1min Snip
Jackson Dahl
Welcome to Dialectic, episode 20, with Yancey Strickler. Yancey’s a writer, entrepreneur, and currently the founder of Metalabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He also founded Kickstarter, where he was previously the CEO and is a current board member, and is also working on a new corporate forum called the Artist Corporation. We talk about all of these and more, and frankly, those only scratch the surface of Yancey’s creative life and work. At Root, I think he spent his career thinking about what it means to be an individual and what it means to be a creative in the modern world, and how the internet is shaping all of that. Much of this work has been specifically around new types of forms that enable artists and creatives. The first half of the conversation is really focused on a backdrop around how the world is so shaped by individualism and by creativity, and how while the internet has ultimately empowered Both of those dramatically, it’s also left many people longing to be a part of something bigger than themselves, especially creatively. And so we spend the rest of the conversation talking about how that can happen, and Yancey’s notion that we should-
Individualism vs. Community
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People used to be born into communities and had to find their individuality, but now they are born individuals seeking communities.
Contemporary freedom is individualistic, potentially limiting since it focuses solely on personal desires.
Jackson Dahl
We’re going to start with individualism. A couple of quotes for you that seem to be favorites of yours, one in particular from Cahill and their Youth Mode essay. Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born individuals and have to find their communities. And then the second is from your interview with Adam Curtis. He said, the contemporary idea of freedom is very much an individualist one. I, as an individual, want to be free to do what I want to do. The idea of individual self-expression whilst feeling limitless because the ideology of our age is individualism looked at from another perspective is limiting because all you Have is your own desires. I think both of those quotes are definitely-
Internet’s Impact on Individuality
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The internet has enabled a new form of individuality.
Online, one can reinvent themselves repeatedly, cultivating multiple facets, which the internet accentuates and rewards.
Yancey Strickler
And I look at people younger than me and I see that continuing. And then I look at the internet and I see a whole new world with a different set of rules that to me resembles that thousand year ago moment where the internet, I think basically stopped Cousin marriage in that it allowed us to become individuals in a whole new way. Like to be an individual online, it’s not just that you’re not from your clan. It’s that you don’t know what you look like. You can choose everything about yourself. And you can also do it over and over again. And actually the people who go deepest in this world, you cultivate alts. You cultivate many slices of yourself that are all true parts of you, none complete parts of you. But they’re things that the internet accentuates, celebrates, rewards. And what I see online is similar to a thousand years ago. I see the creation of a new society.Personal knowledge management practices remain valuable, but their future depends on being reimagined as interfaces for communities rather than purely individual systems. The question is how tools designed for individual thought can enable collective sense-making without losing the benefits of personal curation. pkm-
Mesaverse
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The internet is more of a ‘Mesaverse’ than a ‘Metaverse’, as it reflects our inner selves meeting, not physical embodiments.
It’s about our inner voices meeting online, according to Yancey Strickler.
Yancey Strickler
And, you know, I’ve always thought like the metaverse word is wrong. And that I always think it’s like a Mesa verse because it’s about all of our inner selves meeting. It’s not about physically embodying some digital. No, no. It’s our inner, all of our inner voices. That’s who is meeting online.
Jackson Dahl
It’s more authentic is essentially what you’re saying.
Yancey Strickler
In some ways.-
Scam Era
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The current era is defined by a sense that everything is a scam, leading people to adopt a ‘scam or be scammed’ mentality.
This reflects a troubling yet truthful undercurrent in our current political situation.
Yancey Strickler
It’s all, every range, just like every range for a person. But there is just an inherent truth to it. Even the manipulation. Even last night I went to an event that Toby Shoren posted of Other Internet, and he had us— Former guest of the podcast.
Jackson Dahl
Great.
Yancey Strickler
And he had us map the eras of the Internet, and people talked about, like, now, someone said the era of now is scam or be scammed. And she’s just like, everything’s a scam. You know everything’s a scam, and so you know the only thing to do is that you have to scam, you know, because otherwise, what are you doing? You’re just waiting to get scammed.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah, it’s sort of like everybody’s LARPing. Yeah. And yeah, the new form of LARPing is, or role-playing is scamming. Just scamming.
