Remixable Software - Guest Post

If you try hard, you can remember a time when our tools and platforms were designed by people, for people. Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.

The failure of the creator renaissance would be that artists are so busy managing their newfound tools that it drowns out the moments of inspiration. That’s why usability, instinctive onboarding flows, deep documentation, and reliable customer service will be so critical for startups building these creator tools. Instead of clumsy and inscrutable e... See more

There is currently a quite monocultural digital life, especially compared to the digital world that we came up with in the late nineties and early two-thousands, when individuals created the web. We had our websites and our hodgepodge content management systems, which we’d built for ourselves. Because of that, the web felt more like a city with dif... See more

By contrast, consumer software tools that enhance human agency, that serve us when we are most creative and intentional, are often built by hobbyists and used by a handful of nerds. If such a tool ever gets too successful one of the Marl-serving companies, flush with cash from advertising or growth-hungry venture capital, will acquire it and kill i... See more

These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the printi... See more