In a recent post I wrote that Metalabel’s focus is groupcore: software, tools, economics, spaces, and ideas that help creative people cooperate. But what does groupcore mean? Can one groupcore as a verb? Is groupcore distinct from other forms of coordination we already know?

Groupcore is a term I use for the loose, rotating circles of collaboration and work that the internet makes possible. To groupcore means being part of multiple collaborative spaces (IRL and online) where you make things with other people — some that pay money, some that don’t — that together form the basis for doing things with others, financially supporting yourself, and manifesting parts of who you are.

Groupcore happens when people seek cooperation that preserves autonomy, distributes authorship, and generates outcomes none could make alone. It’s an underlying mode, like open source or co-ops, that anyone can participate in.

Practically, groupcore looks like a post-industrial guild, a scene, a metalabel, or a people-controlled DAO: a horizontal network overlapping in skill, interest, location, or history, where efforts may alternately compete, conflict, or collaborate.

The physics of the groupcore approach produce two other common traits:

Groupcore is fractal. Each level and phase of a groupcore effort is a reflection of its larger self. The roles within a groupcore project reflect the group’s norms and vibes (positive and negative). Subgroups inherit the meta-logic of the overall work. The creative process reproduces similar patterns at different scales. It’s groupcore all the way down.

Groupcore is anti-fragile. Groupcore practices do not rely on a single product or source of income. This diversified structure makes them inherently anti-fragile. It encourages a high turnover of small ideas with distributed authorship and low fixed costs. The failure of one project is unlikely to threaten the network. This resilience compounds, as groupcore work tends to strengthen as it survives conflict and meaningful toil, producing emergent slack and opportunities to integrate learnings as it evolves.

What groupcore is not

Groupcore is not the same as organizational and work-driven structures we’re used to.

• Poly not mono. Traditional orgs have fixed borders that establish authority and direction. Groupcore orgs are nodes that simultaneously participate in many different projects and configurations, both intra-group and inter-group. Cross-pollination of ideas and techniques between groups is a core feature.

• Lattices not skyscrapers. Groupcore projects are interlinked and networked more than hierarchical. Their growth is not meant to produce towering edifices so much as durable and broadly integrated structures. Groupcore influence is more lateral than vertical and reflective of the post-web world.

• Fluid not fixed. Groupcore projects focus on a specific vibe or outcome while maintaining a sustained fluidity in how they get there. Plans to make a project can easily evolve into work on the underlying infrastructure, side components, or last-mile applications. Unlike a job, groupcore is not something or someone you “work for” but a conscious path of open-ended labor.

How to groupcore (basics + stack)

For any groupcore practice to become realized, a few key elements are needed:

• Purpose. To properly groupcore, there must be a shared interest or goal. What does this group exist to do? Is it a feeling? An outcome? An escape?

• People. Who do you make things with? What do you all do? What skills does each person bring to the group?

• Responsibilities. What does it mean to be part of your group? How can people contribute? What are they here to do?

• Outcomes. What’s meant to happen as a result of coming together? Are the goals financial, impact, or something else?

If you have these, you have the start of a groupcore practice. To activate these basics, a few shared tools are needed:

• Shared intentions and language. Agreement and language are key tools for any groupcore endeavor. The group needs a shared way of communicating (which will differentiate from outside vocabulary over time) and some shared ideal that lets them act without being bribed, coerced, or managed into it.

• Shared communication spaces. Most activity happens in shared communication environments, usually a group chat, with occasional voice or video calls and IRL gatherings. This space produces the raw material of ideas and seeds of future actions.

• Shared brain. The shared communication channels generate collective knowledge and understanding, recorded and inscribed in the group’s shared brain — perhaps a mutually accessible folder, single master document, or something more or less formal.

• Shared resources. The group must be supported by a set of shared resources, like audience, money, reputation, ability to infiltrate or influence desired parties, and so on.

Groupcore decision making

With these shared social and technical tools, a groupcore project will begin to operate according to its nature. These ideals tend to be defined in theory and realized in practice across a few key axes:

• Decisions. Does everyone get a chance to weigh in or only specific people?

• Proposals. Do you need to propose or can you just do things?

• Consent and dissent. Is everyone expected to agree with everything that goes on? What happens if they don’t?

• Norms. Is the internal structure and process of the group fixed and defined by rules, or is it fluid and something that changes based on new experiences?

Groupcore can take many forms, from intentional democracies and co-ops to anarchic free-for-alls and Dark Forest conspiracies. Each has a light side (mutual support, shared power, collective action) and a shadow side (bureaucracy, ego-trips, cult dynamics). The same tools that make a group resilient can also make it insular or coercive. The difference is in how power, attention, and care are handled.

How Metalabel groupcores

For the past four years, Metalabel has been an exploration and manifestation of groupcore ideals. We initially called these structures “culture labels” and “metalabels” – psychic infrastructure that allows groups of people to cooperate in creative fields.

From the beginning we adopted the working structure of a heterarchy — a fluid hierarchy where a different person is empowered to make a final decision based on the area of expertise. Each person has a domain in which they’re expected to act and make calls as they see fit, and as it coheres to the larger vision of that project.

