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Conversation_with_Yancey_Strickler

Key topics: physical vs digital publishing objects, alternative financial workflows, co-releasing, expanding the publishing “containers”

3 July 2024, 5:30PM

Introductions

Yancey (00:00:25)

I’m a writer and an entrepreneur in that order. My first career was as a culture journalist, writing about music and film for Pitchfork, The Village Voice, different magazines in America. I started blogging daily online in the early 2000s and was always a part of online culture, many message boards. Then I co-founded Kickstarter, and so that pulled me away from editorial for a while.

At Kickstarter, I created a project called [The Creative

Independent] (https://thecreativeindependent.com/), which is an ad-free resource of daily interviews with artists. It’s now been running for nine years and it may be the project I’m most proud of. That was a concept of an editorial space that would be treated as a public good and that would produce knowledge for the commons. Everything has a creative commons license.

I stepped down as CEO of Kickstarter in 2017. I started blogging again. I didn’t tell anyone about it for about five months. I just did it on a website no one knew, just so it was for me, which was great. Then began doing a

TinyLetter and then was one of the first Substacks. At the time I was doing that, I also had a book deal with Viking, which is part of Penguin Random House. I was in the traditional publishing industry and I spent two years working on an economics and philosophy book that was published with them.

During that time, I also wrote a piece called The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which became nerd viral. It has something like a million reads. It was originally in my TinyLetter newsletter to 300-500 people. All of that has culminated in this year with a couple of related projects. One is creating a physical book built around the Dark Forest Theory piece as well as eleven essays written by others that together make a kind of a canon that defines this concept. The idea was to self-anthologize, put out a book, create a label, and begin to publish more work by people like us too. That’s been a very successful experiment. We’ve sold 1,500 books in the past four months. We put out a call in a newsletter to our collectors to say, if anyone else has work in the same space as this, we’re open to it. From that has come another book project that we’ll be introducing in the new year.

Then the second piece that’s the main focus of my energy these days is a project called Metalabel, which is a space where a project like what I’m talking about of a group of authors collectively releasing a work becomes practically very possible because of a collaborative publishing and releasing tool that we’ve built. Our tool allows people to split money at the point of purchase. So once you buy a copy of our book, every one of us gets paid a percentage out of that money and it’s just automated. We’re trying to create a space dedicated to new forms of creative output, a new model for how creative people can release and have a home for their work outside of social media.

The last thing I will cite is a piece that I did as a part of the Dark Force Collective, but that’s a piece I spent five years on, called The Post-Individual. I thought a lot about how I wanted to release it. It was originally going to be a book. Then I had the idea to release it as a limited edition zip file where someone could pay $5 or whatever they wanted and they would get one of 250 editions that had this piece inside along with a video of me introducing it and audio recording and my research notes. All 250 of those editions sold out in a week, so I got paid $1,000 for that piece.

I’m seeing more projects beginning to release work as a limited edition zip or even an open edition zip. Just expressing my piece as just a text or a blog post or whatever doesn’t feel like enough. I’m very invested in making digital work feel more tangible, more valuable, worth paying for.

Why: Politics of Publishing

Marta (00:05:24)

What are some tools that you use?

Yancey (00:05:27)

Just in terms of useful tools, I have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I instead just leave my Google Doc open with comments left on, sharing it privately with people and saying, you can share with friends, but don’t share publicly. And those pieces were very widely read and engaged with. There’s an interesting thing where if information feels like you are not meant to see it, or you have to work a little harder to see it, it becomes more interesting because effectively all information online today feels like an advertisement. So if there’s something that’s not trying to be seen, that’s automatically a point of differentiation. I just keep finding a lot of success communicating that way. Some of my friends run a project called [MSCHF] (www.mschf.com), which does strange releases. They have a Google Doc that they title Friends and Family Discounts, and they share the Google Doc with direct links to purchase, and things will sell out from that even more than they will from a website. I think Substack is a great tool. I use Ghost for my personal website, just because I don’t want Substack to be my website because then it just looks like everything else.

