[3] After returning to Croatia, he was involved in the hardcore punk scene of the 1990s,[3] graduated with a degree in philosophy and general linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb,[4] started writing for Croatian magazines such as Zarez and, prior to his twenty-sixth birthday, published two books, Protiv političke korektnosti (Against Political Correctness) and Znakovi postmodernog grada (Signs of the Postmodern City) in Croatia and Serbia.

[13][14] The influence and significance of the Subversive Festival was often paralleled to the Praxis School, the Marxist humanist philosophical movement that originated in the SFR Yugoslavia during the 1960s.

which the American linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky praised as a book "based on rich personal experience and participation in constructive subversion, along with wide reading from classics to the latest dreams of artificial intelligence".

[15] According to Chomsky, "Horvat leads us on a whirlwind tour of the maladies and discontents of modern civilization and the many ways to right what is wrong and achieve a better future".

His guests included M.I.A., Vanessa Redgrave, Margarethe von Trotta, Adam Curtis, Herta Müller, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Dolar, Julia Kristeva, Eva Illouz, Tariq Ali, Bobby Gillespie, Thomas Piketty and others.

[17] In 2013, Horvat was the host and author of an intellectual TV show on Croatian National Television called Zdravo Društvo (Sane Society) which tried to recreate the Balkan cultural space and hosted many intellectuals such as Renata Salecl, Rade Šerbedžija, Andrej Nikolaidis and Viktor Ivančić, among others.