Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Budgets and auteurs
The greatest films are not the ones with the biggest budgets. A film worth watching carries an auteur's statement, some opinion and artistry, and software that matters needs the same: a team with something interesting to say about its product.
Fashion as a statement
Fashion works the same way. Functional clothes are available to everyone, and what a person wears makes a statement only because it contrasts with what others wear or signals membership in a group. Products can feel just as opinionated and artistic.
Authorship in software
When everyone has the same AI tools, that statement is what separates one product from the next. What gets built and how it feels are authorship, and a person or a group of people still do it.
Where did the idea of the auteur come from?
François Truffaut argued in a 1954 essay in the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma that great directors stamp a personal vision on their films instead of simply filming scripts. Critic Andrew Sarris carried the idea to American readers in the early 1960s and called it the auteur theory. It recast directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as authors of their films. Truffaut himself went on to direct The 400 Blows in 1959.
Why does fashion work as a signal?
German sociologist Georg Simmel argued in his 1904 essay Fashion that it serves two opposite urges at once. Wearing a style joins a person to a group, and the same style sets that group apart from everyone outside it. When a style spreads widely, the group that started it moves on to a new one. Simmel taught at the University of Berlin.
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