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Your next job interview won’t be about you. It’ll be about your agents.

Six years ago, I had Dennis Mortensen on my podcast, Same Same but Tech, and asked him what happens when AI gets good enough to do the boring parts of work.

This was before GPT-3, before Chat Daddy, before the stack of assistants we casually keep open in tabs all day. Back then, “AI” still mostly meant Siri and Netflix recommendations. Dennis’s company, x.ai, felt like magic because an assistant named Amy could sit on an email thread and handle the calendar ping-pong for you.

(Yes, he owned the x.ai domain pre-Elon).

During our conversation, Dennis described the future via the lens of a job interview - one where you wouldn’t just talk about your career history, but about the agentic tools you’ve built and would bring along with you. Your very own army of agents.

He put it like this:

“The next job interview that somebody will have in eight years from now will not just be one where you provide your typical CV. You will also tell a story about, ‘It’s not just me that you hire. It is me and 11 agents that I’ve been training over the last five years.’”

At the time, it sounded abstract. Now, it feels inevitable.

People are training systems on how they write, how they code, how they think. Little loops that draft before they draft, summarize before they read, research before you even know what question you’re asking. The boundary between what you do and what your agents do is already gone. More and more of our jobs look like directing, editing, and deciding what to keep.

And now, with things like Open Claw and Perplexity Computer, the human isn’t just “assisted,” they’re optional.

We don’t prompt anymore. We delegate. These AI systems search, browse, daisy-chain actions together, and report back via text message. The work doesn’t wait for you to do it. It starts without you.

We’re quickly evolving from using tools to managing personal workforces.

Before all this, your résumé used to be a record of what you’d done. Now it’s a measure of leverage. Two people can look identical on paper – same background, same experience – and operate at completely different scales depending on the agentic workforce they’ve built around themselves.

Back in 2020, my reaction to all of this was simple: I hate chores. Chores are the worst. Let the machines handle email, scheduling, admin. That felt like the obvious trade.

What’s less obvious now is where that line is.

Because the systems aren’t just handling chores anymore. They’re thinking. Deciding. Executing in ways that start to bleed into the parts of the job we used to think of as ours.

The jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re dissolving.

And once that happens, the question shifts. Not “what can I automate?” but “what exactly is there left for me to do?”

Because, fuck, if an AI wants to do all my work, it can. I’m more interested in what’s left after that.

More on this soon. In the meanwhile, listen to the full episode of Same Same but Tech on Spotify or YouTube.

/m

H/t: Me for not saying “I told you so” once in this entire essay.

• Same Same but Tech Podcast (Apple Podcasts)

• Same Same but Tech Podcast (Spotify)

• AI is like your Cousin from Europe (ft. Dennis Mortensen + Justin Kan)

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After The Musical Self-Expression Spectrum essay, besties and exes started shilling me their mid-spectrum forms of expression. And in the spirit of Tumblr Substack, I figured reblogging was the way to go.

Below, please find the 10 weirdest suggestions for the music spectrum. :-)

(Add your own suggestions in the comments or DM and I’ll add ‘em to the final Musical Self-Expression Spectrum).

1. Shazaming in a church

You were just wondering…

2. Taking a college level course on Taylor Swift

I can’t make it, I have my Era’s midterm due tomorrow.

3. Asking your Uber driver for the bluetooth

“Excuse me, sir…”

4. Renting a karaoke room (for yourself)

Dead sober, too.

5. Buying records without owning a record player

Hey, a physical sale is a physical sale.

6. Pretending to be in a music video while listening to a deep cut

Bonus points if it’s raining.

7. Posting a song on your story to bait your crush

See “Delete” by Ninajirachi.

8. Telling a crowd you are “meeting your friend” in order to move closer to the stage

Nobody believes you, yet they still won’t fight it.

9. Listening to yacht rock on a yacht

Very specific vibe.

10. Making out with your assistant at a Coldplay concert

Kiss cam for the win.

/m

H/T to the icon Natalie Moosher for the assist

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Lord knows no anxiety like being handed the aux cord in an Uber full of your most musically opinionated friends.

Fifteen seconds to prove you understand where the night is going without trying too hard to prove it. Silent judgment radiating from the backseat as you desperately scroll. Your thumb hovering over three songs, second-guessing ‘em all. Too safe and you’re boring. Too weird and you’re auditioning. Too obvious and everyone’s disappointed. Performance anxiety distilled into a lightning cable.

It’s ridiculous that any of this matters. But it absolutely does.

Choosing a song on the aux cord is musical self-expression. You didn’t make the track. You didn’t perform it. But you chose it. And that counts. That’s “music.”

Aux cord DJ’ing (and that tinge of anxiety) says something we usually don’t say out loud: music isn’t just the thing you make or the thing you play. Music is the full spectrum of ways you show up around sound.

Playing piano is music. Writing music is music. But so is ripping Shania Twain on the jukebox at a dive, building a playlist for The High Road to Taos, wearing a band t-shirt you bought at Sasquatch! decades ago because the cotton still tastes like sunscreen.

Wherever you are, you’re on the Musical Self-Expression Spectrum.

It’s not hierarchical. Playing guitar isn’t “better” than producing on Ableton, which isn’t any “better” than curating a Heated Rivalry playlist on Spotify.

I’ve surfed this Spectrum my entire life. I play the piano. And the drums, sort of. I build music products. And, yes, I playlist. And produce. And sort of DJ. And music blog (also, sort of?).

They’re all just different modes of participating in the same larger thing. Different ways of musicking.