Yancey Strickler
But just listening to people talk about that and to feel, oh, that is the, well, that is the current of our political situation now. That is like, there is a truthful, even as I may be troubled by it, there is a truth that I recognize. And I’m like, yeah, I think she’s onto something.-
Creativity’s Origin
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The concept of creativity emerged in the 1940s, driven by the Department of Defense’s need for divergent thinkers to compete with the Soviet Union.
Advertising also contributed by integrating aesthetics, shifting from utilitarian approaches.
Yancey Strickler
So I just bought it that day and started reading it. And the book made me angry. Because the book explained how the concept of creativity was through two dual forces that began in the 1940s. It was the Department of Defense that was looking to find divergent thinkers to be officers in the military. They were facing off against the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was the ultimate totalitarian state of more manpower than ever. So the only way the U.S. Could compete was through individualism and new ideas, industriousness. So they needed to find, and at the time the U.S. Had a high degree of conformity, very conformist society. Yes, right after World War II? Right after World War II, extremely conformist society. And so conformity was a high value. And so to seek divergent thinkers was also to go against the value set. So they end up studying certain types of engineers and they study artists. And they’re like doing Rorschach tests. That’s invented in part to do this. They’re like measuring electrodes and they’re trying to see what makes these people work. And some of the first researchers doing this were Abraham Maslow and Timothy Leary got early grants to do this work. At the same time, in the advertising industry, the head of BDDO wrote a book about- Sorry, BDDO? BDDO. What is that? It’s an advertising agency. Still around. Still about a big agency today. But he wrote like a book that was kind of about bringing aesthetics into advertising.1min Snip
Yancey Strickler
It’s just like mass society in a way that really hadn’t been experienced before. And so there was also this concern that came up in the media a lot about, like, basically, is this it? And all those forces came together. And in these social science circles and in these DOD-funded projects, there began to percolate this idea of there’s an essence. There’s an essence that’s presence. In this essence, it’s the democratic form of genius. Because at the time, genius was thought of the lone genius, the madman, the mad artist. It was like the edges of society. But there is an essence of that that anyone can aspire to, and it’s called creativity. You said this made you mad. Why? Because I felt like, is my life a psyop? You know, I felt like, am I the kitten batting the toy?
Jackson Dahl
Because what I was going to say is it almost feels like they tapped into something really true there. Oh, no, yeah. I mean, it is. It is. But just first reading, you’re like, how is this true?makes me rethink consumerism of the 50s - automation and postwar abundance led to more time and the need to signal status. from conformist society to one that individuates itself. from one that didn’t change as much from its community origins to one that not only championed reason but one that needed to broadcast identity, not just status
Yancey Strickler
These things that we take so, that we lament are going away or yeah fascinating yeah and so it’s a very it’s a very new force in society and i and i think that like there is something to the Notion of creativity that’s about improving things through ingenuity through aesthetics yeah through you know all kinds of things that to me make sense as maybe you did reach a certain Stage of Maslow’s hierarchy. He hadn’t come up with that yet, but maybe that is, you know, where creativity enters the picture. And maybe it is the case that up until that stage in human history, that the broad, you know, the broad stability would allow that to be a real goal of society. But, you know, if you look at someone like South Korea, who’s had such a dominant cultural footprint, you know, the last 20 years, I’m reading books about it now. But, you know, you’re going to find that this was an explicit investment by the government to say, yeah, we need to raise children to have artistic practices. Just certain things that have been shown.-
Art’s Commercial Expression
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Commercial expression of art started after the French Revolution, specifically early 19th-century French salons.
Art became part of mainstream conversation in the 1930s-1950s.