A heterarchy is a high-trust structure that relies on rapid decision-making, low egos, and comfort with a fluid approach. There are times in our history we’ve been more hierarchical, which tended to coincide with times of struggle (competing ideas, unsuitable processes for who we are, things not working well). Our best moments have come when we’ve honored this way of working.

Metalabel the lattice

Groupcore is not a skyscraper but a lattice. Metalabel’s projects show one way this can look.

In this diagram, the center node is Metalabel Studio – the core group and heterarchy where decisions are made, ideas are shaped, and responsibility is ultimately held.

At the bottom, two nodes anchor the structure:

• People. The four of us at the core plus our wider network of contributors, allies, and our past collaborators.

• Responsibilities. The shared work each of us holds in our domains.

When this base combines with our purpose and outcomes, it results in the releases that express our work.

One of the most significant is the Metalabel marketplace — infrastructure and space for cooperative releases. This is where most people first encounter us. We spent two years building its architecture, product, and community. Today the work is managed by a smaller subsection of our team focused on curation and customer support. 30,000+ collectors, 1,000+ creators, and nearly $2 million in transactions have moved through this over the past three years.

One group releasing on Metalabel is the Dark Forest Collective, a writer group that uses our tools to release books and experiment with shared finances and treasuries. We started and continue to organize this project, which has put out three books so far.

Our experiences with the Dark Forest Collective led to Artist Corporations. This is a proposed legal structure for artists and creative people that reflects groupcore values. This started as a single, one-off release, but the project is growing into a separate institution and team from Metalabel, with two of us steering it as it begins its mission.

Our other focus, the Dark Forest OS, is a software project that encodes groupcore patterns into a product that anyone in this lattice will be able to use. From built-in metablogs to shared resources and communication channels, DFOS will offer the core groupcore stack in one tool.

How we manage these projects

This is a lot, especially for a team of four. So how do we manage this?

• Limit decisions. Make as few decisions as possible. Strive to operate in a flow state where one project leads to the next. Make work more stream-of-consciousness than premeditated. If we’re forced to choose between paths A or B, it means something upstream has gone wrong.

• Strong norms. Over time we’ve developed a set of norms that have served us well, like release culture, metablogs, and egalitarian pay and equity. These help limit process and reinforce who we are.

• Hands-on in every role. We all perform different specific jobs. There are no managerial or purely administrative roles. We use our time to focus on the direct output of the experiences we create and less time on the meta-management of it.

• Sequential is better than simultaneous. A benefit of a release-based structure: you go all in on a project for a set amount of time before shifting onto the new one. Even as we’re managing multiple simultaneous projects now, they began at different times, require different people, and do not compete with each other for resources. Poly not mono.

• We make what we want. We project our own groupcore patterns into products and tools for others to follow or fork. We make something because we’re interested in it for ourselves, then productize and extend it to others. An organic, fractal process.

• Everything points in the same direction. When we look at our portfolio of projects, we see the same ideas repeatedly expressed in different ways. Everything we do points to the same goals, even as the how keeps changing.

You’ll see our groupcore vision manifested into a tool others can use when DFOS opens up in the not-distant future.

A groupcore future

I’ve long been inspired by the idea of the Hacienda from an early Situationist manifesto. The Hacienda is the place where all the right people are having all the right conversations and life feels truly alive. But it’s a place that does not exist and cannot exist in any permanent way. It’s a place that must be built, and that anyone can build at any given moment.

This is what groupcore is like. Less an end-state than a state of being. Groupcore does not seek to dominate competition or extract excess labor. The goal of groupcore is to open the space of divine connection that exists between us, and to keep it open long enough for new ways, new selves, and new value to grow.

In 2019 I wrote that the internet was becoming dangerous and people were moving out of the mainstream and into dark forests:

“The internet of today is a battleground… The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”

This was written during a much more agreeable time on the web and the world. That post worried about the consequences of the dark forest: that as more of us retreated from the mainstream, public spaces would be increasingly filled by extreme voices working to gain power and influence instead.

What was a theory of growth in the hidden corners of the internet has moved to the heart of it all in the years since. Even as humans use social media less, online spaces are increasingly being used for ideological gains, now aided by AI. There’s now more bot content than human content getting posted. As Sean Monahan (formerly of K-Hole) writes, the iconic Dead Internet Theory that the internet will be increasingly non-human — which multiple tech leaders have recently echoed — combines with the Dark Forest Theory to explain the strange internet we inhabit today:

The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside.

One way to look at this schism is through the lens of who makes the content — human or machine. Another lens is who has more power. As Domination and the Arts of Resistance, a book by James C. Scott (author of Seeing Like a State) explores, subjugated people maintain their cultures and ideas in the face of oppression using “hidden transcripts”:

“The theatrical imperatives that normally prevail in situations of domination produce a public transcript in close conformity with how the dominant group would wish to have things appear. The dominant never control the stage absolutely, but their wishes normally prevail. In the short run, it is in the interest of the subordinate to produce a more or less credible performance, speaking the lines and making the gestures he knows are expected of him.

“’Hidden transcript’ characterizes discourse that takes place ‘off stage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders. The hidden transcript is thus derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript.