“Musicking”

Christopher Small gave us Musicking in ‘98. Music isn’t a thing. It’s a doing.

Music is a verb, not a noun.

Music is participation in any capacity in and around musical performance, whether by performing, listening, rehearsing, dancing, or working the door. The roadie who tunes the bass. The sound engineer running the board. The guy who upsells the ticket on the secondary market. (Okay, maybe not that guy - fuck that guy). They’re all musicking.

In other words, music doesn’t exist as an object you can hold. It exists in the act of doing it.

Christopher was reacting to the common belief that Beethoven’s Fifth exists somewhere in the ether and we’re all just encountering it in various imperfect forms. But music isn’t a Platonic ideal. It’s the sweat on the stage, the hum in your ears, the tears laying on the rug with a lover listening to Your Hand in Mine.

Music is something you do - not something you have.

State of Flow

My icon, Laurie Spiegel, understood this from a different angle. Laurie worked at Bell Labs building algorithmic composition tools. Her goal wasn’t to replace human creativity with computers, but rather to automate the disruptive parts so she could focus on “inhabiting the state of flow.”

“Music composing often really bogs down at the level of the note … and people lose perspective and they muddle around.”

Spiegel’s software let her work at the level of gesture, of shape, of architecture. She wasn’t interested in perfecting individual notes. She was interested in the process of exploration, discovery; of music itself.

This is process primacy. The beauty is in the doing, not the finishing.

The joy is in the exploration, not the artifact. We live in the age of the finished file, the polished thing you can screenshot and share. But the file doesn’t capture what it felt like to make it. It doesn’t hold the 47 rekt versions you deleted. The process disappears, and all we’re left with is the output.

Laurie wanted to music, not to have music’d or be music’d.

Participation is Mandatory

What Christopher and Laurie (and I) are getting at is that music happens at every point along the Spectrum, not just at the far edge where the “real musicians” live.

But the internet shifted the weight distribution. Pre-internet, most people clustered the right as consumers. You listened to music, wore the merch. The left side was gated by costs and technical knowhow.

The DAW era shifted that. GarageBand, Logic, Ableton, Fruity Loops. Suddenly anyone with a Dell could make something that sounded halfway legit. Bloghouse era. But you still had to invest the 600 hours to make a snare sound right.

Now we’re in the AI era. Text-to-music generators let you describe a vibe and receive a fully formed track 30 seconds later. No GarageBand. No MIDI controller. Just prompt, wait, slop.

Which brings me back to Laurie. Her whole project was about building tools that extended human creativity, not replaced it. Music Mouse was interactive, not automatic. It required you to stay in the loop, to make decisions, to keep participating.

To flow.

(h/t to my dear friend, Tero, for this, as well).

See, it’s not about where you are on the Spectrum. It’s about whether you’re still inside the process or whether you’ve outsourced it entirely. DJing is compositional, playlisting is thesis-driven, AUX’ing is vulnerable, prompting is… an algorithm.

Once you let the algorithm decide, then you’ve destroyed authorship and stepped outside the act of music.

(And I guess some people want that).

For the rest of us, we stay on the Spectrum. We participate. And participation is the only scarce resource left.

This matters more now than ever, because we’re living through a moment where the artifact has become so cheap it’s almost meaningless. Anyone can generate a song. Not everyone can sit with it, hold space for it, make it mean something.

The Musical Self-Expression Spectrum is a reminder that music was never really about the MP3 in the first place.

Alas, I fucking cooked that aux cord.

/m

A heartfelt h/t to my friend-mentor-arch-nemesis, Matt Brown, for the ongoing inspiration in design + musicking.

• Musicking by Christopher Small

• Laurie Spiegel

• The Band T-Shirt Theory

  ---

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Ram Das famously once said, “If you think you’re enlightened, call Delta’s customer service.”

I might be misquoting, but the reality is that nothing quite exposes the human condition like a delayed flight. And despite all the inner work, airline customer service still brings out my final boss.

That’s why for years I’ve had a running joke (or perhaps a low-grade obsession) with building a website that writes your airline complaint letters for you. One that captures the tone, citations, and righteous indignation with finesse. Of course, that wasn’t meant to be a billion-dollar idea. I’m not even sure it was meant to be a million dollar one. It was a human one. The kind of idea that typically lives in the purgatory between my notes app and action.

And I hadn’t really thought about it for a while. It got buried somewhere under “Build a giant Etch A Sketch” and above “Design a visual ASMR app.” And so it goes.

Then Crowdstrike happened – an outage that crippled airline systems globally. All of a sudden, airports turned into dorms. Twitter turned into a boo-hoo forum. And my running joke started, well, running again.

But it felt different this time. What once felt insurmountable AF all of a sudden felt surmountable AI. With the rise of AI tools and “vibe coding” - a term for prompting large language models (“LLMs”) to code on our behalf - writing software suddenly became as natural as writing a few sentences.

So end of the day Friday, I peered over to my protégé / college intern, Chloe, and just obliterated her weekend plans: “Chloe, let’s rip.”

Three days, a Cursor Pro account, and a couple upper deckies later, FlightOrFight.AI existed. An AI tool that turns your flight delays into legal-ish, emotionally precise-ish, complaint letters. No onboarding flow. No press strategy. No investors. Truly, just vibes.

I posted FlightOrFight.AI on LinkedIn that night.

By Monday, it went viral.

By end-of-week, I had a term sheet for acquisition – literally, negotiated in the comments.

Introducing Cultureware

It took a little over 2 years to sell my first startup. Took a little over 2 days to sell this one.

