Severin Matusek

About MetalabelAbstracting the concept of a label away from the music industry: it’s a hyperstructure (borrowing the term of Jacob Horne from Zora) that I call the metalabel. It’s a person or group of people creating a common identity for a shared purpose producing public releases that manifests their point of view.

Is there that much difference between the (1) manosphere playbook of extracting value from people weaker than you, taking no responsibility for the damage, and moving to the next target and the (2) private equity model of identifying undervalued assets and extracting operating efficiencies and returning capital to shareholders?

I sent the essay to some of my most prolific, creative friends, and they all resonated deeply. Faces materialized in my mind like photographs developing in solution. The indie hacker from Paris who has built four bootstrapped micro SaaS businesses with Loveable. Researchers in China taking apart viral closed-source products and launching... See more

A decentralized brand is a fiction made real, an egregore, a self-sovereign entity that lives through the imagination and belief of many. One does not simply decide what a decentralized brand "is." It is not something that can be created by focus groups, strategists, and identity designers. Like Bitcoin, a decentralized brand has its own autonomy,... See more

Depp vs Heard trial offered a window into the future of media, where content creators serve as the personalities breaking news to an increasing number of viewers — and, in turn, define the online narrative around major events. In this new landscape, every big news event becomes an opportunity to amass followers and clout, and the money that... See more

Platform socialism is a systematic alternative to private power in the digital sphere and can help unite different forms of struggle around a shared vision of a democratic future. It is about reclaiming a long-term counter-hegemonic project for challenging capitalist control over technology.

As a more right-leaning crowd of tech elite and terminally online Gen-Z founders emerged, they turned against politics in the workplace and globalism. Sharing technology globally had put Silicon Valley’s tech leadership at risk of being overtaken by China, some said.