Yancey Strickler
Those are… Even music. Purely patronage, edification. When you start to get into the arts as individual expression or the beginnings of a commercial expression, you’re really looking at after the French Revolution. Like early 19th century French salons began to have like competition to show your work for the first time. There’s a book, a great book I’ve been reading that’s like all about the art market of early America in the late 18th century. So there’s like, it was just starting then, but really art, like art as a part of mainstream conversation, you’re looking 1930s, 1950s and beyond. Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock. Right.
Jackson Dahl
What’s interesting too, is that at least even just in the, in the words, creativity connotes, it doesn’t require there be some implicit, explicit medium or craft or skill, which is Interesting. It kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier, which is almost this like way of thinking or way of approaching.-
Artist vs. Creator
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Yancey Strickler defines an artist as a self-employed, self-expressor, while a creator is a self-employed, commercial expressor.
A creative is someone who works in advertising and is a brand-employed branded expressor.
Yancey Strickler
Bet when I said creativity sacred, I hadn’t read that book yet. Cause I really do see creativity as a, as like explicitly a commercial thing in a way. Like I kind of accept that about it. It explains to me what the difference is between an artist and a creator is. Like an artist is a self-employed self-expressor. A creator is a self-employed commercial expressor. Wow. Okay. A creative, someone who works in advertising, is a brand-employed branded expressor. But I mean, I do think that artistic practices,-
Art as God
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Art can allow us to experience a feeling that the artist had when creating the work.
Yancey Strickler thinks of art as God, like a stalactite or stalagmite of God, a wave that crashes and stops midair.
Yancey Strickler
It really strikes me that when you make something, there’s moments where you’re overtaken by a feeling and you don’t know what happens and something happens. And many artists will talk about this. I also find it interesting how we will experience certain works and we will have a strong emotional physical experience. And I believe it’s the case that the same feeling the artist has when they’re making that work that overcomes them is the same feeling the audience has when they encounter that work. And that millions of people, thousands of people have the same feeling. It’s almost pointing at something. Yes. And that we all, our heart, our chest rises in a certain way. An aliveness. Because what we are experiencing, I believe, is a real rational thing. And the way I’ve come to think of art, not all art, maybe, but the way I’ve come to think of like that sort of expression is that it is God. And that it is a, the way I would put it is it’s like a stalactite or stalagmite of God. Just like this jutting out, this wave that crashes and stops midair so we can just look at it. And sometimes it comes out of our fingers or our mouths. Sometimes it’s just in front of us. And it is just an absolute gift. And it’s wondrous. And we get to see it. And it’s not just art. That’s this. Religion can be this. Nature can be this. Love you know, all kinds of things can be this. Yeah.
Jackson Dahl
People use the word art generously to encompass all that. Yeah.
Yancey Strickler
Yeah. But like, but to me, it’s-
The Rise of Creativity
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Yancey Strickler realized how recent the concepts of art and creativity are, only about 100 years old.
He sees a straight line up and to the right of creative output, self-expression, and the number of creators.
Yancey Strickler
When I started to appreciate how recent my conceptualization of art and creativity are, that was just like, whoa, whoa. Recent in the 100-year sense. Yeah, recent in that, like, my parents were alive when these things were happening. Right. You know, my, my, like I, I’ve come to think of myself as a second generation creative American because creativity entered the school system in the 1960s, creative writing, things Like that, all explicitly from this research. So like I have been brought up into this and I’ve also just seen in my life, I’ve always cared about, you know, music and culture and things like that. And I’ve seen everything I care about go from like a footnote of society to now like main, main venue of things alongside politics and business and sports is like culture. It’s what kids want to do. Entertainment. It’s what kids want to do. So I’ve watched, I have watched that like greatly rise in the relative importance. And I, and if you just even think of being a creator or being someone who is a self-employed commercial expressor, which is the number one most desired job for people under the age of 18, That job did not exist 15 years ago. Did-
Squaring the Circle
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Yancey Strickler reflects on Adam Curtis’s idea of squaring the circle: balancing individuality with being part of something greater.
Giving oneself up to something bigger, like people giving themselves up to God, can lead to empowerment.