That’s not to mention the difference in venture funding, full-time engineers, and cortisol levels. So when Sam Altman talks about the lore of the one-person billion dollar startup, I deeply get it. He’s referring to the power of AI to make builders and companies infinitely lighter. Stripping away the noise agentically until even a second employee is considered bloat.

Sounds like a dream, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the way this all shakes out.

That framing is rooted in traditional startup mental models, and old world connotations of products and product-led companies. Building, product-market-fitting, and scaling was the path to IPO. AI makes all of that easier, for sure. It’s what we’ve seen. But it’s not what we’re going to see.

In our new AI world order, monolithic builds won’t be the future of most consumer applications. This revolution will be about tiny apps. Single feature bangers. The idea of an “app” will change to something much more lightweight, and the concept of a “platform” will evolve to something that encompasses the millions (yes, millions) of vibe-coded releases.

(I’ll save it for another essay, but I strongly believe Model Context Protocol (“MCP”, h/t Anthropic) points us in the direction we’re headed).

For now, leveraging AI-assisted tooling has introduced a new tempo of product development. One that feels more like cultural experimentation. Vibe coders and “co-pilots” like Replit, Lovable, and Cursor have turned code into a creative medium - turning a spark of curiosity into running software in minutes. The ability to build while the idea is still fresh – before the world moves on – has become its own creative superpower. It’s not optimization. It’s timing. It’s memes. It’s cultural jazz.

When I posted FlightOrFight, I wasn’t pitching a new company. I was publishing an idea that runs. The idea was solid. (Great, even). Rooted in deep-seeded pain. But upon reflection, it surprisingly wasn’t the idea, the customer service letters, or the “sticking it to the man” energy that stuck with me. It was the feeling that something could move that fast. That an idea could. That I could go from running joke to public release to acquisition in seventy-two hours flat.

That’s not a startup. That’s cultureware.

Code as Content

And cultureware - like memes - may not be built to last - or scale - the way FAANG was. It might be less about crafting perfect 10-track albums, and more about dropping singles.

Because in the end, I didn’t build FlightOrFight like a startup. I built it like a song.

Viewing app development within that framing of creative culture makes it clear that something has fundamentally changed: code has entered the chat.

See, for as long as I’ve dialed up, the creative internet ran on a simple division of labor: companies made code, creators made content. Startups built feeds, consumers consumed ‘em. Boomers made songs, Zoomers made the Turtle Rabbit Dance.

But AI has entirely collapsed the distance between idea and execution - and the boundary between code and content has dissolved more aggressively than we’re giving it credit for.

Apps today are used as a means of distribution, and attention - not necessarily LTV. Thus, it feels inevitable that the cultural loop of content creation will enter the world of app and product development. We will build software the way we post on Instagram. Not code as infrastructure, but code as performance itself. Apps as creative expression.

In other words, code as content.

The feed, not the App Store, will be the distribution channel. And while yesterday’s feeds were filled with thoughts, thots, and thawts - tomorrow’s will feel more interactive. Sora’s remix function hints at this future. “Social vibe coders” (just made that term up) like Gizmo, Rooms, and Spielwerk blatantly point at it. We’re not publishing content in mono anymore. Not even in stereo.

We’re spatial now, bb.

Your App (Hype M Remix)

With this new rhythm of creation – where the tools are fast enough to keep up with the imagination - software will feel less like work and more like play. More like songs. More like memes.

And if apps are songs and memes, it’s clear that remixes and self-referential software is fated. As a Tumblr-era, Hype Machine fanatic, Soundcloud kid, that might be the future I’m most excited for. (Or I may just be doing my best to will it forward). So much so, I already remixed my first app.

A few weeks after FlightOrFight’s acquisition announcement went live, I dropped another project: a mashup generator. A startup had got a little buzz after spending a few months on something similar. Another few apps had spent years (and raised millions in venture funding) to do the same. I wondered if I could design something more playful than what was out there, and vibe code it into reality. So I allocated two sugar-free RedBulls to the cause. Less than a week later, I dropped Remixy.

Even the name was a double-entendre (like guac, entendres cost extra). “Remixy” was a mashup app for “remixing” songs, and it was my “remix” of the Mixy app, aka a “Re-Mixy”.

That’s not meant to be a flex; it’s an illustration of the shift - and where I think techno-creative culture is going.

(Okay, fine - it’s flex-ish).

The New Creative Archetype

If every generation gets the medium it deserves, ours gets code.

With it, we’re witnessing the birth of a new creative archetype – part founder, part artist, part cultural operator. Someone who builds software the way musicians release music: frequently, fearlessly, and in public. Move fast and break things means something different.

But we’re not replacing artistic creativity. We’re elevating it, providing new paintbrushes, and removing latency. The barriers that once separated artists from engineers, or founders from fans, are dissolving. A single person can now build something that feels like a product – not a prototype – over a weekend.

The same way punk turned noise into identity and TikTok turned daily life into performance, our new wave of creators will turn code into cultural matter. Small, executable artifacts that say something – about frustration, joy, curiosity, absurdity – and invite participation.

Every app is a mixtape. Every commit, a lyric. Every launch, a statement.

Ultimately, FlightOrFight wasn’t a traditional business (in the business sense). It was a proof of concept – that software could now move at the speed of culture. That code could be spontaneous, emotional, and alive.

And if that’s true, then the next great artist might not drop albums or games – they’ll drop apps that feel like both.

And, as we all know…

The drop is everything.

