Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and now director of Metalabel, talks with Daniel Pinchbeck about how creative people can build economic structures that do not run on profit maximization. Strickler traces his path from a farm in southwest Virginia to music criticism at The Village Voice, Spin and Pitchfork, citing Harry Smith and Smithsonian Folkways as formative, and recalls the unease he and Perry Chen felt about crossing from art into business in 2005. He sets out the argument of his book This Could Be Our Future, that most organizations are built to select whichever option makes the most money, and that artists are equipped to decide by other values. Pinchbeck asks whether entrepreneurs have inherited the cultural authority once held by musicians and artists. Strickler closes on Walter Benjamin and the loss of aura.
Guest: Yancey Strickler
In brief
- Strickler argues that most contemporary businesses are organized around a single criterion, the decision that produces the most money, and that artists are unusually equipped to make decisions on a different set of values.
- Strickler says that when he and Perry Chen began developing crowdfunding in 2005, working on a business project felt to them like a betrayal of an implicit oath taken by creative people.
- Strickler contends that music and film have lost the cultural authority they held when he was growing up, and that those industries will look very different within two decades.
- Strickler observes that music criticism remains a field with good writers but almost no places that pay them, pushing critics toward podcasts and video.
- Invoking Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Strickler argues that digital culture has stripped creative work of its aura and that restoring it is necessary if artists are to make a living.
- Strickler positions Metalabel as an attempt to build alternative systems owned by the creative community rather than rentier platforms.
Full text
hey everybody today we are here with yansy strickler one of the F founders of Kickstarter and um most recently metal label and the author of a few books um including um uh what is it called this could be our future uh and also editor of the dark Far Forest anthology of the internet uh and yeah I was interested to talk to yans I started reading his book and um his thinking around Financial maximization and how we sort of trying to create like mechanisms to address that for Creative people um so welcome yansy how you doing on this hot day you took the words out of my mouth uh yes it is it is hot today yeah great to be with you thank you very much um maybe tell us a little bit about your background I know from the book that you had a a New York kind of counterculture uh beginning well I mean I grew up my you know OG beginning is growing up on a farm in Southwest Virginia uh so I I grew up in the country and a very Christian home and um you know live lived a very rural life but always through books and through culture dreamed of The Wider world and moved to New York 25 years ago to be a music journalist which I made a living doing for my first decade here and then met a friend who' had an idea that became Kickstarter and three of us were co-founders in creating Kickstarter and then I've had a string of projects since but yeah it starts with Farm reluctant Farm kid finds his way to New York and begins to find himself still on that same path I think yeah yeah well me too I guess but so I mean music music journalism music criticism um that was like the Village Voice era yeah roach wrote for The Voice a lot Spin Magazine Pitchfork was one of the early writers for Pitchfork and yeah that was my that was my whole life my whole scene I was a part on for part of for a long time was there now there are what's that particular like genre of music or like indie rock or something that was you were like mostly drawn towards yeah indie rock was my main my main focus also had a very deep knowledge of a lot of um field recordings and ethn mus graphic sort of Records Smithsonian folkways is something I've written a lot about Harry Smith yeah just a love Yeah Harry Smith is a top three hero Harry Smith is incredible and um yeah I guess in a way you were lucky and that you made this transition from music writing and so which doesn't really does it still exist exist as a career path these days I'm not quite sure um I don't think we have a Lester bangs in our in our midst right now um there are there are there are great there are great writers great critics um there aren't a lot of places where those people can get paid some of them make podcasts these days some make videos um but yeah it is not it was never an easy industry to make a living nor I mean should it really but it's definitely become harder and it's you know it's as someone who cares so deeply about music it's also just been fascinating to watch both music and film which were the dominant forms of culture for me growing up along with you know television maybe the other dominant one but music and film have definitely receded in their cultural Authority their place in the world and uh you know think those those Industries are going to look very different two decades from now than anything that or even shorter than that anything that we've been used to completely I mean yeah well we can get into that but it's um yeah it's fascinating to see how culture keeps morphing and changing right now um but anyway so you you somehow were able to sort of jump to a new Lily Pad you made you made the jump to a tech project um yeah it was it was yeah it was a I mean it was it was interesting because that was in 2005 I met Perry Chan who' had this idea for what people came to call crowdfunding and we started talking about it together and he was an artist and I was a music writer I ran a tiny record label then to and we started conspiring on it together but there was a strange feeling for us as creative people to be working on a business type project and it felt like a a line that we were crossing it even felt like a betrayal of a certain like oath we had taken um and yeah just felt out of step with what our peers were doing and what was okay I mean to me in high school like you had to choose it's still this way I think you had to choose whether you like sports or music and similarly you have to choose are you an artist or do you like touch the world of business yeah and I felt like we were one of the early projects that bridge that line and we were as we got more conf ENT we became proud of that and really advocated for more creative people should start projects like this because there's a great opportunity to share a point of view to manifest something bigger than you and also like we there's a certain mindset that most businesses have that the book talks about of seeing the right outcome in any decision that's being which everyone makes the most money that is how most businesses today are run an artist an artist is someone who is equipped especially equipped to be open to a different set of decisions to follow a different path of values and that's that's what we wanted to be and aspired