Yancey Strickler
In COVID. Kind of true. Kind of true. Yeah. I mean, that first quote you read from Adam about you have to square the circle. You have to square the the circle about letting people be an individual, but be a part of something bigger than them. I mean, that sentence has echoed in my mind ever since. And he and I have known each other, been friends and worked on things together for a long time now. And that conversation was similar to most talks we had. And he is just so often pointing out the degree of power that is accessible to people if they allow themselves to see themselves as part of something greater. But how hard that was to do, how hard that was for people to do, because you’re giving up something. And so he’s talking about, is there a way, in much the way that people give themselves up to God, that by giving up, you become stronger? And in that same conversation, he compares you going out alone at night with a flashlight on your own to look for something scary versus you going out with a group of people. And he’s like, think about how much powerful you are in one versus the other. And yet this is how we behave. I just really felt in my bones how true that was. And just that image of squaring the circle really stayed with me as like, yeah, both are true.-
Embrace Conspiring
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Don’t focus on collaboration, which can blur boundaries.
Instead, embrace co-releasing, cooperation, or conspiring for a more powerful and fun internet experience.
Yancey Strickler
But I think that what I have, you know, a lot of my work in recent years has been around group things and Metalabel has a lot of story around doing things together, but I don’t advocate necessarily For like collaboration as a way forward. Like collaboration is the scary part that Adam talks about of like giving up too much of yourself. Cause collaboration means maybe I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. Who are they? Who am I? Like there’s a little bit of a, today especially, I think we have to respect our boundaries a bit. But instead something like co-releasing or cooperating or conspiring to me are all.
Jackson Dahl
Conspiring is a great word.
Yancey Strickler
Yeah, are all excellent things where it’s like, well, yeah, I don’t want to be just me. I’d love if I knew that when I did something, like you always had my back. And if you always have my back, I will always have your back. And hey, if we got 30 of us to all say that to each other, shit, we’d be pretty powerful actually. And it’s that mindset, which right now, bot networks know, people launching a shit coin know, But there is, and this is what dark forests unlock, but there is a way of engaging the internet Today that I think is far more advantageous and more fun, which is to have your conspiracy running in some other channel where you’re just making things and talking about things together. And then you’re launching them on main when you want, or you’re showing up in those other spaces as you wish. But actually, your primary relationships aren’t the, I’m putting a finger to the wind and seeing if anybody loves me today.
Jackson Dahl
You’re a part of a network.
Yancey Strickler
Instead, you’re just like, I’m checking in with my chat. We’re talking about maybe a project we’re doing together or something. In the last, since Metalabel, especially in the last two years,-
Individual vs. Group Identity
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Technology narrowed our focus on the individual, re-individual, and post-individual path, emphasizing followers over peer groups.
Yancey Strickler believes technology will change, revealing the ‘follower crown’ as a false and faulty measure of success.
Yancey Strickler
But I think that- Like a puzzle piece almost, yeah. Yeah, but it’s just allowing, I think technology, I think technology narrowed our window to say the individual, re-individual, post-individual path is the one. So technology narrates to say it’s not about your peer group of friends, it’s about how many followers you get. But now technology is going to change and it’s going to make, we’ve already seen that like, it’s a false crown.-
Music Discovery
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Yancey Strickler describes how he used to discover music through record labels, buying CDs and exploring their catalogs.
This led him to find new genres and artists, creating portals into lovingly curated and specific universes.
Yancey Strickler
I mean, a lot of my music discovery is through record labels. Like I would, back in the day, I would buy a CD from a band. You see their label. You try to find a catalog or anywhere to just see who else, what else do they release? You’re just looking at names. You’re like, and you mail order something else from the label. And suddenly you’re like, oh, I’m really into Louisville math rock, you know, all because you bought a slint record or something. So there’s like, there were just amazing portals into whole universes and so lovingly curated and so specific. But I had always been aware of them, but it was reading about the Royal Society, which started in 1660, Sir Christopher Wren, and there’s a group of natural law professors, which was The term for science back then. And natural law were things only God would know. And so this group of a dozen professors started meeting at a pub in London. The pub is still standing today, starting in 1660 on Thursday nights. And they were all fed up because facts were proven by the church or the king. So they started a group and their motto was take nobody’s word for it in Latin. And they began publishing one of the very first zines. It’s called Philosophical Transactions, still in print today, 400 years later.
