report

Yancey Strickler

  1. Intro

  2. Cofounder of Metalabel, Kickstarter, and The Creative Independent; author of “This Could Be Our Future” and “The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet;” creator of Bentoism and the record label eMusic Selects.

  3. https://substack.com/@ideaspace
  4. https://www.metalabel.com/
    • Metalabel supports releases in the worlds of:
      • Art / Culture / Design / Games / Internet / Music / Performance / Podcasts / Publishing / Technology / Video and film
  5. https://darkforest.metalabel.com/dfa2 Expub is a consortium between Nero Editions (Rome), Institute for Networked Cultures (Amsterdam), Aksioma (Ljubljana), and Echo Chamber (Brussels) for a biennial of experiments on new publishing formats. The idea is to bring to light knowledge and practices developed by members over the past years in publishing, which continues to expand beyond the classic terms of traditional linear publishing. The idea is to create a definition and operational model for Expanded Publishing.

[+chloe to take notes]

You are partecipating in an expert sprint -> an informal space to discuss freely about your practice and ideas. While our focus is on expanded publishing, we want to know about your field, We are recording this with plans of creating a hybrid report, and eventually a toolkit or publication, but mistakes silences and uncertainty are part fo the plan

a seires of 10 interviews with experts, artists, editors to understand the whys, hows, whos, and whats of expanded publishing. That is how the interviews will be structured, allowing 10 minute for each, with a moment of open discussion. The other interviewees are Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Thomas Spies, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Open Source Publishing, (Yancey Strickler), Kenny Goldsmith, Dušan Barok, Caroline Busta.

1. Why: Politics of Publishing (Mission/Theory/References/Ideals/Goals) - 10 mins

What do you hope to achieve with your practice?

If you were putting together a syllabus on publishing practices, what would be some references, theories, materials?

Your work has touched different aspects and moemnts of the publishing industry: from kickstarter and financial models, to metalabel decentralized and community distribution and co-creation, dark forests on community and escape from legacy media and platforms, your work as a blogger and writer on substack

-> through these projects, do you have a guiding idea? Why do you operate in the way you operate? Do you have a mission, ideal, goals that guide it?

defines himself as writer / entrepeneur: began as cultural journalist - coming from early blogging in the early 00s — co-founded kick starter (stepped out 2017) + also did creative independent - daily interviews with artists - knowledge for the commons + then 2017 blog and writing more - essays, book, dark forests

with other makers , including caroline , creating a “cannon” > the dark forest collective - also made a book

https://thecreativeindependent.com/ > project he is very proud!

metalabel - people can split revenue - a space for new model how people release creative work outside social media

post-individual piece - limited edition file - zip file 250 editions open edition

more beyond the text - a zip file has many media - pushing the boudnaries of digital work - “worth paying for” - people are really open

2. How: Infrastructures of Publishing (Tools, workflows, operations, (revenue) models for Writing, Editing, Printing, Distributing, Promoting, etc ) - 10 mins

On tools and operations - i noticed during some zoom calls you participated in that you tend to send in the chat quotes from partecipants that you find relevant, an immediate note taking and shouting out, almost akin to a retweet - fascinating bc if you think how much knowledge is being created and shared in these zoom calls, that sort of chat summary is a form of publishing

What does your workflow look like?

question of how to be seen? - many people sending substacks

“what things are born as it’s what they will always be”

critique of crypto - an insular world, about itself

new financial models are possible outside of this, new things that people dont have to engange with crypto

question of long term of archival storage?

Dark Forest workflow and leakiness -> what are the setbacks of legacy media and publishing, and what can we learn from the workflow of the dark forest space?

sofistication in communication

be very careful in commuication, low pressure

example of the limited edition zip file - internet encourages us to think about audience /focus on that - but lets think of - what would be the people that are meaningful to reach? - power in smaller scale

reach=/success

small run media - resistance the “like count” mentality in cultural work - changing relationship with culture

scarcity

resitance the way internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful

What is your revenue model for writing, editing, printing, distributing, promoting within Metalable?