“We do not wish to prejudge, by definition, the relation between what is said in the face of power and what is said behind its back. Power relations are not so straightforward that we can call what is said in power-laden contexts false and what is said offstage true.

“What is certainly the case, however, is that the hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript.”

Hidden transcripts are drafted, revised, and designed in dark forests safe from outside view. Public channels are where dominant powers dictate and control narratives. As authoritarian regimes around the world increase their monitoring and persecution of those who do not fall in line with the dominant story, these spaces and their security become increasingly important.

This is coming from the voice of a white guy who’s used to being positively included in the system. But this presumption of safety has never been available to others.

This month the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University is hosting a gallery show called “DFT 2025” — “DFT” an abbreviation for Dark Forest Theory. The show’s co-curator, artist Salim Green, uses this shorthand to describe the Dark Forest concept, particularly as it relates to Black people who “may gain agency through concealment.” The show asks: “How might a practice of hiding, abstraction (as a tool and strategy), evasion, a refusal of visibility and insistence on privacy, and opting out, facilitate freedom?”

The show includes works from Rhea Dillon, Nikita Gale, Rodney McMillian, and others exploring the tensions between what’s hidden and visible. It also includes DFT Radio, a streaming station broadcasting sounds and ideas from the show as oblique echolocations from the Dark Forest.

The Dark Forest Collective, a private group chat of 15 writers, has published three books charting unseen universes: The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet; Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova (one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year); and A Sexual History of the Internet by Mindy Seu. Each a map of worlds that aren’t always meant to be seen.

The dark forests have grown so vast the metaphor now needs infrastructure. At Metalabel we’re building the Dark Forest Operating System, or DFOS: software that makes it possible for small groups to create their own private internets. The idea that once described how we hide will soon be architecture for how we can safely gather and not be alone.

Everything public feels like an ad. Everything private feels real. The gap widens every day. The dark forest is where decisions are made; public space is where they’re performed. In an age of state dominance, only hidden spaces keep our conversations and ideals off the menu.

Watch the ten-minute talk:

Artist Corporations are a new structure that turns 1099 gig-workers into owners. This is the story of where this project came from and what it may one day do for you.

Beginnings

I grew up in an old farmhouse in the Appalachian Mountains far from other kids. I spent my days dreaming of the outside world.

Music and books showed me the way. I read obsessively. I started a Beach Boys fan club and enlisted my cousins as members. I wrote a fantasy series in black-and-white composition books. I made music with friends. Creative expression let me experiment and discover who I could be.

After college I made it to New York City. I began hacking together a living writing about music and culture. I saw tons of shows. I started a tiny record label putting out music from bands I loved. I was always broke, but it was fun.

Around this time I made a new friend — Perry Chen — who’d been working on the idea for what would come to be called Kickstarter. The project answered a problem we and cofounder Charles Adler knew well: how hard it was to fund creative projects. People had to wait in line for a limited number of funding opportunities. The few that existed went to insiders and people already connected. That was not us.

Where there had been a wall, Kickstarter built a door: a path for anyone to go straight to the public to get support for their ideas. But we had to stretch beyond our comfort zone to do it. My obsessions were music, movies, books, creative culture. Business and the world of money were uncomfortably alien.

I remember regularly feeling like a traitor. The wall between art and business was towering and unquestioned. Creative people didn’t do what we were doing. I gave myself a crash course, reading and learning whatever I could to better understand what it would take to make the idea real.

Once the platform launched and started to grow, we wanted to chart a course other creative people could follow. We became one of the first Public Benefit Corporations as a way of expressing our distaste for business-as-usual. 

In 2013, a study out of Wharton found that Kickstarter projects had already created 300,000 full-time and part-time jobs. A decade later, it could be more than a million. Nearly $9 billion has gone to creative projects through the site since it launched 16 years ago. 

Burnout

In 2017 I stepped down as Kickstarter’s CEO and became a full-time creative person for the first time in a decade. The transition wasn’t easy. I was writing a book exploring the history of financial value and self-interest (This Could Be Our Future), and starting to work as a full-time creator.

When I looked at my own behavior, I realized I was more reticent to express my true feelings on the internet than I’d ever been before. I was instead sharing my true thoughts in private group chats where it felt safer to be my real self. I sent to this list (then on TinyLetter) a piece called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” that soon went nerd-viral, kicking off a still-going discussion of how we relate and gather online.

The Dark Forest was more than theory, it was a lived experience. My book led to the creation of a community (the Bento Society) and soon I was teaching hundreds of people around the world a new lens for understanding their self-interest. For more than a year I created space for this community. Many people and parts I loved (hi Spirit Gym <3). But I was also at the top of an audience hierarchy that too often had me feeling depressingly on my own.

Eventually I burned out and flipped the table over. I couldn’t keep doing it this way.

Artist power

My loneliness caused me to look everywhere for answers. I thought about Dark Forests and started working on a project imagining a society in its image (“The Post-Individual”). But I was also thinking about my own life: how could I feel more connected to others?