I spent two and a half years deep in crypto. Metalabel preceded getting interested in crypto, but we got caught up in it like anybody. I think that crypto was born as a financial asset, and what things are born as is what they will always be. What I found was that the audience of people who engaged in crypto had zero interest in the world outside of it. Crypto is a very insular, internet-only game. We would launch work by people who we thought were very excellent, and we’d get people excited about the real world. No one in crypto cared. They cared about games that gave points and made the number go up.

There’s some tools there that are interesting, but as we discovered in building Metalabel, we could make something like a financial split using existing financial tools and not having to make people buy into a new currency to transact. I do think it’s possible that we will ultimately provide long-term storage of creative work on something like IPFS, like a

blockchain, but the blockchains are so small you can’t even store a single image on one, so it’s kind of silly. But there are questions of long-term archival storage. It’s an extremely financialized world that only cares about that, and it’s hard for me to see how that changes after some time.

Marta (00:08:35)

Going back to the dark forest and visibility, how the dark forest collective operates with leakiness, if you could go into that type of movement of how an idea starts and then gets published.

Yancey (00:08:53)

For any of the types of projects that we’re working on, you do want things to leak out because ultimately there is some desire for expression that exists. As someone who consumes a lot, I am sophisticated about how things are communicated, I want my own intentions to be clear and to be clearly expressed to an audience. I found in the past that when I’ve gotten trapped in the “oh, I have to do something every week, or I have to maintain some schedule to reach some growth target” the work sucks. People don’t like it.

I create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion.

Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, The Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audience and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It could be me. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead flip that and say what is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred- you know small runs, I think there’s a power to that and what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset and it can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.

Who: Community of Publishing

Marta (00:11:15)

On this topic of internet audiences and community in our discussions, also pushing back on what even is a community, what does it mean to like, create work within a community? Do communities even exist? I think a meme in the dark forest anthology that’s editors don’t make magazines, they make audiences. How, how does community play in in publishing for you?

Yancey (00:11:43)

The book I wrote for Viking Penguin introduced a philosophy called

Bentoism that created an actual community of people called

the Bento Society. Couple thousand members. That was a group of people held together by a common interest that could be manifested through people meeting each other.

Maybe that’s the difference between community and fandom. Fandom is probably the more dominant model online which we mistake for community. You and I both might be fans of the same things for similar reasons. We are not in community with each other but our fandom makes us co-aligned in some ways. With Metalabel I’ve always found it important to make a distinction to say that this model of releasing work like a label is not to say that you are collaborating, necessarily, but as to say you are co-releasing.

Nero is a publisher. You will put out work by 30 different authors and it’s not like they are all collaborating to be a part of Nero, but they all are a part of something. There is some space that your brand, your aesthetic, your taste that the author benefits from. That is not exactly a community, but it is a shared context.

I also don’t mind the shorthand, you know, trying to find a way to encapsulate that energy that brings people together, even for a moment or a specific context, online. The piece that I released as a zip file, the post individual, is a frame of reference for how the notion of individualism is changed by the Internet. Before the Internet, to define yourself is to say who am I, and I think after the Internet, it is to say who all am I? Because the Internet allows us to create new individuals of ourselves all the time. Every account we create can be a new alt or a new specific interest, and it manifests these little private inner beings. Our subselves are making a new society together on the Internet. The nature of the world is going to be reset by this changing notion of what it is to be an individual.

I ended up mapping this to the history of the emergence of individualism itself, which is around 1000 AD in Italy and southern France where the Catholic Church wanted to break the powers of clans, families being held together. The way they did it was they banned cousin marriage. You can no longer marry your cousin because that’s a way the families were maintaining family power. So instead, children have to marry outside the family. Within a generation, these small trading posts became cities because there needed to be places where people could meet. Once people no longer were just in the confines of the clan, they were individuals for the first time. They had to find ways to work, ways to educate, ways to do everything. This is where modern society was made. I think that the same thing is happening to us online, that the internet has liberated us from our clans. It has liberated us from what we look like, or where we’re born, or our physical being. It’s allowed us to create all these individuals within us. On the internet, we are making a new society based on this new understanding that we are just learning of what it means to be a person that’s just changed by all these digital experiences. It might end up being that the future of community is something defined by the internet and the things that we say now.