/m (founder, 2.5x exits)

• PR Newswire: Airfairness Launches AI Flight Compensation Tool After Acquiring Weekend-Built Startup via LinkedIn

• The Founders Press: Airfairness Launches AI Flight Compensation Tool After Acquisition of FlightorFight.ai

• Yahoo! Finance: Airfairness Launches AI Flight Compensation Tool After Acquiring Weekend-Built Startup via LinkedIn

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Two years ago today-ish, the dream team at Music Tectonics made the (questionable) decision to have me keynote their annual conference in Santa Monica.

Given the illustrious conference is kicking off again this week, I figured I’d publish my keynote for the very first time - exclusively for the best humans on the internet (Dead.Online subscribers).

I called it Shell Art is Over (fka Future of Music in the New Techno-Cultural Landscape) - and it still feels oddly relevant, even in a post-LLM world. I’ve uploaded a little recap below along with the full video at the end of the post (!).

Bon appétit.

Yesterday

Two years ago I walked on stage at Music Tectonics and asked a room full of music execs the question no one wanted to hear: Does music matter anymore?

I did it partly for the chaos, partly because it was true.

For most of my life, music was my culture. It built my operating system. It shaped the slang I used (tight), the clothes I wore (baggy), the scenes I joined (mid-rise). Even the drugs I other people took were weirdly genre-specific.

See, I grew up in ‘90s Portlandia (aka Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn). Grunge, punk, rap (and weirdly, R&B) raised me. Kurt and Pac wired me with anti-conformist code. Pop was sellout. If genpop liked it, I couldn’t. (I still can’t).

Music really fucking mattered to me. And everyone else. It wasn’t streaming wallpaper. It was a cultural blueprint. It led everything else in culture… Until it didn’t.

Somewhere along the way, the center of gravity shifted. Music’s signal got weak. Perhaps because the things that now define youth culture - gaming, social, interactive worlds - were all built natively for the internet.

Music just… wasn’t.

Today

Video killed the radio star, then technology killed everything else.

Each generation of hardware reshaped music: vinyl limited song length, radio refined it, MP3 players shrunk it. Every new pipe dictated the form that flowed through it.

But then the concept of a “device” changed. My Sony boombox became the Playstation, and the Playstation became the iPhone - machines built for touch, interaction, play. And the medium that mastered that design language wasn’t music. It was gaming.

Gaming isn’t just entertainment - it’s the new social fabric. A multiplayer identity machine. It prints culture in real time. 80% of Gen Z plays games (and average over 7 hours per week). 30% discover new music inside those games. The disco became the Discord. The club became the stream. The record store became the open world. And gaming eclipsed the combined box office and recorded music revenue years ago.

Of course, we noticed. We followed the money. Brands dropped gamer collabs, artists streamed in Fortnite, politicians played Among Us for votes. We gamerbait’d hard.

And to be fair, there’s brilliance in that. Fortnite concerts hit a ~bazillion viewers. Esports sponsorships outpaced major sports. But underneath, an unspoken truth formed: gaming, not music, became the world’s most participatory art form.

Over the years, while music adapted to survive, gaming evolved to lead.

Tomorrow

But here’s the flaw in our thinking: gaming isn’t the pipe; the internet is.

The internet is the cultural bloodstream, the infrastructure everything now flows through. Gaming is just one of the liquids in motion - music is another.

The real question is: what does music look like when it’s designed for the internet itself? For communities, participation, and belonging.

When music went digital, we lost that connection. We traded ownership and identity for frictionless streams. No more liner notes. No more collections. No more “I was there.” Music became content, and “indie” became a playlist instead of a movement.

Concerts still give us that feeling - sweat, soul, contact highs - but they don’t scale. Not at internet scale. Not like gaming and social media.

So, what’s the path forward?

Day After Tomorrow

We already see blueprints everywhere.

TikTok turned music into a participatory language - covers, dances, duets, remixes. VTubing reimagined performance as identity play. Web3 experimented with ownership and fan investment. Midjourney and now Sora hint at a world where anyone can make something from nothing - synthetic media as creative liberation.

It all points toward the same truth: music’s next chapter isn’t about distribution. It’s about interaction. About participation. About play.

How Music will Win Culture (Again)

For decades, music led culture. Then gaming took the torch. If we want it back, we have to redesign our design principles.

1. Design for the internet, not for games. Make it fun, playful, and native.

2. Redefine culture as participation. Ownership, creation, and community are day 1 primitives.

3. Design band T-shirts. In other words, design for belonging - moments and products that say I was there.

(It’s that simple and that hard).

Two years later, I still can’t tell you where this all lands. But I still can tell you one thing with absolute certainty:

Shell art is fucking over.

Watch

Enjoy!

/m

• Music Tectonics

• Portlandia

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I’ve spent more money on band t-shirts than rent checks.

My closet’s a 100% cotton playlist – Silverchair, Soundgarden, Daft Punk, Coachella 10x, Nirvana hand-me-downs from my guitar-slinging older brother. He taught me that fandom wasn’t just CDs, it was an outfit. An identity. A badge you wore into the world.

The merch stand knows me by name now. Every show, I cop something – a tee, a hoodie, a vinyl I may or may not spin. Paying for art has always felt tax-deductible, a girl-math quirk that lets me vote with my dollars for the things I want more of (mostly sad rap and metal).

That’s the point: fandom isn’t rational. It’s not an Excel model; it’s merch. And you can learn more about building a music product in the merch line than in any pitch deck. Fandom isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a feeling – one a band t-shirt captures better than any blockchain ever will.