3. Who: Community of Publishing (Network, Collaborations, Readers, (sustainable) engagement) - 10 mins

(Computers and the internet have changed how we see and understand who we are, how we socialize, and inspired humans to act in ways closer to how algorithms and machines see us -> post-individualis)

We have sort of pushed back on the normative and perhaps outdated idea of community, which is however central to dark forest space

In the DF anthology there is this meme/image that reads: editors don’t make magazines, they make audiences (caroline made this meme!)

In what ways do you see the role of the editor as a creator of community?

https://www.iftf.org/insights/bentoism/

marta references “in the internet no one knows youre a dog” - you can have multiple accounts but the individual is still there

even expub

How does one capitalize on community? How do you turn social capital into capital? Is it exploitative to do so? Is community a viable business model?

4. Open Discussion - 15 mins

lorenzo - metalabel and financial model - what is the technicality behind this split?

how do you see growth is metalabel and still have “control” ?

yancey: architecture of the site: 

- open data structure

- good catalogue/data structure/metadata

- decentralised identifier - activity pub uses

there are pipes used by ecommerce big companies that allows them to split money by different actors

stripe

the heavy curation comes from sucking in our gut, trying to look good, hiding the mistakes

federated media

opened in March 2024 - will go more public in september

“we dont want to be a museum, we want to be alive” -(( interesting? museums as dead?))

q of mediocrity - mediocre art, music, books

very opinionated main page, but allowing others to self host, etc,

ilan: compensation for attention? wondering would you expand micro payments model to metalabel to readers?

yancey: like the idea of a collectible, something standing on its own

people struggle with distribution and being seen

referrals to the split, –> distribution

opening up creation and partecipation, remunaration through the split

freemint - all 3$,

ilan: how is it open in different forms of media? what is media

make new media new again

so far zines, art, music, games, performances, concerts, making new media new again!! (lets do a maga hat style one)

expanded publishing = how do we put out shit?

like an album, containing vynil, booklet, concert ticket, etc.

full package, behyond boundaries of market that it created, e.g. publication+pdf+talk

must of coniugating your work as visuals

learning how to social media

carousel and channeling meaning through ig post expands your readership

mollysoda

rhizome.zip - digital monograph (new museum nyc)

david graebers estate, author of bullshit jobs, piece+talk as a “single”,

9 creative meditations –> pdf + video

pay what you want, free if you like

newsletters don’t quite have that form

hard art in london, brian eno + XR -> zip files with talks with crazy people, geoengeneering

tommaso: metalabel provides and welcomes complexity and difference - we refuse big tech

poor publishing, small and low tech - do you have experience in this? - servers, infrasturctures?

yancey: what felt safe is not (refering to data loss) - homesteading on the internet

homesteading —> whole earth catalogue

not everyone has the geek, for a lot of people that is the antithesis of what tehy want to do,

reliance on open source libraries

crypto –> primitives of moving around the web

the hard part is two sided marketplace you need to create a large amount of people, grow it enough to make it survive

simplify it! just get it out there! and then review it later, the affordances it creates

nightmare of open source maintainance

pro social, give back to the commons, getting blocked by business

tommaso: and also vice versa! like activity pub for example

ilan: doi for articles, academic journals–> cern released zenoto which allows to give a doi to anything,

what ecosystem do you imagine if any piece of media has an identififer?

open source font, music release with her font -> how to tag her?, citing and tracking for provenance, keys for online and offline locking, did structure, open phonebook

ai google terrifying to media producers, verbal reference of scraped data, how do we make our owrk and data more part of the web

5. What: Future of Publishing (Defining and Speculating together on Expanded publishing) - 10 mins

What are the more urgent aspects that need to be addressed in the future of publishing? spaces publishing needs to go into? If you could have a say in how the publishing industry will expand and evolve in the future, what would you want to see more and what would you want to abandon?

now there is more published words a day than ever! (content bonanza, economic catastrophy)

resize-rightsize

rookiemag - print on demand taylor swift mag

hard, competitive, noisy

again–> publish less??

maybe we should release this under metalabel?