Why we do this?

I’m Yosuke Matsuzaki. I live in Japan. I’m the CEO of otiose corp. and of BOOBY LLC, which actually exists. I used to be an engineer.

This is going to sound like an insufferable engineer talking about himself. I’ll put the stupid part first so it doesn’t.

The first company I helped build from zero went past $1.5M ARR. Then it failed at becoming an organization, and I left like I was being chased out. I had no money. I was homeless for about a week. That was fifteen years ago.

The second one is recent. Global team. Time zones that never lined up. It felt like I was a manager twenty-four hours a day. I got adjustment disorder and a sleep disorder and quit. I also walked away from the stock options. Pretty stupid, right (lol)

Since you’ll want the credentials anyway: I was the first engineer at two companies that grew from nothing past $1.5M ARR. One of them went to Series B and 150 people. As lead engineer I built more than half of the internal systems. At another company I joined as the first internal engineer after they’d already hit $700K ARR, and helped take it to 3x. I also sat in a big corporation, in a department that did both engineering and marketing.

I know the machine from the inside. That’s the only reason the numbers are here.

What I started after that is this fictional company, otiose corp., and the real Japanese company BOOBY LLC. The theme isn’t anti-AI or anti-capitalism. It’s anti-loss of humanity. That sounds like nonsense, so I’ll be concrete.

Engineers will probably never forget November 2022, when ChatGPT showed up. It was still GPT-3.5, but a lot of engineers imagined a future where engineers wouldn’t be needed. Even so, the subject doesn’t become “AI.” In my world the protagonist is still the human.

AI sped up the loss of humanity.

Anyone who’s been inside a startup knows this feeling. Dedicate your whole life. Speed and efficiency are justice. Beat every competitor. Hit an ARR nobody can catch, in a short time. That’s justice. Meanwhile you put aside the questions — why am I doing this work? is it fun to do it with this person? — and you’re only asked to chase numbers.

The miserable ones are the board and the middle managers. If ARR is stacking up, you can go to bed humming. When the gears start to slip, the organization panics. Soon someone points at a teammate as the bottleneck. People get cut. Or sales and engineering start grinding against each other.

You’ll say I’m lying, but the most fun is when the business is at zero and nothing works. Once it scales fast, you have to work with people who don’t fit your skin, and the incentive to protect the organization kicks in. Sometimes you have no choice but to cut someone under you in order to protect the org. That’s how the loss of humanity happens. To protect their hearts, the people inside slowly lose their feelings — like AI, like robots.

This happens more or less anywhere you work, not just startups. If you’re public, there are quarterly revenue and profit targets, and pressure rains down from the stock price at the top all the way to the edges. Even at a small company, useless pressure arrives from the owner’s life plan. AI made work 10x faster. You could say it made the psychological pressure on humans 10x too.

Who do you blame?

In the middle of this I looked for someone to hate. The CEO who corners you. The VC who puts up money and demands 10x. The report who keeps causing problems. And finally AI itself, or the companies building it. Step a little away from the noise and you see that hating people means nothing. Hating someone doesn’t improve your situation. It doesn’t clean out your feelings either.

What matters more, I realized, is to look at the labor and capital that strip away humanity from above — to observe them — and to be able to laugh at yourself. If you can laugh at yourself, you don’t have to point your anger outward. You can spend the day doing nothing. That’s OTIOSE, exactly.

I want to introduce a little of what otiose corp. does.

First, telemetry — the web simulations. THE GREEN DOT and ASAP SLOP LOOP blowing up on Reddit already feels nostalgic. THE GREEN DOT: you become a fictional middle manager and try to keep your reports from slacking. You obstruct the slacking. At the end you submit personnel evaluations to an AI CEO. Over a million views on Reddit.

Second, ASAP SLOP LOOP. A GUI that mimics task tools like Asana. 14,000 people around the world join in and just throw tasks at each other. A nonsense simulation. Over 700k views on Reddit.

There are other web apps too — AI SLOP ME, THE EXECUTION. Personally, going viral was never the most important part. The photos and writing people leave behind are what actually heal me. Snapshots of labor, of social-media society, sitting there. Please go look.

supplies is a desk charm for people who belong to otiose corp.

Today’s work and capitalism can grind down humanity pretty easily. I already said it matters to grasp that from above and observe it. A desk charm felt right. It’s cute, and it catches your eye.

Slight detour: I’ve been emailing with left-leaning thinkers, journalists, professors in the US and Europe — arguing, exchanging. I learn from all of it. At the same time it felt too correct, too theoretical, too hard. These are words that should reach the most exhausted workers, and they don’t. That’s a waste. So I also thought: maybe a charm you can understand without using your head (or feel like you understood) is better.

Last is bulletin, the weekly newsletter we send to employees. It cuts out extreme events inside the fictional company otiose corp. — events that run the opposite of reality. The paid version is actual paper: once a month, four weeks’ worth. Handwritten replies to letters from employees go in there too. Please try the paid membership.

Anti-loss of humanity. That’s our theme. I want to drive a wedge into people’s heads. If you agree: play the simulations, buy a charm, become a bulletin member. Any of them. Just do one.

This got marketing-y at the end so I’m probably going to get yelled at (lol) Whatever. I definitely make less than I did as a senior engineer, and I’m short on operating costs, so this much is fine, right? Forgive me. Please.