I re-read the book Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerad and was inspired by how punk and hardcore bands took charge of their careers. Spurned by traditional record labels, they started indie labels of their own. That step gave their work power. Their music wasn’t just about them. It was an invitation for others to do the same — even under the same banner.

That same week I came across a very different story with similar dynamics: the origins of the Royal Society. A group of academics fed up with facts being determined by the church and king in 1660s London began meeting each week. They decided to form a club with the motto “take nobody’s word for it.” Their meetings led to the publication of one of the first zines, Philosophical Transactions, where the foundations of science were iteratively established, and which still publishes 350+ years later. (And you thought your weekly newsletter cadence was worth bragging about…)

Punk rock and modern science are polar opposites, yet their evolutions are strikingly similar: a group of people with a shared worldview releasing work under the same banner that built a larger cultural movement and influence. I wrote up my observations in a Google Doc I circulated to friends. Soon I was talking with a small group of people about the idea. By the end of that year, a team of us were trying to turn it into action. 

That project became Metalabel, an operating system for creative people to start internet-native versions of the institutions I observed in the past. I’ve now come to see our work as creating groupcore software: tools that create a counterbalance to the lonely economy logic that’s tilted us away from each other for their profit, rather than towards each other to be part of something bigger together.

As part of the first groups, I instantly found the experience more rewarding. I was part of something. I felt more connected. It was easy to imagine how and why others would too.

Artist Corporations

The farther I’ve gone into this journey, the bigger the challenges and opportunities seem. One day while thinking about legal structures (not a normal thing for me), a next step appeared. A way for artists and creators to:

• Become more than 1099 gig workers

• Be entrepreneurs, owners, and stewards of their practices

• Create more economic security

• Access better health care

• Protect their intellectual property and creative work

• Build wealth on their own and with others

How could this happen? By following an unlikely path and making a new corporate form: the Artist Corporation, or A-Corp.

Imagine four photographers who come together to form an A-Corp. They share studio expenses, pool income from client work, split profits, and jointly own a growing archive of images. They each also have individual A-Corps to hold work made outside the group. They accept donations for documentary projects while also raising investment to expand. By year two they’re earning enough to get a better health care plan. All under one legal structure designed for creative people.

The Artist Corporation is a new foundation for building equity through creative work. A structure that would include creative people in the greatest benefits of capitalism (collective wealth creation) for arguably the first time ever.

But how?

To make new corporate forms means passing laws at the state level. The same thing I saw Public Benefit Corporations do. When I first had the idea, I reached out to an old friend, and soon we were working with world-class experts in corporate structure, designing a new foundation for creative value while talking to artists and creators about what they need too. (A process that’s still underway.)

Later this summer we’ll publish the full details of our proposal and how to get there. We believe very much in our work and see a path for making it a reality.

And momentum is building. Since the TED talk went up last week, more than 1,000 artists and creators have already signed up.

Join the 1,200+ artists who want to be an A-Corp.

Why now?

This is obvious to creative people, but saying it out loud: platforms monetize creative work while leaving artists and creators isolated and under-resourced. This is the status quo we’re in now.

The demands for content keep increasing. The support systems keep decreasing. New tools like AI are both exciting opportunities and existential threats to our livelihoods. In other words, this is a critical moment for people to claim agency and ownership of their work.

Today 48% of Americans personally report having a creative practice (48%!!). More kids want to be creators than any profession. Creative culture is no longer the sideshow — it’s the main act. The time is right to level things up and for creative people to have their Adam Smith moment.

The Creative Century

All of this adds up to a new era: the Creative Century. A period when creative people become more powerful and resourced than ever before.

To get there we need structures under our control. That’s what A-Corps can be: a new legal and economic foundation for creative people to collaborate, protect their work, and build wealth together.

Nearly half of Americans identify as creative people. We aren’t niche. Artist Corporations will give half of America power and a stronger voice in their creative careers and practices. A shift so significant we might feel it more widely: a world less purely utilitarian, less purely economic, and richer in meaning, connection, and possibility as the values of art and creativity filter through society.

My life, I now realize, has always been in service to this dream. It started with looking for my place in the world. In many ways that’s still what it is. Except now it’s not just me. It’s a whole movement of people working to transform our lives and the lives of generations to come.

Whether this work succeeds or falls short, just know: this is for all of us.

Peace and love,
Yancey

ARTIST CORPORATIONS: A new business entity that turns artists and creators from 1099 gig workers to owners. Artist Corporations let a group (or solo artist) keep full control of their intellectual property and creative output while pooling income, sharing equity, and qualifying for both donations and investment under one flexible, legally recognized structure. Learn more.

HOW TO HELP: Want to help make Artist Corporations real? Sign up and add your voice here. Together we can build the Creative Century.

"Our next speaker," the voice of Helen Walters, Head Curator at TED, begins from the stage, "describes himself as a writer and entrepreneur, which if anything downplays how much his existence has impacted other writers and entrepreneurs. Please join me in welcoming..." Then she says my name.

Music plays. A crowd claps. A producer next to me in a headset makes sure I have a clicker in my hand, then gently pushes my back. "Go!" she says.

I step from the darkness, then lightly jog to the side of the stage. I pause, then begin up three steps to a circle of red carpet in the center of a big room.

