The Indie Hacker Economy is a Pyramid Scheme

Photo by Mehmet Ali Peker on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless here.If you spent any time on tech Twitter over the past few weeks, you’ll have seen the same growing panic.People keep talking about how the indie hacker economy is collapsing.Revenue is down for anyone building their own app, and the money is leaving the space.And the reason why is simple: everyone points to AI. The more AI tools there are that can enable anyone to build anything, the less people need the tools built by indie hackers.But I think the core problem here isn’t actually that the indie…