Severin Matusek

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

And AI’s semivisible, infrastructural role in exploiting precarious labor (Uber’s nifty algorithm for suppressing driver wages), landlordism (RealPage’s widely used rent-hiking software), and neocolonial war (Israel’s high-tech civilian-bombing gadgetry) may already be too entrenched to stop. But professional readers and writers: We retain some... See more

The real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock,... 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

For some people, in considering this possibility, the question naturally arises: “That sounds nice, but how is a tiny software company supposed to compete with huge and well-funded companies?” The answer is that you don’t really have to. You just have to get an understanding of the proper pace and scale of whatever your endeavor is. Get there, and... See more

but continued a love affair with language and meaning as texture and material.

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.