Severin Matusek

brands like Rare Beauty and Poppi reward subscribers with early launches and discounts, while using their communities to gauge new ideas, get feedback and build loyalty. Loyalty driven by sincere participation compounds, creating brand evangelists whose influence can’t be bought.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it... See more

And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter - the increasing randomness of reach - is just too hard to accept.

Zines are anarchist content-sharing. AI is opposite.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,

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