Everything you need to know about building music products, you can learn from band t-shirts.

Don’t listen to me because I build products. Listen because I wear a lot of band t-shirts. Steve Jobs had black turtlenecks. I have Black Sabbath. Same uniform, different religion.

But I don’t wear them for nostalgia. Or resale. Or clout.

I wear them for three simple, emotional, slightly irrational reasons – each one a lesson for anyone building in music.

Lesson 1: Fans Buy to Support

David Bowie once sold $55 million in “Bowie Bonds” backed by his future royalties – debt with better branding.

The idea of music as investment lingered decades later: NFTs, creator coins, royalty splits, tokenized revenue streams – all promising ownership, all drowning in metadata messes, SEC headaches, and underwhelming returns.

The reality: fans don’t want to own your cash flow; they want to keep you on the road, in the studio, making more music. That $40 oversized Gildan screenprint? Gas money to the next city. That’s survival – and it does more than a year’s worth of streaming ever will.

A crypto-coin paying me one-thousandth of a penny in royalties? That’s not ownership; that’s cosplay.

Lesson 2: Fans Buy to Remember

Sure, Online Ceramics sells Dead & Co. tees online. But my ears aren’t ringing on Shopify. The sweat’s dried. The nitrous doesn’t ship from Shakedown Street.

Crypto tried to bottle that feeling with POAPs and on-chain tickets, but digital provenance is a receipt, not a relic. Merch carries texture, memory, and tinnitus across your chest. It shows others what James once said we’re all really saying:

“I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.

I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.

I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.”

- “Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem

Now being “there” is about taste, community, and memory. 1000 true fans aren’t betting the token goes up. They’re betting the memory is worth the spend.

And merch is the proof you can’t “mint.” Cotton > code. Being there > being early.

Always.

Lesson 3: Fans Buy to Express Themselves

Streaming platforms know this. That’s why Spotify Wrapped hit so hard: it wasn’t data, it was a mirror. A mirror that made you feel seen. A digital band tee. “Here’s who I am.”

MySpace Top 8s. Tumblr music blogs. Last.fm scrobbles. Same impulse: flex your taste. Broadcast your identity.

On one end: playing an instrument. On the other: wearing the shirt. In between: playlists, aux battles, DJ sets - all ways of saying, this is me.

(And nowhere on that spectrum sits a Bowie Bond). 

The next great music product won’t feel like a brokerage app – it’ll feel like a merch table.

This is why every Web3 music company raising on “fan ownership” is solving the wrong problem. Fans don't want equity - they want merch. The future of music won’t look like an early-stage investment strategy. Or streaming royalties. Or minting NFTs. It’s not an asset class. It’s a crush. A timestamp. A beautifully irrational act.

The future of music will be built by people who get it. People who know what it means to wait in a merch line. To save up. Show up. And buy the shirt.

If you’re investing in music tech, look for companies building better merch tables, not better cap tables.

Not a token. Not a bond.

A band t-shirt.

/m

• Images courtesy of Máuhan, Forbes, NYSMusic, Dead.Online (in order of appearance)

• BBC: ‘Bowie bonds’ - the singer’s financial innovation

• CoinDesk: POAPs: What Is a Proof of Attendance Protocol?

• The Technetium: 1000 True Fans

• Bunch of startups: JKBX, Royalty Exchange, Royal.io, Sound.xyz, SongVest, et al.

• San Francisco Chronicle: Deadhead lovefest: Shakedown Street rings in 60th anniversary at Golden Gate Park

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There’s a Wu-Tang Clan album sealed in a silver box that legally can’t be streamed until the year 2103.

One copy. One owner. One contract that forbids commercial use, reproduction, or broad public performance for 88 years.

We were given this album, and one impossible prompt: make some art out of it.

Fortunately, this wasn’t my first rodeo in legal gray areas – or in the strange polyamorous marriage of music, technology, and law. I spent my youth dialing through 56K modems pirating half the internet – Napster, Soulseek, BitTorrent, you name it, I used it to download music.

Since then, I’ve learned (at least) two things about music: it’s always a little bit illegal, and illegal is a sick bird.

(ill eagle...okay, okay, I’m sorry.)

1.0 Music as Law

One constant in the music industry is that every era invents its own sonic contraband. Bootleg cassettes. Dubbed CDs. Limewire zips. YouTube rips. SoundCloud remixes. AI voice models. Whatever the medium, the pattern repeats: artists innovate, kids imitate, lawyers panic.

And it’s rarely the biz that moves us forward; it’s the underground – the kids, weirdos, and bedroom producers playing with emerging technology – who drive change. JDilla had his MPC60. Brian Eno had generative music. Ghostwriter had retrieval-based voice-conversion (“RVC”) models. The industry fights what the underground proves already works.

If you’ve ever tried to do anything interesting with music, you’ve met its favorite “L-word”: licensing. You can’t press a vinyl, remix a track, or stream a boyfriend ASMR audiobook without it. Copyright law, as we know it, was practically written by musicians (or their lawyers) trying to get paid. The player piano birthed the first mechanical license. Sampling gave us fair use doctrine. Streaming resurrected performance rights in disguise.

Music doesn’t just follow the law – it teaches it.

So when born-digital art museum Rhizome and American art collective MSCHF invited us to make a little sumth’n sumth’n for this year’s 7x7 Program under the theme Law as Code, the prompt felt eerily familiar. Music has always been law as code. File formats and lawsuits share a syntax. Contracts are just metadata for meaning.