to be and I think we did a pretty good job of that and I think that opportunity in that longer that longer trajectory of how can um different types of people have access to power have access to influence can shape the world I think that is still something that I don't know I explicitly think about a lot but I think underlies a lot of the work that has consumed my life yeah that's awesome I love that um yeah I sometimes I think that in a way like the same focus and attention that in the 60s went to like artists like Warhol or like you know um The Rolling Stones or the Beatles whatever that now goes to the the entrepreneurs you know like um they they've almost it's almost like um yeah I don't know once again whether it's a good or bad phenomenon we could we could also think about but it does feel like um that type of creativity like business creativity has like become like you know highly valued over the last decades and sort of it's no longer sort of an equivalent you know I mean of course some you know musicians like Taylor Swift for instance are also genius at managing their their business enterprises but doesn't always go together um yeah I I I would say in both of those in both of of those instances I think and this is a I mean shame on me for bringing this lens because I don't bring this lens of things but I think there's a way of viewing all of those people as essentially culturally entrepreneurial and that they were people or groups who just started entirely new scenes new movements but like you you can even take a uh you know business competitive analysis to like the British Invasion and to say what the Beatles were and the stones or the Challenger brand and like the pinks are the upstart brand that never gets over a certain line and there's just even a way to see the way that I think a lot of those project reshaped the world shaped culture and you know and I and I think now that the web has flattened all Human Experience into simultaneously culture Commerce advertising self-expression uh you can find a project like the one I'm working on in meta label or a lot of other very interesting modern sort of meta modern projects that integrate a lot of different systems and ideas and to making something new but that feels both familiar but also speaks to just the ways uh the ways our experiences have evolved online um and so yeah I think I think we're in still in the early stages of that process the this piece I wrote about the POS individual really makes argues that what we're doing on the web Now is really what's going to shape I think the coming centuries of the human experience's and for a second can you explain thesis was that was another I think that was what I actually thought to reach out to you um yeah so I've been thinking a lot about for years about my experience on as an online person and I've been like a message board person since the late 90s and just a lot of my experience has been online and wa which Message Board me I was on Echo and word and stuff like that one called I love I love music it's like very small small scenes it's still like and I don't want to break you I was just curious okay go ahead yeah yeah yeah and um and then reflecting on my experience online uh I wrote a piece a few years ago called The Dark Forest theory of the internet which said that there's idea in fermes Paradox that says we look up into the universe and we send out messages saying hello it's Earth where is everyone and we wait for someone to call us back and because no one does we assume that the Earth that the universe is empty and it's silent we're the only ones here no one writes us back and instead the idea is think about a dark forest at night similarly things are quiet it feels like nothing moves but in reality the Dark Forest is full of animals but those animals have learned that there are predators there and that to reveal yourself is dangerous because it will it just makes you vulnerable and so that this idea applied to Earth and the universe says well maybe we're the only ones foolish enough to reveal where we are and eventually we'll learn out we'll learn why the universe is silent and I applied the same idea to how I use the internet and to say that for myself and I felt like for a lot of my friends this was written in 2019 that we were not willing to be ourselves on any of the main channels because it seem too dangerous you could be trolled you could be cancelled you could your words could be taken out of context there's just there's all these negative incentives and everything we see on social media is advertising essentially attempts to manipulate public opinion to certain perspectives and the only logical thing to do is to opt out of those spaces and instead to go to Dark Forest small chat group groups smaller spaces where there's less risk and yes there's not the upside of going viral but there is the upside of Safety and Security and we had learned that we' reached the stage of the internet where that's what we learned that we needed as people and this piece the post individual was really me started five years ago and it was thinking about well in that world where we're a member of these communities what what does that do what has that done to me and I'm a member of many different communities and ultimately each one of those represents a different part of me a different slice of myself I'm in like an artist group I'm in an entrepreneur group I'm in a group of people I went to college with I'm in a group of people I went to high school with they're like different slices of myself and that what the internet is doing is the internet has become a universe where we are all continually being born again as new individuals as these sub parts of ourselves and all of our subp parts of ourselves are meeting these slices of self for everyone else and online we're making an entirely new society that sits over top of and around the one that we're physically in and that I call this this change this metamorphosis the state of being the post individual where we graduate from just seeing our identity as just me who I am and instead see our identities as extremely fractal as being very complicated as being something that we might decide at any given moment who we are choosing to be and the piece touches on the history of individualism the piece touches on which goes back to the start of to Christianity it touches on early research of how people use computers and tries to look forward and say what is that what does that mean for where we're going and so yeah to me it it's it's trying to understand how the experiences that we are having as some of the first Generations to be really online to say that I think our experiences are more and more the future and even our notion of politics will change as a result of this traditionally politics is based around one person one vote already online we've switched to more of a one identity one vote kind of concept the idea of a human has been broken into smaller pieces and so it's trying to think about where that goes both emotionally for us and strally for The Wider world and yeah you could that's on my website the post