Jackson Dahl
Creativity is 100 years old and zines, they were ripping in the 1600s.
Yancey Strickler
Zines fucking own this shit. Yeah, but they, in philosophical transactions, they published the first experiments because the idea was proving facts through evidence. So let’s try to prove facts through evidence. This was a new idea. And through those pages, iteratively, peer review was invented. The scientific method was invented iteratively. And this is where the Babbage machine was funded, where the Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment, discovering electricity was published. And it was like an iterative process of not a product of science, not a top-down designing of something, but simply a point of view, proof facts through evidence, a group of people who Are all agreeing to publish under that shared point of view, under this shared banner.-
Cultural Production
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Cultural production has historically flowed through structures where artists create a larger halo by supporting others.
Creators can adopt this model to foster collaboration and community instead of working alone.
Yancey Strickler
Where in many cases, often it’s an artist themselves proves to be very successful and also proves to have like a business mind and just sees how to make something bigger. Or their success, they want to create a larger halo. And so they just start to support other people in something.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah, or Tyler brings odd future with him as he rises. Yeah.
Yancey Strickler
Francis Ford Coppola turned the success of Godfather into American zoetrope, which he used to put out all the French new wave movies in America. And zoetrope is still like an important project today. So like what it just made me see in the internet of today was that one of the reasons I was sad as a creator, because I was struggling with a lot of happiness issues at the time, was I was really On my own and grinding and trying to like make a dent in the universe through my emails, you know? And, but yet if I look throughout history, there’s a different model that I can adopt in a way that I can be in more of a conspiracy, can be in more of a relation to other people. And it involved not using the technological primitives of today, but like said, looking back and just be like, okay, how do I approximate that?-
Poly Creative Output
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The future of creative output is polyamorous, involving primary and alternative projects.
Individuals will derive income from various sources, balancing core brand work with group label activities.
Yancey Strickler
That the notion of money easily flowing between people, not so clearly being mine and yours, but things that, yeah, disperse, distribute. We get a little bit from here, a little bit from there. I think that also is going to change our relationships. Where right now, I think we have a very monogamous, monolithic approach to creative output. I think the future is a lot more poly. And yeah, you have your main and you have your alts and the income is coming from these different places. And probably your main is like where you’re doing your core brand work and probably all the group label things you’re doing is the fun stuff. And that’s your, and that’s your balance. And that gives you enough of, I get to, I get to square the circle. I get to be myself and an individual, but I also get to be a part of something bigger than me.
Jackson Dahl
And that feels pretty different, by the way, than being a part of a company, which is maybe,-
Future of Creative Output
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Yancey Strickler thinks that we currently have a monogamous approach to creative output, but the future is more poly.
Creators will have a main focus with alts, getting income from different sources, balancing individual work with group labels.
Yancey Strickler
Where right now, I think we have a very monogamous, monolithic approach to creative output. I think the future is a lot more poly. And yeah, you have your main and you have your alts and the income is coming from these different places. And probably your main is like where you’re doing your core brand work and probably all the group label things you’re doing is the fun stuff. And that’s your, and that’s your balance. And that gives you enough of, I get to, I get to square the circle. I get to be myself and an individual, but I also get to be a part of something bigger than me.
Jackson Dahl
And that feels pretty different, by the way, than being a part of a company, which is maybe, you know, one other thing I think hearing you talk about this is it almost feels like the role Of the label, unlike maybe in 1990 or certainly earlier, prior, and maybe still today in A24’s case, but in most cases not, prior labels were inherently tied to scarce distribution, In the case of music labels and film, movie studios, whatever. Now they’re not. Distribution is owned by individuals. And so when I think about, Josh Citarella has a massive audience that he’s bringing people to the dark forest thing, as are you, as are Venkat. And the role of the label seems to be less on the distribution end and more on the, how do we work together? How do we organize? Maybe who is our first set of audiences? Is that right?