Marta (00:16:12)

There’s the classic meme in media studies, which is: [“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”]

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog),

which was a NYT cartoon. In the field of new media studies, there’s a lot of thoughts about what it means to be online, what it does to your personality, because of course, while you can have multiple accounts, at the end, there is still the individual behind it. Thinking about some of Dean Kissick’s articles of the experimentations in abandoning the individual self as the main pillar on the internet and pop culture. But I think we’re still really much attached to that. And when it comes to publishing, we talked about this in the context of open source tools and how developers want to receive recognition for their individual work, even though it’s operating with this ethos of sharing and non individualism. Also, maybe in this room, we’re not operating as one single entity, because we also come from different contexts of, for example, North and Southern Europe.

Yancey (00:17:05)

We are not just collective, we are not just individuals, we are both. We are learning how to be both. We’ve had a mode, especially in the West, of the past who knows how long, sixty years, of thinking there’s one way. We’ve been individual-maxing. We hit the apex, and it was kind of lonely and not that interesting. So now, people react to their conditions. There’s the K-Hole quote I always go to. “Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are individuals and have to find their communities.” That is the person online today. That’s how the world is being remade. It used to be one person, one vote. On the internet, it’s one identity, one vote. The notion of personhood or what something with rights is, has changed. And I think all of society will, over time, be remade in that notion of what a person is.

How: Infrastructures of Publishing

Lorenzo (00:18:15)

You mentioned Metalabel, and you say that it’s based on a very simple, traditional financial model to split the share. And I’m curious to know precisely the technicality behind the split. The second question is, one day you will open Metalabel to a wider audience. With open submissions and so on. How do you see this kind of growth in that platform? And how do you think you will be able to still control the brand and the attitude that Metalabel has right now that is super high quality? It represents something culturally.

Yancey (00:18:59)

The site has a lot of interesting ways that it’s architected. I’ll just first start with one. We wanted to make something that had an open data structure. We felt like the world was lacking a tool for creating a catalog as an artist or a creative person, a good data structure of my work with entries properly sorted by metadata and work and notions of work that could be portable around the web.

So we use an underlying architecture called a decentralized identifier, which is an open protocol that Blue Sky uses,

ActivityPub uses, but some of these new federated media use, and allows every piece of content to be referenced and embedded in other worlds just through using an open phone book basically. So that is what we started with instead of a blockchain, which achieves the same outcomes of universally accessible data.

We always loved the splits part of crypto. Last year, myself and our head of engineering, our architect, spent some time researching this question and of how you could do splits in a traditional context. Could you do splits with regular money? And I learned that there were pipes that existed for Walmart and Target and Amazon, the biggest e-commerce players, that allowed them to split money between a shipper and a third-party seller and a platform at a point of transaction. That ability existed for these big players.

We dug in and discovered a way that we could build a system like that using Stripe. And so the way we have made it is that for every release on Metalabel, there is a record agreement where anyone who’s listed as having credit on a release can be added from a drop-down and you set a percentage of money that will be directed to them. You can also choose the treasury of your group, which is just a pool of money that will just sit there and like not go anywhere. Every transaction from that release goes into a private account for just that release where the money sits on top and it has all the logic of the split underneath.

You can also add in hard costs to be recouped. So in the case of my Dark Forest book, the first $8,000 first would go to one account to pay back my printer and my shipper and then only after that $8,000 was crossed would the split happen. But the money builds up in that transaction.