individual is the name of that piece very very long where do you think it goes where do I think it goes I think that the um what the corporation was to the 20th century is what small groups of aligned people are to the 21st century that you know historically we've gone from like Empires to nation states to corporations and I think that with the sort of tools that we have online and the way the web lets us just in a very polyamorous way just be a part of different networks that are making things or agitating for certain things together I believe that's going to be the core social structure that the world is going to be shaped and that will happen in business it will happen in culture it will happen in politics it will happen lots of different ways and that that is where power is going to move and so you know I I see that as being a new type of tribalism it's going to have a lot of upsides and a lot of downsides it will ultimately be empowering a very Liberal classically Liberal concept of like ideas because people will be able to be in groups and advocate for all kinds of things including many things that you might very much disagree with but ultimately this will be revealing all of these preferences and desires that exist between us that the web has has made tangible rather than just imaginary I mean some of that also kind of um I guess I guess with mass media you know the age of the TV and all that stuff it was like it felt like there was sort of cultural centrality right like certain stars or certain you know writers had all the attention I mean um is that are we are we reaching the end of that so it'll be like many many more just like small scale kind of people who you know appeal to a certain Niche or whatever yeah if we even think about if you if you're a Twitter user the experience of Twitter pre- Elon and post Elon preon Twitter feels like more of the big three networks where it's hey you have blue checks very it's very organized everyone is here you know Dan rather's here Jerry Rice is here whatever everyone is here it's this is like the World's phone book and then post Elon you know all of that has been destroyed in an attempt to destroy that power structure which is really with that and has been very successful in doing so and we're in like a post Babble moment where we don't know where the central conversation is anymore and for a lot of people that's threatening because uh they don't know where to Market or they don't know where to influence or maybe with that Central conversation they felt like they could control things a bit more and now now it's diffuse now we don't know where the center is and that tends to be frightening for a lot of people uh because you don't know what's going to emerge it could be everything from Occupy Wall Street to qanon to tea parties to just you know dime Square to just a cultural scene and that's the kind of wide openness that I think we're in now and uh and I I believe we're we're just at the very start of yeah I mean I guess in a way I I I saw that you know the Twitter shift I mean he's very much made himself the sort of Central character in the drama I don't think I I think I unfollowed him yet every other time I open up X you know he's my top person or whatever so he's kind of created his own like f them I guess I mean I mean have you looked at a Janus VAR falconist is that his name the techn feudalism Theory uh yeah I'm familiar with I bought the book I haven't read it yet but yes I'm generally familiar with this he basically feels that we've um we're no longer in I mean he's being provocative capitalism we're now in techn feudalism um and we're all kind of like people are like you know um yeah kind of digital surfs you know because you can't even move around the internet unless you have an identity from you know Google or Facebook or something like that the funny truth of the web though is that even for the concentration of certain powers and Market players I do still ultimately think it is users it is people that have the most agency like the ability to for a lot of things the ability to leave is pretty high and I think a lot of tech companies are terrified of their customer based leading you know and they you know one of the ways we tried to architect my current Project Metal label is to have a post platform architecture where people can easily leave and be a part of other services and you're not using a a lock in of data to try to keep people in a certain place that's been tactic that a lot of web companies have used um but yeah I mean I think that at its best the web is uh allows us to move freely and to make our own choices but of course uh not always easy and of course people are often conspiring against us to make that difficult sure I mean like long term yeah but I would love to leave Spotify but I mean they seem to have wrapped up so much music it just seems like you would be really somewhat deprived um you know if you were away from them um okay let's go through your history a little bit so like um your music journalist uh you you had you met somebody how do you guys meet uh the the kickstarter team yeah he Perry was uh worked at a restaurant in Williamsburg where I was a regular we became friends yeah yeah and he had this great idea and uh and what what was your skill set from what you know that that was helpful for for getting the thing to to to blow up I worked at a company that used technology as my day job so I understood the internet well for 2005 and I knew a lot of artists and yeah was well connected to the creative world nice and then so you built like a MVP and you got the funding and then you built it up and stuff like that longer Messier story but yes it was four years four years later it launched 2009 kickstar launched and is I I I I guess I hear about it less now I assume it's still going uh plowing along for some reason my community or extended Community kind of used it more and now now I guess but I guess that just happens it's like it's probably moved on to other communities and so on um yeah there's definitely yeah it's it's still going just celebrated its 15th birthday is there anything that you wish had been done differently with that are you really happy enough with how it um went along uh big picture happy Prouds micro yeah they're diff they're different steps different moves that a more mature person who's learned the things I've learned would maybe would maybe do differently yeah I guess one thing that but there's one well just there's a there's a there's a strong there's a strong tension uh when you're creating a space that's opinionated and that is you know we took we took a position of approving projects that went live on Kickstarter and just trying to create a space that was uh we wanted to be a part of and then as you become a very popular service that people where people see they can become seemingly millionaires overnight yeah you have a lot of people working hard to get into such a system and that's a it's a very it's a challenging it's a challenging thing to manage over time I think that's something I'd love to yeah I don't know think more about explore again and are are