, above any external forces, builds, as opposed to extracts from, cultural and social value. In the age of platforms, the challenge is to reconfigure and revive institutions, employing “intra-institutional technology” that augments their missions without cannibalizing them,... See more

Oupi Goupi proves our brainrot connects us, and it’s on a deeper level that’s inaccessible to bots, slopists, and even CEOs. It requires an understanding of a universal culture that could forever remain alien to them: meme culture.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

“How do you take the avant garde and put it into the mainstream?” says Clark of ISOLARII’s goals. “It’s about these little niches and pockets of resistance from around the world. But it's also about trying to get into mass pop culture.”

Looking at memes from the outside, we see an ever-evolving meta-language dynamic hypercontextual structure, but at its core, it simply operates on a single energy source: empathy.

Changing how we think of value requires changing how we think of self. Bentoism is an answer to that, a practical framework to think about the Now Me, Now Us, Future Me, Future Us.