It will soon be that there is a moment when the release admin will lock the split. Once the split is locked, then the money gets pushed through the split and all the money populates to every member’s earnings account. If you’re a creator on the platform, you have an earnings page in your personal profile where you see from every release you’re a part of, here is your percentage of the split and here’s the money waiting for you. And then you click withdraw and it just shoots out to your Stripe account.

We opened our doors in March. So it’s been like a hundred some days. We’ve been following this model of just two or three things a week because that whole split system we’ve been manually running on every project to make sure it works. But it works. Right now our heavy curation is mostly just covering up our flaws. Sucking in our gut and trying to look good. As of September we’re going to have a moment of being more public about this project. We’re going to show people what you can do with it. We’re going to explain it for the first time. The application process right now hits you with a big wall that says we’re going to reject you. Don’t even try basically. Instead it will be a very friendly process where people can share something they want to do. The desire is to with one-on-one outreach continue to develop really excellent high-profile great releases and projects and there are a lot of those coming. I also want to have weird internet things.

Discussion

Ilan (00:25:00)

We can see on the internet there’s a big turn towards compensating attention. People are paid not by producing work, but by giving their attention to things. Would you ever think of expanding the micro-payment model of Metalabel to also readers, and not just writers and contributors?

Yancey (00:25:21)

I like the idea of making anything collectible. And the idea of making a piece of digital work something that can stand on its own as a single thing to engage with and interact with. I think the hardest thing most creative people and writers of all types struggle with is distribution and being seen. And I don’t think these are good dynamics. I think these dynamics are often problematic. But it’s very easy to imagine a world in which a release could offer to add referrals to the split. And you could say 10% of the split from this release will be distributed among everyone who refers a sale. And all we would need to do as a platform is to provide unique share codes when someone copied a URL. And it would just incentivize people to share. It would also incentivize spam. But I think that there are interesting ways to think about opening up the split or opening up contribution.

There’s a project in the final stages of build of a musician whose release has his cover art as a placeholder. And on the release says, whoever makes the cover will get 20% of the split of this release. Submit your cover idea here. Those are things that you could publicly publish as a way of creating a different sort of participation potentially. I think if it’s cheap enough, I think if it feels like the artists themselves put it up, I think people are down for that. I think that’s interesting.

Expub (00:26:50)

How open is Metalabel to different forms of media?

Yancey (00:26:54)

It’s a broad set of creative categories. Most so far has been zines, art, music, several games, multiple performances, a lot of things in downtown New York where we’re based, concerts. I’m embracing the term new media again. I feel like new media can be made new again.

If I think about the future of Metalabel, I believe physical books and physical magazines and physical media of all kinds are important. And I celebrate them. But I don’t think that that’s an audience that can grow hugely from collectors. But I think digital can be a huge space of growth with formats. Creating digital formats that feel legit and make an artist feel legit and that make a consumer feel willing to pay for this. And that’s where I think there’s white space and opportunity. And any creation of viable formats there is a net win for the entire creative community because it’s just a new vehicle for all of us to express work.

This is where we have this concept of a record. Think of a vinyl album ‚ a record of work that has a cover, there’s a package, and inside it contains a number of pieces. And those pieces can include a digital work, a physical work, a talk, an invitation. And that’s exactly what Metalabel is. The Dark Forest book, you got the PDF, a physical edition, and you got to join a Zoom call with the authors all spoke together. That was $45. It’s allowing you to think beyond the boundaries that the market has created for us and to redefine them.

What: Future of Publishing

Marta (00:28:55)

Where can you imagine publishing expand in the next few years? If you could have a say in the future of publishing, what would you say?