you still actively involved with that uh with that project or you kind of like more in the in the back seat at a at a high level i' i' like advise some people but no no day-to-day involvement at all yeah and uh so then what was the inspiration for the metal label project maybe explain to people what what what it's about I thought it was super interesting yeah I I left Kickstarter stepped down as CEO in 2017 and then wrote spent a couple years thinking back about that experience and in particular Kickstarter became a public benefit Corporation and so wanted to understand the traditional expectations that existed around companies to just profit maximize and what it meant for us to take this step and so that that b uh for people the public benefit how how it's different yeah well since since the early 1970s the conventional wisdom is that the job of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value which means to make every decision from a litmus a litmus test of what will make us the most money and a public benefit Corporation is a different for-profit corporate structure it's been around since 2012 where you as a company can write a charter about what explicitly you wish to be held accountable to so it's a chance for you to say it's actually not shareholder value that's most important to us it's X Y or Z things so Kickstarter reincorporated as this and we wrote a charter with 12 commitments and Provisions that the company should be held accountable to rather than the pursuit of profit and so that's been in place since 2015 and yeah was was proud of doing that we were one of the first big companies to do that does that make it impossible to be like a publicly traded company um no no not at all not at all um it just is saying you basically have a double bottom line so certainly people might not be as interested in that but it's more a almost a strategic value statement uh that has some teeth because it's part of your your legal Charter um so yes so I wrote a book kind of about that experience as well as a different way of different lens for thinking about value um called bentoism it's a whole other side path and can you explain years after that yeah so bentoism yeah so the book the book talks about why is it that why is it that we that we have defaulted to thinking money is the only rational form of value um we understand other values exist Community loyalty how we feel but yet we lack the way to make decisions from that perspective in any sort of group setting especially any business setting so like how can we think about that differently and the kind of the crucifix of business today the ultimate symbol is of a hockey stick growth chart which is just a x axis of time y- AIS of money units sold whatever your selfin is and just the line sloping up and to the right and this is what you want to see and one day I was sketching and tried extending the x-axis of time far out Beyond like whatever that first quarter is you're showing in that hockey s graph and imagine said it extends far out and similarly the Y AIS measuring some sort of self-interest you want to grow I also made that uh a lot longer because I thought well as your self-interest grows like that can grow infinitely your responsibilities can grow infinitely and I put a two by two over this larger expansive space where this hockey stick chart was suddenly this phallic little arrow in the in the corner rather than some dominant thing and saw that there were these four dimensions these four separate Dimensions that I that were distinct there was now me the bottom left quadrant what I as an individual want and need right now this is where Financial demands come in in the bottom right there was also future me this person I hope to One Day become and I saw how well actually the decisions I make now and now me affect what future bees are even possible in the top left I saw there was now us as self-interest grows soda responsibility so it can't just be me it's us so there is this consideration of uh what are the people around me who depend on me what do they want to need what do I owe them and finally in the top right is future us our kids and everybody else's kids too and every decision we make of course affects their lived experience also and I suddenly saw that all four of these spaces are active in any decision I make I just never see them I have a hard time seeing anything beyond now me and I just wrote next to this simple sketch like what is this a what is this a picture of and I wrote Beyond near term orientation this was a simple 2 by two to help you see beyond the near term and looking that again I realized that was an acronym that said Bento and I thought oh this this is a Bento Box you know the Japanese packed lunch which the Japanese philosophy of hadachi Buu which says the goal of a meal is to be 80% full that way you're still hungry for tomorrow the Bento was the same idea for self-interest making decisions seeing seeing things according to your values and that project took on it it's a little bit like you know Ken Wilbur's for Quadrant model I do is it basically the same does it map onto that very well or not not so much yeah I mean his his verbiage is his verbiage is not easy yeah this is like orange this is teal yeah no I I um that that's the spiral Dynamics but the four quadrants is the thing where it's like yeah we its and its like you know subjective objective and Inter objective yes yes um I mean I do think that like the Frey's dimensions of self mapped to this actually pretty well and there is um I've recently had a professor who teaches at Cornell and at Penn teaches decisionmaking told me that he is teaching the Bento in his class and it's GNA be a part of a textbook and it's actually something that is being used inside he helps governments uh negotiate and make large decisions and that the Bento was used that's so cool for the New York state hospital system to commit to its uh to certain carbon carbon uh you know Carbon pledges and they used a Bento to get there but it was a project that yeah just uh just emerged and became and became a focus and became a community and after a couple of years of doing that I got really burnt out and I became exhausted from holding a lot of space and from constantly being this teacher doing doing that doing that being what exactly were holding like courses uh yeah for the the Bento Society became a group of a few thousand people and I was creating space creating events doing a lot you know being a community manager and hit a wall um because I just felt I felt very alone and very burnt out and I did the whole going on Hiatus for a minute email the whole cycle and uh and then just gave myself a month to just reset and I ended up reading two things at the same time that opened my eyes uh in a different way one was a book I've read many times called our band could be your life it's the story of punk and hardcore in America great book by m Michael azerad fantastic book and it features 12 narratives of different artists and basically every narrative is the same there's a band somewhere in America makes really noisy music in the early 80s they develop a