This is really happening.

Forty-eight hours earlier I'm in the same theater. This time it's empty except for a couple-dozen crew. People are setting up chairs. Random videos project onto giant, movie theater-sized screens. Audio of a woman talking incessantly plays from dozens of speakers. A famous scientist asks if someone can turn it off. "Unfortunately not," someone says. "They're testing the sound system." The scientist looks frustrated.

"I'm sorry about the noise," TED's speaker coach says to us. "But this is the only time we can be here and we want you to get used to this room. This is your theater this week."

Two dozen of us — all speakers, all still strangers to each other — nervously watch and listen. We have the honor — though maybe now we're doubting this status — of giving a talk on this stage in the coming week. Something for which we'd all been preparing for at least two months — some longer. It had felt so far away. Now it felt so real.

The speaker coach points out the screens, clock, and other key spots in the room. The small table where you could leave your confidence notes to check out while you pretended to get a drink of water during your talk. Only if you need it.

Then, the big moment. "Everyone follow me," she says, turning towards the stage. "It's time to go up there."

The first TED I attended was in 2012. Back then TED Talks were just starting to go online, and the conference's reputation was rising. That year I remember watching Bryan Stevenson's famous talk about racial justice, someone 3D-print a human liver, and grabbing a random seat only to realize I was sitting between Bill Gates and Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons).

That first year I was too intimidated to do much but cower in the corner and hope not to be noticed. I was one of the younger attendees, and my cofounder Perry was already established in the TED community. I was fringe.

I didn't mind my wallflower status. The rooms were full of impressive people doing impressive things. Of the many places where I've felt I never measured up, TED ranked right up there alongside the backstage artist area of Coachella and every time I've gone to Sundance among the places where I've been most uncomfortable for no good reason beyond status anxiety.

Since that first TED I've attended five more. None as socially awkward as the first, but also none that much more comfortable either. Even as many friends were invited to speak and had their careers wonderfully lift off as a result, the stage and community felt distant to me.

Where I did meaningfully win was meeting my wife at TED. Infinitely better than a talk, obviously. But I still dreamed of being on-stage. In the mid 2010s, there were few bigger flexes for "making it" as a public intellectual. My ego craved the validation. Each year when the TED lineup was announced I secretly hoped my name would be on the list — a surprise addition so surprising not even the speaker knew.

No matter how much I wished for it, no invitation came.

If we think about the key archetypal content forms of the first three decades of the internet, the TED talk is surely among them — and perhaps the most prestigious form of all.

A perfect information capsule, each TED video offers a narrativized visit into the worlds of futuristic science and technology in a consistent three-arc structure: an opening story with a surprising, often personal introduction; a detailed-for-the-layperson description of some area of science and tech; and a grand reveal of some possibility we hadn't yet anticipated. The stories often pay off with video-ready moments — a drone levitating; Bill Gates letting loose mosquitos in the theater; numerous startling tech demos.

A TED talk was a perfect popcorn nugget taking "ideas worth spreading" from lab benches and the halls of academia and bringing them to desktops, TVs, and phones of curious people around the world.

The best of humanity and the best of the internet rolled into one.

It's February 2025. A friend who used to work at TED tells one of their former colleagues there about a secret project I and others are working on. You should hear what Yancey is doing, my friend tells them. You're going to love it.

Now here I am on a video call with Helen Walters, TED's head curator.

"I've heard a little bit about what you're up to," she tells me, "but I want to hear it from you."

So I tell her the idea. How it started. Why it started. Where it might go. I didn't tell a fancy story, just explained it. Someone wanted to know about my project so I was telling them. I knew why she was asking, but I tried not to think about the implications.

After a half-hour of questions and conversation, Helen finally says it. "I think this is wonderful. We'd love for you to present it at TED. Opening night. You and I will work on it together. What do you think?"

My face simultaneously breaks into a smile and tears. "Thank you," I struggle to say. The tears come harder. I nod again. "Thank you." I cry more.

Helen looks at me with compassion. "What's going on right now?" she asks.

It takes me a moment to compose myself.

"I've always wanted this, but as much for ego as any other reason. Then I stopped wanting it. I've been off doing my own things. And now it shows up."

I get emotional again.

"It's like the universe is telling me, after all of this, that I'm ready..." I say, thinking about numerous struggles and doubts.

"You are ready," Helen tells me. "You're going to be amazing."

She gives me instructions to start working on a ten-minute talk. She'd like to see a first-draft as soon as possible. We're already late in the process. I take notes, thanking her profusely.

When we get off the call I sit in silence for a moment before getting emotional yet again. I fall to my knees on the floor, overwhelmed. I look up at the ceiling, repeating "Thank you" over and over again. The universe has given me a tremendous opportunity. It's only given me this because I'm ready for it. I'm determined not to let it down.

In the weeks leading up to the event, I draft 18 different versions of my talk. The first is autobiographical. This draft is quickly returned by Helen with many edits and redlines. The note in her email is cutting: "I find myself less convinced by this than what you told me on our call." Ouch.