My collaborator and co-conspirator was Spencer Harrison of PleasrDAO, the internet collective that now holds Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – the single-copy Wu-Tang album so valuable and so restricted it can’t be played publicly until 2103. Recorded in secret from 2007 to 2013, it was RZA and Cilvaringz’s statement on the “cheapening” of music in the internet age. There was only one copy of the album ever created, with no (legal) access on streaming platforms. When Martin Shkreli (the controversial pharma-bro) bought it, it became a meme of greed. When the Department of Justice seized it, it became lore. When PleasrDAO acquired it, it became somewhere between museum piece and hostage.

To this day, it’s the most expensive piece of music ever sold. The liner notes read like scripture: for eighty-eight years, the holder may play it privately, free of charge, but never use it commercially or publicly. A perfect paradox: an album that exists to be heard, legally forbidden from being heard.

So that was our canvas.

2.0 Law as Code

When we kicked off our creative sprint, we asked: what if we made something from the restriction itself? What if the contract was the instrument?

Our answer became 1-800-SHAOLIN – a physical New York City phone booth turned audio confessional. A ritual you could dial into. Call the number, and the album calls back. No MP3s, no leaks, no downloads. We weren’t breaking the rule; we were performing it. If the law says “private listening only,” then we made privacy public. The booth became a temple. The call became communion. Just a voice on the other end of the line, whispering through the loophole.

We also built a companion website where we stole – sorry, borrowed – intellectual property straight from the U.S. Trademark Office. We remixed filings into speculative listening devices: The KungFuShu: spring-loaded sub wu-fers that you feel in your (shoe) sole. Freq Fang: custom-molded mouth prosthetic for direct and personal vibration of the bones. 36-Wutt Bulb: sonic distribution via lightwaves and heat. Beatburger: an edible album. Half satire, half futurism. We were testing what happens when the machinery of law becomes a creative material.

And because we like to commit to the bit, we made the entire audience sign an absurd 300+ page NDA before the 7x7 presentation. A performative clause. A wink to the system. It turned participation into possession.

Music was never a product; it was always a verb. Musicking, as Christopher Small called it: the act of taking part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. Playing, listening, vibrating, translating. Even obeying the law could be a kind of musicking, if you do it with intent. So 1-800-SHAOLIN wasn’t just a creative project; it was a living test case. How far could you stretch legality before it turned into art itself? Could a contract become choreography? Could a clause have rhythm?

We learned that the line between art and compliance is paper thin. That law is just code in fancy clothes. That sometimes the only way to keep a song alive is to hide it.

(click above to watch the full presentation)

3.0 Code as Art

If Shaolin was a contract pretending to be an album, 1-800-SHAOLIN was an album pretending to be a contract. It lived in that thin space between compliance and creativity.

To me, that’s the takeaway: the boundary between the legal, the technical, and the musical keeps collapsing over time with every new emerging technology. I’ve spent years chasing that collapse – from my early days remixing music on a cracked copy of ProTools, to my last startup, Bubbl, a pre-TikTok video remixing app, to my recent explorations in AI-assisted creative. Whatever the era, I always land on the same tension: the gray area of legality, creativity, authorship, ownership, and play.

To its credit, music is still where the future shows up first. It’s where law gets rewritten in real time. It’s where technology learns how to feel culture. That’s why I spend most of my time here.

4.0 The Remix Clause

Throughout most of my work, there’s been an underlying obsession with remixing – the original term for “fucking with formats.” Bubbl. My website. Everything else I’m not telling you about (yet). Treating the component parts – the codes, the rules, the ingredients – as Legos is where I often find magic. But I don’t do it just to rebel, or to break the rules; I do it to create something fresh, and new.

Similarly, the point of 1-800-SHAOLIN wasn’t to break rules; it was to play them like instruments. Law is just code with a wig and robe on. Code is just law that goes
“beep boop” inside computers. Music is just law, code, and rules that we learned to play differently. Spencer and I did our best to apply that spirit of play to the rule of law and code itself.

Looking ahead, the next wave of creative work – especially with AI – will depend on how well we can translate between those systems: how we turn constraints into creativity, how we build new rituals out of regulation, how we adopt the spirit of music, and play, in our practice.

We’re all still negotiating what counts as creation. Maybe that’s the point. Every generation gets its own gray area to play in.

If it isn’t obvious yet, my POV is that we should do so freely.

Trust me, I’m a lawyer.

[Signature Page Follows]

/m, esq.

• Video: 7x7 2025: pleasr x Máuhan

• Rhizome: Call 1-800-SHAOLIN for a good time

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This Post Isn’t About Leaving Spotify

Everyone seems to want that post. The glossy Medium essay. The heartfelt goodbye. The heroic leap into the unknown.

Well, this isn’t that post — but here’s my leaked exit interview from back when I left my gig at Spotify:

And although I left the company, I took the job with me.

I am now your very own Head of Innovation and Market Intelligence here at . I’ll be doing the same kind of trend, culture, and tech forecasting I did at Spotify but now it’s on the Internet for the Internet, with far fewer NDAs (and compensation).

After all, this post wasn’t about leaving Spotify… And this wasn’t my goodbye email:

/m

• CNN Business: He’s shaping the future of Spotify, one moonshot idea at a time

• TechCrunch: Spotify quietly lets all podcasters upload videos, surpasses 250K shows

• MixMag: Spotify Adds DJ Mixes to Platform from Noisier, Adam Beyer, and Amyelle

• TechCrunch: Spotify becomes first music streamer to launch on Roblox

• Variety: What Spotify’s New AI DJ Can Teach Video Streaming Services

• Decrypt: Spotify’s Token-Gated Playlists a ‘Powerful’ Benefit for NFT Projects

• Spelman: Spotify Expands NextGen Audio Program to Historically Black Colleges & Universities

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I used to describe art as something that made you feel. I still believe that.

