Severin Matusek

I was a serf, a voiceless and expendable user at the base of a virtual fiefdom. The longing for sovereignty over my networking stack was connected to deeper desires. I may not own my own home or feel that I have much say in the direction of the country, but online, at least, I would have both freedom and agency.

About the problems of the Creator Economy There is a desire to be seen how you wish to be seen. Content today is presented without almost zero context, e.g. videos on Youtube recommended by an algorithm.

The thousand true fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet: users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are, correspondingly, two ways to... See more

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest,... See more

1. The emergence of creators as vertical-specific search engines. Creators are often the entry point of choice for people on the internet.

Now there’s a fifth way: Be a part of entire large nomadic scenes with no particular geographic base, but with highly complex organizational capabilities and internal economic engines. The Ethereum ecosystem is a very good example of this phenomenon. It has the scale, operational complexity, and economic mass of a major multi-national corporation,... See more