I get to work on another draft, then another. Slowly I see the arcs take shape. Helen keeps the notes coming. They're specific and never sparing. We're in a steady dialogue through Google Doc comments, discussing which examples I should cite, where proof statistics are needed, and, perhaps most important, how I would open the talk. I am endlessly grateful for the feedback, and fully submit to the process without ego or defensiveness.

Three weeks later it's time for my first dress rehearsal in the TED offices in front of their team of curators. Early on a Monday morning I enter an atrium where a mock TED stage is set up. Chris Anderson is there — my first time meeting him — and the other curators, including Helen. I stand and give the talk from memory. No slides. It lasts a little over ten minutes.

Then come the notes. Areas they find less convincing. Parts that are confusing. An example that doesn't land. A question about how I started it. The comments leave the overall talk intact but identify places that don't pass the smell test. Good shape but more revisions are needed. Just four weeks to go.

The twenty speakers — roughly a third of the total crop of this year's conference — follow the TED speaker coach to the stage. The last step onto the platform feels significant. A small step for a human, but a big one — we all hope — for our causes and careers.

We stand together on the circular red carpet, lights sparkling in our eyes, as we take in the room. The speaker coach shows us again the screens, the clock, and how to make eye contact with the crowd. "Don't just scan or turn your head back and forth," she tells us. "Don't think about the cameras. Make eye contact with a person for one thought, then move to the next person. Give your talk to the people in the room, not the cameras or the people watching at home later. That's what makes it feel special."

We look out at the thousand empty seats rising up in the empty half-amphitheater. I try to imagine each filled with a person I'm making eye contact with. It's a jolting thought.

"I want you all to get a feel for being up there," the coach continues. "This is your stage. So let's try something."

At the count of three, she tells us, we should all start giving the first two minutes of our talks all at once, all together. We laugh awkwardly. Really? Before we can ask if she really means it, she starts counting.

Suddenly the stage is filled with a cacophony of voices. Next to me a woman from Nairobi begins to tell her story. Behind me a man howls like a wolf. I try to remember my lines, but with so much going on it's harder than I expect. I try to shrink my awareness.

Stay focused, I tell myself. Remember what you're here to do.

In the weeks leading up to the talk, I balance iterating on the draft and memorization. Whenever I walk around where I live in New York City, I put in AirPods with nothing on, start the timer on my phone, and repeat the talk as I walk — as if I'm on an especially animated phone call.

Each commute to and from work gives me three tries. Things go well, though my attempts keep stubbornly coming in almost three minutes over my allotted time.

One night my wife asks me to give her the talk like I would on-stage. I awkwardly stand in the kitchen and do it. When I finish, she's silent. "You sound too much like you're giving a speech," she tells me. "I don't think it works. You need to sound more natural, like you're just talking."

I'm disappointed but can feel she's right. I start imagining the speech is less oratory and more conspiracy. Less stage actor projecting for the back seats and more screen actor creating presence with subtlety. My tone stops trying to convince and becomes simpler and more peer-like.

Then, just a week before, a breakthrough. We go out to dinner with two friends, one of whom is an 88-year-old painter. My wife asks me to give my talk to him. In the middle of a loud Chinese restaurant I give the exact words of my talk, but as a dinner table conversation with a friend rather than a proper speech. Even while using the same words, I feel the context and tone become more natural.

When I finish, I ask Paul, our 88-year-old friend, if he understood it. "Yes, I think so," he told us. "It sounds very exciting."

My wife turns to me: "That was your best one yet."

Twenty-four hours before the talk, something miraculous happens.

After rehearsal and a dinner with the other speakers the night before, I'm buzzing with energy. To burn it off I go for an hour-plus walk around downtown Vancouver listening to music — not rehearsing. I needed a reset.

When I wake the next morning, the miracle. Somehow my brain has decided on a simple idea: this isn't your first TED talk. This is your third TED talk. When you did it before you already did the nervous thing. It wasn't going to happen again.

This thought was a total lie. It was my first talk. I was nervous. And yet... I don't know how else to explain it, but it worked. I've done this before, I thought. In a way I had. I'd visualized it. I'd rehearsed it in front of the curators. It was a lie to myself, but it conveniently did the trick.

I relaxed and felt a sense of calm. From that point forward, part of me really did feel like I'd been there before. I told other new speakers the same thing. We didn't need to be nervous. We were third-timers. This was old hat. The idea was empowering and fun.

As my feet touch the stage, I feel the buzz of people and energy. For twenty minutes I'd been pacing around the dressing room. Now here I was.

At the top of the stairs I turn to Helen, smiling and thanking her for, well, everything. After all of this, here we were in front of everyone. It was hard to believe.

I take two steps forward and see my brown shoes sink into the red carpet. I lift my eyes to the room and make out the faint outlines of people everywhere. A soft backlit glow that feels almost like what you'd imagine Heaven might be like.

My heart is calm. My breath is normal. My voice feels steady. Not an ounce of me feels unsure. I briefly interact with the audience, introducing my wife in the second row to the crowd to her surprise and embarrassment. I tell the audience we'd met here at TED eleven years before. They should keep their eyes open if they're single. The crowd oohs. The energy lifts just a bit more. She and I smile at each other.