(I know a lot of things make you feel. But rectangle square.)

To that end, the mauhan.com project was always meant to be just that. Not a website. Not a portfolio. But a rectangle square. An art experiment. One that hopefully evoked feeling.

So after spending a stupid amount of time and energy on creating a hyper-realistic, hyper-manicured avatar of myself…

I threw it / him out.

It felt off. Too AI. I wanted this project to feel intimate, not synthetic. Self-aware, not surreal. I wanted it to hit. So I recorded myself, prayed to the Algorithm, and invited the Internet to come play:

Someone (me?) could write an entire blog post (Substack?) on the thrill (anxiety?) of the “hit send” moment. TL;DR we learn. And I learned that - despite my intentions - feelings belong to the other end of the Google Meet. On mauhan.com, it became quite clear quite quickly that the “feeling” was up for interpretation:

But it felt.

And truth be told, that’s all I wanted.

It felt good to say something without saying anything at all. Conveying an idea through form factor. I’ve always been obsessed with fucking with formats - playing with the architecture to challenge what something should be, and should do. Rewriting the form of delivery as part of the work itself. Changing the way “the room” works.

In middle school, I submitted a long-form narrative version of a “duck walks into a bar” joke for our state-wide writing exams. In my adolescence, I published a Coachella recap disguised as a missed connection love story. In my, uhh, professional life, I gave a conference keynote via memes. A portfolio website that operates like a Google Meet wasn’t so far off the beaten path.

And (thankfully) this one seemed to have landed. It felt. It feels. It’s feeeeeling.

“If I put this candle in an all-white gallery space, it looks like a piece of art. If I put it in a garage, it looks like a piece of trash… I could either design the candle and spend a lot of time telling you about the candle, or I could design the room that it sits in.” - Virgil Abloh

King Virgil always inspired me. His work revolved around context. He’d remix an object by changing the room it lived in. A gallery vs. a garage. Streetwear at Louis Vuitton. His genius was in reframing surroundings so the thing itself glowed differently.

So while Virgil designed the gallery; I’m just doing my best to turn the garage into Dia.

Okay, but why?

Yeah, good question…

I think a part of it was meant to be commentary. This idea of constant intrusion. Constant accessibility. Dialed up to 11. That you get unfettered access to me, to others.

Fine. Take it. Have a live feed into my living room. My office. My home. My face. Go for it. Come’n in.

And while the site was meant to tickle your brain a bit, it actually wasn’t meant to be an ‘aha!’ moment. But I'm glad it is. The shock is good. That little jolt. The double-take. Every random text I receive apologizing for dialing in (second only to the “Did I see you on How I Met Your Mother?!” texts. Mind your skeletons...).

That glitch is the “it.”

Truth be told, part of it was just… me. For better or for worse, I’m accessible. I like people. I like meeting people. I like being there for people. I find the good in people and get along with most all of them. I show up as green dot available.

So this felt - well, right. On brand. Tongue-in-cheek. A wink. But nice. Soft. Not arrogant. Not meant to be, anyway.

And I suppose most people would write this thing up as social commentary. A monologue on our always on, always connected culture. But I don’t want to write that. (Viciné can).

Because I’m not selling anything. I’m just creating.

(Unless you’re buying. If so, get in touch.)

I hope you clicked.

/m

I recognize it’s a bit cringe to do a write-up on your own website. But (a) this is conceptual art, (b) I’m trying to get comfy putting my voice out there, and (c) f you, it was clever.

• It’s Nice That: A tech exec’s portfolio site masquerades as a non-stop Google Meet

• Slanted: Mauhan.com A Social Experiment

• Call the Design Guy: The Top Design Portfolio Websites

• Vicine: Mauhan.com - A Social Experiment

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My first blog was called Chill Milk. It was about design, music, and all the cool things in between. To everyone’s profound disappointment, it had nothing at all to do with dairy.

Similarly, Dead Online has nothing at all to do with dying. 

In fact, it has everything to do with living. It’s about culture - music, art, technology, and the interdependencies of the three merging to shape our today and tomorrow. About being terminally online and actively engaged - if not at least observant of - emergent techno-cultural scenes. It’s about trends, ideas, insights, and big thinks. 

I’ve spent my career looking around the corner to peer into the future. Dead Online aims to capture the moments right before (and sometimes right after) the furious whiteboarding. To keep the aperture wide, and you plugged-in and up to date.

Welcome. (And thanks for subscribing). ;-) 

Dead.Online is post-brainrot-future-farming

Terminally online so you don’t need to be.

Dead.online explores trends, ideas, and Internet culture to help you look around the corner and stay relevant.

Period.

Curated by Máuhan

The night before Napster was shut down, I stayed up all night downloading the entire catalog of ‘90’s RnB. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with the intersection of music, culture, and technology - and built my career around it.

I started as a bloghouse kid scouting the next big thing for SPIN and LA Weekly, and eventually graduated to Spotify, where I forecasted trends, developed content formats, and led “moonshot bets” as their first-ever Head of Innovation and Market Intelligence. Along the way, I founded (and sold!) a pre-TikTok video remix app backed by Warner Bros, built ventures alongside Fortune 500’s as a Partner at BCG Digital Ventures, and invested in startups as both a VC and Angel Investor.