tiny following they decide to record themselves they try to find some label to put them out no one will so they have to make their own label which just means a PO Box a logo and a name and they put themselves out and every time they did that their friends and other people would just show up and say hey we we make music like you or we want to make music like you will you put us out and over and over by the time one of these labels first released came out they already had like four other ones on the way because being a label is an act not just of releasing music or a form of art it is also an act of manifesting it every hip-hop record that Def Jam put out back in the day made more hip-hop happen because people would listen to that they would want to make their own thing some of them would go on to make music with Def Jam and so it's this cycle of manifesting culture not just putting it out not just making money from it but it's like manifesting at its best at the same time I was also reading about the history of the Royal Society which is a group that started in 1660 in London there was a group of professors who met at a pub every week and they decided to start a club based on the idea of proving facts through evidence rather than the decree of the church or the king so to do this they began conducting some of the first experiments and they began to publish them and what I see is the first Zen it's called philosophical transactions first issue came out in 1664 and in these pages each month each quarter these people would conduct the first experiments in history and through them iteratively doing this and learning from each other and other people reading them and wanting to follow in their footsteps this is where Isaac Newton published his principia Mathematica this is where the babage machine was funded this is where the first mic microscope was made this is where Benjamin Franklin published his kite experiment this is where peer review and the scientific method were invented and this happened through an iterative process of a group of people just trying to publish work expressing the same idea facts through evidence I me they were they were at a bit of a high level in society though right I mean they weren't like a bunch of uh you know sort of zeners living in you know high high rises in Detroit or something like that I mean they were like I can't speak to the social politics of 1660 uh but these were professors which means yes they are men of certain standing and Sir Christopher Ren is the main person of this yeah um but they but they made the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution to a large degree happen simply by collectively publishing under the same umbrella and looking at these reading these simultaneously I just saw both of these projects are doing the same thing it is a group of people who share the same world view putting out work sometimes collaboratively but also just on their own under a shared context that manifested some point of view and so I thought this structure it's like a label but it exists not just in music but it exists in science it exists in art it can exist in publishing it can exist actually in any creative form and I call this idea a metal label a group of people can release work together I guess often you have like little magazines which are like the sort of sort of uh you know Crux point for some new movement or Vision to sort of you whether it's like the Dost or the surrealists or then they can often like excommunicate each other they don't get to publish in the magazine anymore and so on so for whatever reason I mean it doesn't really seem to be uh well we can talk about what's happening now uh in relationship to all this stuff but um uh okay cool so that that makes sense so um so explain again the metal label was to make it easier for people to form these types of uh sort of Aggregates yeah it was initially just an exploration with me and five other people five peers uh trying to communicate this idea and provide a path for people to experiment with the same form and where it is evolved now two years later is 100 days ago we turned on a platform metal. com that lits a creative person or group of creative people start a label publish work together or on their own under a shared umbrella identity um they can publish any type of work music a video an essay it could be digital physical for sale or for free and if there is with anything they release they can set a financial split from any drop they make where me you and a friend maybe we're doing something and we said we'd split it equally every sale that happens a third of the money goes to each of our bank accounts and there's no need for any sort of backin at and it's something that exists structurally in metal label um which is a new innovation that we're introducing and so it's trying to create it's just trying to create a very easy operating system for people to make work together but you don't need to use something like stripe it's like a payment system how do you do the how do you do the splitting up it is it does use stripe as basic onboarding and within every release we've designed signed a release agreement which is a just a specific split for that drop where you as the group of people behind it will just set the percentages and our system for every dollar that comes through will just move those that dollar into everyone's Accounts at that proportion and we just designed a novel way to do that that's so cool does it work for crypto also or is that in the future we actually started in crypto and then left that space um so something like splits is a common function in crypto that we helped innovate on with some interesting things that we then figured out how to make happen and with just bank accounts and credit cards so uh I think there are a lot of interesting things about crypto I don't think it's a space that creative people want to play in and I don't think that the crypto audience is interested in Creative work the way I think of it so you know I could imagine you know I don't think crypto's going away but yeah it's not not where we are now now or in the near future yeah I've lost my taste for it I never really had a big taste for it but I mean um I'm still intrigued like you know mirror XYZ like that was sort of interesting it's cre like a a blockchainbased publishing platform where everything can be turned into an nft or something uh okay so you only been going for 100 days but it's been happening for a couple years now what are you seeing um I guess one question I also had was can Beyond individuals could different like organizations or companies also come together to create like an a new kind of aggregate or something like that possibly possibly um we're we're we're 100 days in there's been $100,000 spent on releases spent about 40 drops to date we are handpicking what's here right now because we're trying to make the backend ready to really scale we're a couple months away from that happening so we're inviting in a couple projects a week and uh the most common forms we're seeing are there's a lot of Publications and Zen a lot of physical and