I stand there a moment longer, looking around the room. Ready.

For the next ten minutes and no longer, I patiently tell my story. Like the TED talks you know, it's a narrative that takes several twists and turns, building to what I hoped would be the satisfying reveal of a new idea. When the moment arrives, the crowd unexpectedly cheers and claps. Better than I'd ever let myself hope.

I feel my words gather strength as the talk builds towards the end. The audience comes along with me. Together we're exploring something both fundamentally new and so obvious it feels like we've known it forever. It's in the air: this might be another TED moment to remember.

At my final sentence, energy shifts. Applause. People standing. The lights brighten. A smile across my face. My eyes lock with my wife in the second row. The moment holds. Then releases.

Some things are worth the wait.

What about the talk itself? What's the new idea I shared?

For that, you'll need to be patient. The video will go online in the coming weeks, and I'm going to preserve the surprise until then.

Stay tuned, my friends...

As a filmmaker your projects move across many years, each second of the final outcome agonizingly negotiated and constructed.

As an author, your work unfolds over years — from the long process of writing to the journey of publishing.

As a musician your projects move in months. A song ready today might be released this winter with a complex calendar of planning.

As a visual artist the creative process is defined by your medium and the rate by which you can show.

As a writer you might operate on a weekly schedule, striving to put out fresh ideas on a predictable cadence.

As an internet poster you operate second to second, every moment a potential to go viral.

Venue as much as process shapes creative time. Digital spaces collapse time. Physical spaces force a confrontation with it. Compare flipping through songs on a streaming service to placing a record on a turntable.

Every moment invested in a work, no matter how seemingly futile, shows up in the final experience. Time spent is a quality more easily felt than seen.

Culture today moves at the speed of the internet, which clarifies why some types of work speak the native cultural cadence while others struggle to keep up.

What we most need from our creative time is generosity. Generosity to learn, the generosity of being open to discovery. Art emanates from the formless generosity of what is and isn’t, drifting in the open expanses of non-time.

When we force a schedule, we can disrupt these patterns. We demand a form that is not true to their nature. Yet it’s also true that when we create on a schedule we become better at listening. Time earns us our luck.

My time is my time. Your time is your time. Their time is their time. We can compare to learn and better understand, but we shouldn’t waste time judging.

Time moves at different speeds depending on your creative practice.

May we all dance to our own time.

This past week the Dark Forest Collective announced a new book: Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by the author Nadia Asparouhova. This book is very special to me, so I wanted to share a few words about it.

For the past year, I’ve served as Nadia’s editor and publisher on this project — a first for me. While working on This Could Be Our Future, I was fortunate to have an amazing editor. It was an honor to support someone I admire so deeply, like Nadia.

Nadia’s book explores “antimemes” — ideas or forces that do not wish to be seen. Taboos, bureaucracies, and opaque corporate shell structures are all examples — things hidden despite their importance. Nadia’s book teaches us what these things are, how they stay hidden, and how to see them.

It’s a genuinely original book told in a very personable way. If you like my writing then you will love hers. You can be one of the first to read it (it comes out May 27) — available now only on Metalabel.

Extremely grateful for this process, and proud to help introduce what I believe is a significant new work.

Peace and love,

Yancey

It’s been a minute since we last talked, so I felt like saying hi. Everything mostly okay with you, I hope? Here’s what’s been going on with me:

An expanding, focused life — In many ways my life has never been simpler. I spend most of it with my wife and son in our family bubble. I work obsessively and joyfully on a handful of projects that call me. I talk to and support friends and collaborators around the world and vice versa. If I were to write out my days in terms of where I physically go, they would look monotonous. But when I live them, they are deep, expansive, and constantly connecting me more deeply with myself and others. A different version of less is more.

The power of the scroll — A few years ago I adopted a new way of working I learned from my friend and partner Rob Kalin: using a giant roll of butcher paper as your working material when you start a new project. The butcher paper then becomes a scroll that you slowly unravel and fill as the project progresses. The benefits are twofold: 1) it creates a chronological record of the project, and 2) writing and sketching in such a way is liberating and constantly generates new insights.

When I started working on Metalabel more than three years ago, I adopted Rob’s technique and started a scroll. The very first panel shows my initial thoughts about the project. In the years since I’ve used it to sketch out many ideas and make many realizations about where the project should go. I regularly put “scroll time” on my calendar — set periods where I sit at the big block of paper with no clear intention, and always something unexpected happens.

Two weeks ago the scroll I began when starting Metalabel was finally filled and completed. Three-plus years of thinking captured in one 60 feet by 3 feet unbroken piece of paper. It feels amazing to look back over all that’s gone into it. I celebrated by putting a little inscription at the end documenting where all the scroll was made:

We captured and documented the entire contents in one long video that I’ll share once some as-yet-to-be-announced projects come out. And yes, Metalabel scroll #002 has already begun.

For more on scrolling, the publication Every interviewed me about my working style recently, where I discussed the scrolling process.