Yancey (00:29:04)

There’s like never been more words published a day in history. It’s a content bonanza and an economic catastrophe at the same time. I think the future of publishing is incredibly bright. It just requires us thinking of it not just books and physical magazines or even ad-supported magazines. I think if we think of the individual writer or the small band of writers, we’ve gone from a world dominated by empires to shrinking down to nations, to shrinking down to I think the 20th century was about corporations largely shaping the world. I think the 21st century is about small groups of people shaping the world. It keeps getting smaller, what you can punch out of. We’re still in this mindset to be legit in publishing. You need to be one of the big four, a big magazine with an office in midtown Manhattan. That’s just not it. Fitzcarraldo, it’s like 10 people. Other Internet, 12 nerds. That’s who shapes culture. That’s where it’s going. People are doing amazing work. The impact of their words is huge. The economics of it are probably pretty good altogether, but it’s so diffused. It’s so not what we’re used to.

Those of us who are operating under the previous set of conditions, how do we resize, right size? How are we re-relevant or what is still relevant, what is not relevant? Those are hard questions, but just thinking purely as someone who reads and writes as naturally as I do anything, I feel like it’s never been better. The future is individual voices or voices of small groups of people being incredibly influential in ways that will probably be very problematic in some cases. I think the future is more free form.

Once people perfect these systems, like Twitter, Instagram, all these things have been perfected, then you have people looking for how else do I express something. Earlier this year, Tavi Gevinson, star writer of Rookie Magazine, released a zine she made about Taylor Swift that she put out on a standalone website with the print-on demand button. You could click to get a copy, you could download it, and that did great. It’s hard. It’s competitive. It’s noisy. There’s so much. That sucks. But it’s also great.

Discussion

Janez (00:31:36)

This metaphor that you use, like the album cover, when you open the album, you have several items inside. This is very interesting, but it’s basically the different iteration of the same object. You have any good example of other practices where formats are combining in a weird way, keeping in mind the attention spam of the average reader, the influence that the mobile phone in our pocket has towards consuming, publishing objects that are not only things that you read, but things that you listen, things that you watch at, and a combination of those things together.

Yancey (00:32:13)

If you wish to participate in culture, conjugating your work into visual forms of storytelling is a must. Making it quicker to me is just making visual forms of expression. This is where memes are really great. There’s an internet artist named Molly Soda, who has a very big following. She made a physical folder of 100 photographs from the internet, and then made a zip file that corresponds to those same 100 images, and made an edition of 25 of these releases. The two you get together, that’s interesting. Selling that is like a $500 art piece.

When people do this for lower price amounts, people experiment. These are things that none of us would have been monetizing. They would just be like attachments to emails or something or a newsletter. HARD ART is a group in London that started with Metalabel. That’s led by Brian Eno, Es Devlin, Jeremy Deller, the founders of extinction rebellion, and they’ve been releasing work with us every month. They’re gonna begin releasing zip files. Brian Eno will also publish a new book with us, a physical book. Collectors like it.

Tommaso (00:35:02)

It feels different going to open source publishing using tools that are not connected to a big platform. Jeff Cox was mentioning we should go small, like small publishing, small tech, minor tech compared to big tech. Have you had this sort of approach also in the tools you use for the production? We are referring a lot to the distribution part, but then I think there is a lot of work before how to produce a publication, because producing a book or text has the very different expertise and producing a video, an audio piece, performance, etc. Have you considered the idea of what does it mean to do open source in the back end? And- and maybe this can also be a very technical question- how do you have a server? Are you hosted somewhere?

Yancey (00:35:55)

It is important to own your identity. We’ve seen a lot of examples of platforms going defunct and data being lost and what felt safe was not. I think homesteading on the internet is advisable, but not everyone has the geek in the group. For a lot of creative people, every one of those steps is the antithesis of everything that they want to do. So it’s like: “give me the thing that does the thing”, and I find generally people start that way and then, as you get more advanced in your career and you have more of a reputation at stake, you start to look for more of the self hosted solutions.

Certainly we rely on a lot of open source libraries and what we do. We first just have to get enough business that we’re default alive to really lean into this fully. We will have an open API that people can build on and extend the product. A lot of our data model is something built to be made open source or built to be published as a resource for others, trying to integrate our thinking into how other people are cataloging their work or mapping how their group operates. And in the crypto world there was a lot of discussion around how the primitives of groups moving around the web doesn’t exist yet and that’s a new thing we can create.