digital work together in a bundle I published a new book The Dark Forest anthology of the internet with 10 other writers we've sold a thousand plus copies of that um and then a format that I'm personally excited by that I had a lot of success with with the post individual is releasing work as a limited edition zip file um the post individual was a piece I'd worked on for five years and because of that it built up so much research and like so much expectation in my head around what this needed to be and uh ultimately came up with the idea of releasing it as a zip that would have a PDF of the essay a video of me talking about it my a dump of my scrier drafts of like 50 pages of notes and research and to just make 250 of them for five bucks each and just to treat that as the first addition and ends up all 250 those sold out in about 10 days so $1,000 got paid to me for this piece a week later I published it for anyone to see on my own blog but what's interesting is that normally when I publish work I feel a lot of anxiety where even if the response is great it's like oh it could have been better and someone else is getting more readers than me or whatever there's just like weird emotional places of comparison I go to and instead with this one where I capped the number of people that I determined was like most meaningful to me at 250 it gave me this feeling of like immense success and satisfaction before the wider public had even read it and now the piece is like going Beyond even my wildest imaginations with how widely it's being referenced and talked about and I feel like it's being some of the ideas are beginning to be integrated into our Collective Consciousness and rather than getting all hyped about it or needing it instead I can be a bit more I can just and enjoy it because there's like an initial satisfaction of like my work was respected and acknowledged in a way that felt truthful to me and that's just let me let go of all the anxiety that's normally part and parcel of publishing for for me personally that that's been an interesting experience very cool so what are some of your favorite besides your own experiences with it some of your favorite like uh uses of it so far um well I mean there's a Zen that went up this week from a bunch of writers from all over the world 25 writers who are all part of the split together so every time someone buys one of their zines it's like people all around the world genuinely all around the world are going to get paid uh there's a label from Japan called FK mmm that puts out poetry and photography books that are printed published in Japan that are beautiful they're a metal label exclusive project um and then one that went live today that I'm very excited about is from the creative independent which is a great resource for artists and creative people that I also co-founded what is the creative independent I saw I didn't get yeah what is that what is that yes the creative independent is a a resource of emotional and practical advice for Creative people every day it has a new interview or Essay with an artist about what they do everyone from Philip Glass to Matthew Barney to Stevie Nicks to Danny Brown all kinds of people have spoken with it it's an amazing project and this is a Zen that includes Philip Glass and some other great people on how to make a living as an artist and that's a limited edition $5 Z that the creative independent published with metal label today and by later this fall we'll begin to invite more people in to release work with us on the space and um yeah and the group I'm a part of the Dark Forest Collective we are also will be publishing two more books in the next year by not by any of us by new Authors who emerged when we said hey we're putting out work exploring the Dark Forest like this space does anyone have anything they want to work on and a couple of our heroes like straightup Heroes reached out saying I have something I'd love to do with you who's a hero I will save I will save the announcement for later this summer yeah no those are all really great I guess one thing that was intriguing to me is like so I'm on substack uh and uh you know it's been fantastic for me like um you know I keep getting new people you know checking out and so on but I also begin to feel like I'm a sort of like a hamster on on a wheel because I'm I'm you know for a while I was super inspired you know with all all these ideas that I wanted to get out now I'm feel I've slowed down a little bit and the volume number of people who are getting on substs to like the volume of of material then it's like you know I sort of feel like you know I guess somebody talked about how like the there you know the way people make money on the internet is either like unbundling or rebundling um and it feels like substack has been this like incredible unbundling where you know normally you would pay like you know 10 bucks a month to a magazine and you get like hundreds of writers now you have hundreds of writers but you have to like if you want to read their whole thing you have to pay individually it doesn't doesn't really feel like a sustainable model to me so I'm beginning to think about because i' I've had a lot of magazines in the past my 20s I haded a literary magazine open City uh in my 40s we had a you know sort of early magazine around the whole psychedelic culture called reality sandwich um that was also you were reminding me a lot when you were talking before because it did like build a whole community of interests around it and unfortunately you know we had a falling out me and the other people who started it and they gave it away to another company which I really don't like so it still exists been a very depressing form for me anyway um but yeah so I was thinking like how do you how could you reaggregate people in into something right now because yeah I mean I mean how would you make it a game for people rather than like a sacrifice because if you're making you know x amount on $5 month subscriptions you know you're not going to do that if you have like a hundred writers and you know you have you know I don't know if you have any you have any thoughts about that or to that yeah definitely I mean I think I think the subscriber model is important I also o use substack love substack I've been a part of it from the beginning know know the founders well um you know I think that the the model I would advocate for is yes have have your substack have your regular channel but there is I think there is an opportunity for all of us as creative people to have periodic larger works or works that we might want to express more deeply or to be like not just a post or even to be something that we want to sell and I think often times those projects would be ones that also might be well served by being in collaboration with someone else and there is a there just isn't a space to do that there isn't a space there isn't a a marketplace where we as creative people can go and list things and be among a community of peers and feel like we might have some Discovery from other people who like other things here and that we have an opportunity to invite