Throughout it all, my superpower has been connecting the dots between emerging culture, technology, and business. My super-weakness has been publishing regularly. Dead.online leans into the former, and violently avoids the latter.

Offline, I live between Brooklyn and Venice Beach, work on consumer products and conceptual art, and run a multibillion dollar psychic hotline.

If you need to find me, follow the sounds of ‘90’s RnB…

/m

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It was a Monday night, and it was just shitting rain in LA.

I moved here to become a screenwriter. It was romantic, but hardly glamorous. Most days I’d bounce between coffee shops and working retail on Melrose, trying to make rent while cranking out spec scripts. Along the way, I fell into culture and music journalism, and spent my nights chasing weird gigs. Usually music. Always gonzo. Almost always for a zine or blog that’d be dead in a year. People seemed to dig that - my byline slipped into SPIN, Skinnie Magazine, LA Record. Small wins.

So when a friend said, “Comedy show?” I said, “Fuck it.”

Back then, Dave Chappelle had been MIA for years. So when he wandered onstage at The Comedy Store for an unannounced four-hour set, the place went feral. And we were in the front row. After, I stayed up all night writing a story, sent it to the Editor-in-Chief at LA Weekly, and (after he quadruple fact-checked what was a highly improbable story) somehow earned myself my first lede piece:

Watching the self-ostracized Chappelle rediscover the stage allows for a strangely candid look at a brilliant, yet jaded, man.

‘This is weird, right?’ Chappelle asks the front row. ‘You feel it too, right?’

Yeah, Dave, we all feel it. The same man who brought us Tyrone Biggums and ran out on a $50 million paycheck stopped by just to hang - a little out of the ordinary.”

That article really got my name out. But I never expected it to play out that way - especially since I shipped out to tinseltown to sling TV scripts - not cultural commentary.

In fact, I moved to LA with the Re:LAX pilot in hand.

Re:LAX was my first original TV show. The logline was “The Office meets Airplane.” It was a dry, character-driven sitcom based on the staff at LAX.

The pilot kicks off with the news: LAX was ranked the third worst airport in the country. We follow a timid, Prozac-popping, fear-of-flying General Manager into his office, where he receives an email putting him on notice.

The season arch continues with 10 episodes - each improving one aspect of the airport, from moving walkways to instituting a strict policy of racial profiling to expedite TSA.

Fortunately, mockumentaries were hot at the time, and Re:LAX earned me some street cred. And I used that momentum to spec for other shows.

Between screenwriting stints, I moonlit as a music journalist. And as the story goes, that’s where things picked up.

My first artist interview was with indie lo-fi revivalists, The Cribs. I showed up to The Standard Hotel, met their tour manager, and opted to interview the band by the pool. I felt like William Miller.

“‘We had a big stretch of time off,’ recounts Ross. ‘We were all together because we were friends, and we’d been hanging out. So, why don’t we get together and write some music, because that’s what you do when you’re friends, you know, people just jam.’”

^ That’s Cribs drummer Ross Jarman talking about how Johnny Marr from The Smith’s joined his band. It’s one of the more stoney-baloney quotes I’ve ever put in print.

I guess I had a knack for those type of artist profiles because the assignments quickly multiplied. I covered Dane Cook, Penguin Prison, Girl Talk, Johnny Knoxville - you name it. I interviewed OK Go at a coffee shop across from Amoeba Music.

‘What’s been so great about the explosion of possibilities on the Internet is that you really don’t need to stick to a form,’ explains [frontman Damian] Kulash. ‘We didn’t really even think of the backyard dancing video as a music video at first. It was just some crazy shit we made.’”

^ Props to me for capitalizing ‘Internet.’ Get it, girl.

That sort of artist engagement was cool, and led to a lot of new friends - one time I spent an hour chatting about potty training a puppy with Lil Jon (his, not mine).

Keeping it fun helped me write well, and writing well helped me earn a dozen or so print and online cover stories.

Pile the most serendipitous rainy day trip to The Comedy Store on top of those stats, and all of a sudden “Words by M.M. Zonoozy’ meant something.

And when you’re something, I guess people pay you to attend music festivals.

“We met on the first day of Coachella. It was your average wayfarer boy meets sun-kissed beach babe. She was wearing hot pink shorts, and so was I. For us, it was a total duh.”

^ Turning my Coachella review into a gonzo love-story added fuel to the post-Chappelle blogosphere fire, and earned me (and my friends) all access passes to all sorts of places where we really shouldn’t have had all access.

Hype escalated into a podcast, and later into a ‘docuseries’ TV concept. The series revolved around my coverage of artists and local music culture. The logline was “Anthony Bourdain meets Almost Famous.”

The show was called On Tour:

On Tour was optioned, and promptly shelved. Shit, that’s life.

Somewhere in that blur, my love for writing about media morphed into building for media. That’s how Bubbl happened - an interactive video thing I dreamed up that somehow snowballed into funding by Warner Bros. We got VC-backed, we got users, we got battle scars. And then, just as quickly, we got acquired.

After that, I took my curiosity into other people’s sandboxes. I was a Partner at BCG Digital Ventures, building new companies with the world’s biggest brands. Next, my dream job at Spotify running innovation - getting paid to live ten years in the future and design moonshot ideas for one of the most innovative companies in the history of, um, companies.

Now, I typically like wrapping up my stories with a cheeky little bow, but this one isn’t over. In fact, I’m back where it all started:

At a Dave Chappelle show.*

* I’m fucking with you

/m