It’s a bit harder to do this- the Web2 world. For us, the hard part is making a two-sided marketplace and platform. You have to attract a critical mass of people on both sides for it to be worth belonging. Once you begin to do that, then you can grow. Augment that. Maybe there are certain features that are required to make that spark grow enough to where you can survive. We spent the first couple years thinking a lot about those long-term questions. That’s what that’s all crypto is, and in the past year we’re just been more about getting it out there, simplifying it, don’t bore people, with all of our reasons, just how to make it feel simple and useful.

As a second step, as a second order, begin to reveal the ways it’s also better for you and the affordances it creates. And it can’t be that software, and that is a political position, should only be open source, because then no one will make software and no one will maintain. You know, maintaining open source is a nightmare. You need what a lot of projects try to do, which is you have a pro-social give back to the commons relationship generally. The bigger you get, the harder that is.

One could argue that Facebook’s contributions to the world of development have been huge. You know react and various things that they’ve contributed that came out of their engineering team and you know we’re part of their practice. That comes from big tech and it is something that we all rely on. Engineers, any, most engineers are interested in those kinds of solutions. They just get blocked by business objectives and say, you know we can’t do that, but I think it’s a lot of great impulses and affordances that I hope we can stay open to.

Ilan (00:38:55)

As an academic, we have the DOI, Digital Object Identifier, which is for articles. This has been only delegated to big academic journals. So you are not able to have a digital object identifier for any other type of text or research or text-based research without any academic publisher. And now the CERN released a very democratic DOI called Zenodo, which allows you to give a DOI to anything, to a photo, to your license plates, to a ceramic. What kind of media ecosystem do you imagine when everything, every sort of media instantiation would have its own identifier? So an identifier means that it will be totally decentralized. It will be not one single organism or a set of academic publishing that will manage this, but everybody would have access to all kinds of media, photos, a bit like the interplanetary file system, but in a much easier way to operate with.

Yancey (00:39:59)

There was an interesting case last week of exactly this, where I wished it was there yet, where we had an artist, [Shantell Martin] (www.shantellsans.com/), release a font, an open source font as a metal label release. So like a library you could download, install. And a musician last week made a zip file of three songs. And within the zip file, he made his liner notes and he made the liner notes using her font. And he credited her. And he wrote in to say, hey, can I tag her work? How do I reference this?

It’d be cool if I’m cited as someone using her thing and I get to give her credit. But I think it could be a very simple citing of work, providing a level of provenance. You can hit a plus sign and start typing a title and it will auto-complete and suggest what it thinks you’re connected to. Making citations very easy, allowing you to publish on your own personal website, publish all things credited to my decentralized identifier address.

Because all decentralized identifiers have cryptographic public and private keys that are invisible to you, but allows things to be locked and unlocked even offline. And so you can use your key and by authenticating it’s you just through email login. And you could say, publish the catalog of my decentralized identifier on this page. And it should be able to pull that database of exactly what’s yours and output it anywhere. That’s the dream of the DID structure and like the open directory and just the similar data models, open phone book.

It’s always what system wins out and what models work, but even us having this architecture of a folder structure, of a label that has a catalog and inside, there’s a lot of transposing of some other structural information models onto this. So all data is architected that way. Even if another system came up and blockchain proved to be it won, we’re all being paid on crypto tomorrow. We would be ready for that world. Replacing on-chain identity with a DID is something that we could very easily do.

We wanna plug into something more structural on the internet other than just like traffic coming our way. A world of AI driven Google search results should be terrifying to every independent media producer because it’s not gonna give you search results. It’s gonna be a verbal answer of scraped data from the most referenced website. And a user might not even get shown any of our pages as an option. How do we make our work and data more a part of the web and not just relying on “I hope someone goes to my server today”.