Yancey Strickler
Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah. I could see that. I mean, it is a tool to amalgamate those audiences into a concentrated distribution source. Yeah.
Jackson Dahl
But maybe it’s more niche or at least down funnel.
Yancey Strickler
But you kind of need it to give a sense of permission because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? So Josh and Venkat and Peter and Carly, like what, what are, you know, what are we, are we, yeah. So you need the very first release of Metalabel Week. It ended up being called Introducing Metalabel.-
Bottom-up Innovation
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Platforms and users iteratively learn from each other, creating knowledge and norms.
This leads to professionalization, as seen in the App Store and on Kickstarter.
Jackson Dahl
Amazing yeah so you just saw talk about a new Yeah.
Yancey Strickler
Yeah. Watching how a platform and people are iteratively learning from each other. Like the idea of a stretch goal came from Alison Weiss project in her third week, like, and she invented it on the fly and everyone learned from her. And you just see how knowledge is produced and how norms are made. And then eventually how those things professionalize.
Jackson Dahl
Yes. And by the way, every single bottom-up internet thing like this, Twitter, like they didn’t invent the hash. You see this pattern everywhere.
Yancey Strickler
Yes. Yeah. And there is that phase and we reach it in the app store, for example, where you have the amateur period where you can make Flappy Bird or, you know, it’s just like you can just do things. But then there becomes a point where it becomes fully professionalized. And then there’s a clear after there’s a clear after for a market like that. And so I saw that come for us, too, just like the increasing professionalization of it. And, yeah, I mean, I think-
Metalabel’s Purpose
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Metalabel addresses the frustration creators feel when their work is treated as ephemeral content on platforms like Instagram or trapped data on services like Shopify.
It aims to honor creative work by providing context and acknowledging multiple authors.
Yancey Strickler
It’s saying that creative work has context in which it is understood. It’s saying that creative work often has many authors that are hard things to represent in specific places. And it came from me feeling both frustrated with how my work felt when I’m relying on Instagram and Twitter to be its home. So ephemeral. And then running like having a Squarespace or a Wix or a Shopify where my work is just random data in a trapped server that the second I stop paying them X amount per month, like I lose.-
Paying for Content
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People will pay a small amount, like $5, to support creators whose work they value.
Physical zines and curated digital content, like zip files, represent emerging forms of paid content.
Jackson Dahl
It’s funny, we don’t really pay for content. We either pay with our eyeballs via ads, or we pay subscriptions to creators. But paying for content is still extraordinarily rare.
Yancey Strickler
Yeah. Like $5 for a zip or PDF, people do it all the time. Like that is a, there is a price point by which someone will like, I’m your patron. I care about you. I’m down to have a real thing by you. And that’s still with us making like, there’s not a good reading experience or any of that yet. Like that stuff. So like that I think is interesting. The other one that has been around forever and is like part of labels and punk forever, but I think we are, and especially things happening soon with us, we’re going to make a whole other Level, our zines. Self-expression, like how do you legitimacy, Max? You put something in print, you make it physical. For most people, that’s the big step. When I first got my book, like back from the publisher and I saw my name on it, I mean, like major moment.
Jackson Dahl
Especially when you take the dark forest thing, like it’s a bunch of blog posts that are really cool. And by the way, to put that in, this is happening for Toby, like Toby-
Self-Legitimization
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Self-publish and self-legitimize by associating with others to initiate momentum and cultivate a community.
Shared history and understanding are created through self-legitimization and association.
Yancey Strickler
But, you know, if you look through, again, just following the early labels thing, what do you do? You self-publish, you self-legitimize by being alongside other people. And that is honestly often enough to just get the flywheel going and to bring other people in and suddenly you have a culture. You know, being at Toby’s thing last night, watching people talk about the history of the internet and of course, like Toby’s leading it, but hearing people mention the word lore,