our audiences to engage with us in a way that's a little bit different and so like I have seen the the writer Craig ma as a friend and someone whose work I've always loved and he's run a a membership model that he does himself for many years as well as having a great newsletter and he publishes books and he has shown over and over that uh his subscribers tend to stay around the same and then he'll publish a book and books he'll give like a discount for subscribers and you know new people can also become a subscriber and they'll get a discount on the book if they you know pay a certain amount and every time he launches a new book uh a new piece that that's tangible he sees a subscriber number hit like a new bump up because he has expanded himself Beyond his Network and there's something tangible other than just the stream for people to tap into and I believe that model of like I don't I don't think people should be giving up their individual practices like I I I believe very much in the power and importance of the individual but I also just believe believe that we gain a lot by being in a shared context so for the Dark Forest Collective um there anything we put out we have a deal where we say 30% of the money goes back to the Dark Forest Collective so we can fund more projects and 70% goes to you as the artist uh and we'll like help promote you and we'll be a part of helping your put your work out into the world and it's a way that we can put out more work that stands for what we believe in that we can get paid back for the work that we do that we can constantly be platforming new voices and like expanding our Circle and none of us have to give up anything about our normal path and in fact all of our own channels become opportunities to promote what we're doing in this one group but it's ended up feeling very natural and not yeah like it just feels good to do it feels nice to make something with a couple of people and have it not be so serious like the challenge of you're saying like with the magazine in the past it had to be so buttoned up you have to make it legally structured there's there's like a this has to be for a long time or it's not really worth doing I think what you see in this type of model is that something like a a more casual collaboration of like hey let's do something or hey I'll throw myself into this I think that becomes more possible and then if we were on a split for that and you know something happens to do a cup pretty well and we get a few thousand dollars from something that we were plates on the small part in you know that's amazing and that's the kind of results that we're seeing now like for contributors to the Dark Forest book everyone there is you know already getting at least two grand from publishing something they've already published before yeah but in a book that we did together and so I just think that there is a there is a rhythm between the normal publishing Cadence that a lot of us create as podcasters writers whatever it is that we do and there's also space for a periodic bigger moment that more reflects here's why we do you know here's the real reason why we do what we do here's like I'm going to collect some of the best things we've done and try to make it a celebration moments like that I think are helpful and so to me this just creates a normal a normalized pathway where you can do that where the tools are straightforward where you don't have to be on your own and it's in that magic of a lot of the a lot of the labels and groups I I look at being initial handshake agreement people tend to make is if one of us did it we all did it and it's like okay within within this category of work hey we're all gonna hype each other and that's how this is going to be something that's like cool and we're all going to benefit from and so I I think it's that type of model and we're seeing early examples of that uh and my expectation is that within a couple of years I don't think this is overnight because this this is a behavior change which takes time but my expectation is that in a couple of years this is a very normal and profitable way to create I Envision a world where a Creator logs on to metal label and on their earnings page they're seeing like amounts they're getting from the split from 20 different things they're a part of and suddenly like this passive income can roll in and it's just a it's just chill it's just chill sometimes you're the star sometimes you're part of a constellation it's great interesting yeah it might be the next generation me that has to figure that out a little bit because I still feel that like the geners that I know are all kind of like still very much like a sort of Mandarin approach when it comes to the writing and so on um no very cool I love all these projects it's very interesting I'm curious also um yeah well I mean um you know to switch from culture to like Society like um you know how freaked out are you right now uh what what what what's freaking you out um uh and how are you uh you know trying to respond to that way well I mean I'm I'm heads down in my micro world of having a young family and having a startup that's in you know a project that's in a doer die moment so my that project being the metal Lab One or the yeah yeah metal label and so my my my view is limited and deep um but I'm an I I remain an optimist uh uh I am I am yeah I I remain an optimist I am involved with many projects that are very not optimistic really uh yeah but just CL I mean just a lot of climate related projects Extinction Rebellion is something that I've helped for a long time um about them right now I mean I think XR has made a huge Global impact and created a new Norm of Civil Disobedience around the climate that has sparked some superficial policy changes and inevitably as was always happen it just led to a generation of more extreme groups that will I think continue um but there's an offshoot of XR that's on metal label called hard art that's the founders of Extinction and rebellion and Brian Eno and EZ develin and Danny Bole and a bunch of amazing artists making work together that's trying to you know create less antagonistic but still like uh Vibe shifting energy around democracy and climate so yeah I believe there's lots of work to be done and you know wealth not going anywhere we got to figure we got to figure it out what about um you know I mean the obviously you talking about financial maximization but also like the extremes of like wealth inequality um and also I guess how like you know I mean the the tech world has seems to have become uh the Exemplar of this kind of like insanity of like you know people uh I mean I was just looking at a figure yesterday that my friend Josh Fox posted about like you know musk's uh you know pre pandemic uh value compared to now Zuckerberg compared to now Bezos compared to now I mean um how could these people be worth over hundred billion dollars and you know meanwhile people are like begging on the streets in misery you know in in large in large but maybe you don't have an answer to that maybe it's kind of obvious um and then the last question is AI like AI concerns