Welcome to Cephas

A Platform That Doesn’t Enshittify A Letter to Casey Newton Dear Casey, You’ve spent years documenting how platforms die — how they start by being good to users, then shift value to business customers, then finally extract everything for shareholders until the whole thing collapses. You called it the platform lifecycle. Cory Doctorow called it enshittification. Same autopsy, different coroner. I built something that can’t do that. Not “won’t” — can’t. And I think you might want to see how. ...

The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working A Letter to Ezra Klein Dear Ezra, You’ve spent years trying to understand why good policy fails, why institutions decay, and why problems that seem solvable persist decade after decade. Your conclusion, as near as I can tell: it’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that our systems are optimized for something other than doing it. I built something based on that same diagnosis. But instead of trying to fix existing systems, I built a parallel one. ...

DFTBA, But Make It Infrastructure A Letter to Hank Green Dear Hank, You’ve spent fifteen years proving that creators can build businesses that don’t exploit their audiences. DFTBA, Complexly, the whole nerdfighteria economy — you showed that “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome” could be a business model, not just a slogan. I’m building something similar, but for everyone. And I think you might want to know about it. The Problem You’ve Already Solved (For Yourself) You and John built an ecosystem where: ...

I Built a Platform and I Don’t Want to Be a Billionaire A Letter to Kara Swisher Dear Kara, You’ve spent your career calling bullshit on tech founders who promise to change the world while building extraction machines. So let me be direct: I built a platform, I’m not taking VC money, and I think the whole model is broken. If that sounds like every other founder pitch you’ve heard, keep reading. If it still sounds like bullshit by the end, delete this. ...

Are We Out of the Woods? An Open Letter to Taylor Swift Dear Ms. Swift, I want to license “Out of the Woods (Taylor’s Version)” for our launch video. And I want to do it through a system that pays you fairly — not because you need the money, but because the same system needs to pay fairly when the artist is a single mom in Tulsa making beats on her phone. ...

Are We Out of the Woods? An Open Letter to Taylor Swift Dear Ms. Swift, I want to license “Out of the Woods (Taylor’s Version)” for our launch video. And I want to do it through a system that pays you fairly — not because you need the money, but because the same system needs to pay fairly when the artist is a single mom in Tulsa making beats on her phone. ...

The Math You’ve Been Writing About An Open Letter to Tim Ingham Dear Mr. Ingham, You’ve spent a decade documenting who gets paid in music — and who doesn’t. The streaming economics. The label margins. The songwriter royalties that come out to fractions of pennies. You’ve shown the numbers, over and over, and the numbers are damning. I’ve read your work. I built something based on it. The Problem You’ve Quantified In your Rolling Stone columns and at Music Business Worldwide, you’ve tracked exactly how revenue flows through the music industry: what percentage goes to labels, what goes to publishers, what goes to PROs, what gets lost in “administrative fees,” and what finally trickles down to the people who actually made the music. ...

Measuring What Matters An Open Letter to Erik Brynjolfsson Dear Professor Brynjolfsson, You’ve spent your career measuring the digital economy — and showing that our traditional metrics miss most of the value. GDP doesn’t capture what platforms create or extract. Productivity measures don’t account for the intangible shifts in who benefits from technological change. I’ve built a platform designed around a different measurement: How much of the value goes to the people who created it? ...

Everything for Everyone — Literally An Open Letter to Nathan Schneider Dear Professor Schneider, Your book title haunts me: “Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy.” I read it three years into building Liana Banyan. I’d been calling what I was doing “cooperative commerce” without realizing there was a movement, a history, a consortium of people working on the same problem. Your book gave me context — and courage. ...

Can I Take a Second? An Open Letter to Tatiana Schlossberg Dear Ms. Schlossberg, I read with great sorrow your New Yorker piece about your diagnosis and the maybe year you have left. About the medications that might buy you more time, if you can afford them, if your insurance approves them, if the system deems you worthy of another sunrise. I’m a stranger, but I’m writing anyway. Not because I can fix what’s broken in your body. But because you’ve spent your career documenting what’s broken in our systems, and I think you’d like to know it can be changed. I have the math, and the application, live and working, to prove it. ...