Michael Morrison

The Anti-Engagement Product

Sojourn, the bedtime-story app I’m building, has a success metric that most product people find hard to accept. The metric is that the listener falls asleep. The numbers a product person lives by — session length, retention, daily actives — all point the wrong way here. The whole machine is tuned to end the session as quickly and gently as it can, and then to not only be entirely fine with you not opening it again tonight, but to celebrate that. The audio fades to silence on a timer. There is no streak, no notification, no come-back-tomorrow nudge, no social anything. The product is, in the most literal sense, trying to get rid of you.

The Intimacy Economy

Making a living from creative work has come down to two options. Run the brand economy: become a person worth following, and let the work be the marketing for the merch. Or run the performance economy: sell the one thing that can’t be copied, being in the room. AI is squeezing artists toward both, because the artifact itself is going free and the value is migrating to identity and tribe. I walked through all of that in The T-Shirt Economy, and it ended somewhere bleak and mostly correct. I’m a horrible salesman, so I wasn’t thrilled.