how are you feeling about this whole AI moment to be honest I find it really boring okay interesting um I I fundamentally don't don't find much interesting about AI I have dear friends who are deep in the heart of this doing amazing work um but I I'm I'm someone more concerned I think with the the heart and the feeling than I am that that level of automation I don't feel like that's my my place to have any strong point of view other than I hope it turns out okay I mean if I had my choice I would yeah I would uh not be on this journey but I don't have this choice not be on this journey with the whole AI thing right now yeah we just you know uh I'm sure I mean yeah do I want human intelligence to be surpassed yeah I mean well yeah I don't I don't know that I have a clear answer on that I don't know that my opinion matters that much I can see a lot of different answers to that yeah I don't I used to concern myself a lot more with these bigger questions but you know looking at Keith herring's Diaries there's a there the painter Keith herring's Diaries published and like on almost every page or every entry there's some notice who like writes about his day or the already made that day and then he's like but you know none of this might matter because there's probably going to be a nuclear war tomorrow yeah so I just shouldn't shouldn't even try and like there's just this constant thing in his you know his diaries about this and of course uh that didn't happen and you know what did what did Keith herring's work gain or like what what happens to what positively happens from us thinking like that all the time and obviously we need some people to do that like what yeah a little bit like I mean I haven't read the diar I skim them but like his version of like Marcus aurelius's meditations because you know every you know Marcus was Rome but every now and then he was like Hey like doesn't really matter it's all going to disappear in the sands of time anyway you know R ROM do ROM do is always helpful to Grant to to ground yourself in these conversations too but yeah I mean I I'm I see a certain go SC of the universe through which I have responsibility and some authorship and I'm trying to do the best I can with that and ultimately the world the world we need is one where we're all doing that and there's nothing being imposed on any of us and um yeah so I don't know not as hot TIY as some may wish I'm curious about um do you I mean so on the one hand there's ai's you know potential use as a creative tool which it seems like you're not that enthusiastic about then the other hand is the uh impact it's going to have on unemployment and kind of like um because a lot of people you know I mean even if AI can never make like a great you know Philip Glass you know thing you know it's still going to make all the commercial Jingles most likely so all those people who made a living on the commercial Jingles are going to be you know suffering as are the people who do all sorts of other types of you know programming design work and so on do you have any thoughts about that in terms of social impact how that that changes the game no you don't I mean I don't want it I mean I don't I don't say that that I that I don't want it and that what you know when you say that what lies ahead is obviously a world of mediocrity yeah I mean that's that's what that is that is a because how are these things to be programmed they're going to be programmed to what's most efficient what is most efficient or what meets business objectives it's the same reason why you have you know subdivisions where every house is the same and everything in New York City as a bank exact same logic so you're going to see that logic applied to many many many more things and yeah it's going to be uh uninspiring it's going to be deadening and we will have to learn how to escape it yeah and you know artists will you know I mean you know obviously you know every time there's a major new tool you know people are also kind of negative about it then it ends up you know I mean going back to the camera or you know the synthesizer or something you know well it's even it's even more that it tends up to be tends to be overrated what the change will be but yeah we'll see we'll see yeah uh cool all right I mean um oh I just want to get back to the beginning we're talking about the changes that you're seeing in music and film or how you see that's going to impact the future what what are what are are there some positives that you see in terms of how um things could change it seems like you're trying to create that engineer that a little bit with with the metal label well I think that the I mean what we're seeing is that the the size of audience that's willing to pay aaart for a piece of Creative Media seems to be going down um if you include video games maybe not uh how much of that is because things have moved to subscriptions with Netflix and Music Services how much of that is true consumer preference how much of that can actually change um yeah I think in particular the film industry which has huge costs and you know takes so much work to make anything it's all that is going to be made even more difficult by the fact that there isn't that pot of gold at the end to incentivize these things and where every executive is making millions of dollars a year to oversee this process um so I think that's going to I don't know where that ends up in a few years but I think where I what I care about and what I find important is I think that there is a need to reintroduce the aura to creative work you know Walter Benjamin had the piece about the art and the age of mechanical reproduction that when art when it's not original Edition not made by the artist Hand there's a loss there's a loss of Aura and that is what mechanical production of Art and what digital culture has been about but I think if we if artists want to be able to make a living if uh if we want to have a creative ecosystem worth being a part of then we have to make creative work valuable and we have to make it interesting and worth paying for and I think we have to build some alternative systems that work for the creative community and that aren't just simply a you know a renter platform and so I think that is a long-term project uh but one that meta labels very opinionate on and which we will make a number of strong statements through our product to try to express where we think it could go but I'm I'm I'm I'm optimistic about that I just think that there are form factors and ways of meeting the audience where they are that we haven't yet discovered but I I'm confident it'll get there yeah I guess there's also live I mean uh even even live online or live in person seems to something that people still really like um cool I learned a lot thank you so much for the time I'm excited to to dive back into metal Lael and check out some of the things you talked about and yeah I'd love to stay in touch let's get coffee in the the neighborhood sometime appreciate that yeah thanks for reaching out C Chow have a great day all right thanks Daniel
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.