New Creative Era podcast — Last month the artist and my friend Josh Citarella and I started a new podcast. It’s called New Creative Era, and it explores how we as creative people release and approach our work. Each thirty-minute weekly episode is devoted to a single theme. So far we’ve covered context-setting (01), finding your hook (02), collaboration (03), and platforms (04). Worth a listen!

I’ve been on some other great podcasts recently, too, including with music producer Jon Tanners, the University of Colorado Boulder Media Economies Design Lab, and Mixcloud founder Nico Perez.

Interviews in Dazed on the future of art and what’s after social — Two excellent deep dives in Dazed recently featured my words and ideas. There was this piece about what’s after social media, which includes an in-depth exploration of the Dark Forest and post-individualism. Then this week Dazed published a piece about how we create a better art world, which includes an interview with myself and Mat Dryhurst pointing to reasons for encouragement among the doom.

Great music — This album by Time Wharp is a perfect accompaniment to any moment. I still listen to the Cindy Lee album nonstop, as well as this playlist I made of Kurt Vile jams that stick in 3rd gear and groove it out endlessly. The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Their Satanic Majesties’s Second Request is perfect.

Economics of self-publishing a book — I wrote a detailed piece unpacking all the costs and economics of making the Dark Forest book. A useful guide for how to make a profit (and how not to) when it comes to independent small-press publishing. Related: Metalabel made a guide on where and how to print your book.

Metalabel — My focus continues to be Metalabel, which is finding its stride. Releases and activity are growing, with increased interest and energy from all directions. Within the squad, we’re a dozen aligned, creative individuals bringing their talents together to make something bigger than any of us on our own, continuing to mirror the exact structure we exist to establish. There’s a deeper synchronicity to this project I continue to trust. The hardest parts are how to make it simple enough to understand. Still loving every second of it.

Speaking at TED — Last but not least on the life front, I’ve been invited to speak at TED in Vancouver. In just three weeks I’ll be standing on that stage for the first time, sharing a new idea.

The experience of being invited was more emotional than I expected. When TED’s amazing curator Helen Walters gave me the news, I broke down in tears, overwhelmed in the moment.

For years I’d desperately wanted something like speaking at TED. A lot of it (being really honest) as a way to satisfy my ego. I wished to be recognized. It seemed like the ultimate way to do it. Yet all those years the invite never came.

Now I find myself with a much quieter ego and an idea much larger than me. A project truly in service to others. This is when the universe presents this opportunity.

I cried in that moment (and in several moments since), because whatever trials I’ve gone through, whatever doubts I have about myself, the universe was showing me confidence and grace. It was telling me I was ready. The realization literally brought me to my knees.

I’m saying all this and the event hasn’t even happened yet. What an emotional wreck this whole process is going to make me. I’ll report back with a full recap in my next message.

Peace and love,
Yancey

That’s a lesson from a book I constantly return to, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, a readable and enlightening guide to how to make something stand out.

One of their laws is “The Law of Fads and Trends.” It goes like this:

• There are two types of success: fads and trends.

• A trend is a fad whose demand is slowly satisfied.

• A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly.

• When you experience success, focus on intentionally growing slowly rather than satisfying every request.

• What could have been a fad becomes a trend.

The underlying lesson: slow growth is worth more than fast growth.

As creative people, the people and projects we most often compare ourselves to are the most visible ones. The ones that tend to succeed from fast growth and viral posts.

In our weaker moments we find ourselves looking at their socials with jealously, wondering why their success can’t be ours.

But where does that path lead? How quickly will it be over?

The modern rush toward immediacy causes us to forget an obvious truth: real things grow slowly.

Cultural movements aren't manufactured overnight. They accumulate and gather force through dedicated effort and persistent vision. They are never a fad, and only appear as a trend on the longest of timescales.

The current systems aren't designed for this. They reward performance over substance and do not think beyond now.

When we play by their rules, the ceiling stops at viral fad. But when we play according to our own rules, the whole universe is ours to define.

2024 taught me this lesson over and over. What started as a year of reluctance — to busyness, to collaboration, to New York City itself — became a year of surrender to larger forces that showed me new ways of creating, releasing, and being in the world. I didn’t see how the dots were connecting while living them, but looking back, the lessons are clear.

The end of West Coast dreams

I moved back to New York City in 2022 after several years away. Los Angeles and Vancouver gave me the gift of space — to think, to write, to develop ideas about creativity and collaboration away from the noise. I returned to New York determined to preserve what I called my "West Coast vibe” and resist the city's gravitational pull toward constant motion.

That dream died in 2024.

My calendar filled despite my protests. Meetings bred meetings. Collaborative projects multiplied. I found myself spending more time building with others than on my own. At first this felt like failure — a backslide into old patterns I'd worked hard to break. I resisted. I resented.

Then something shifted. I realized this wasn't about my personal preferences. This was about serving something larger: ideas, collaborators, the work itself. When I look back at my calendar now, I don't see the frantic activity I feared. I see the genuine engagement it takes to bring new ideas into the world.

The West Coast quiet served its purpose. In isolation I developed theories about creativity and collaboration. But theories only get you so far on their own. At some point you have to go beyond putting ideas into the world and get to work manifesting them.

Learning to hold

The biggest evolution in my creative practice came from an unexpected place: learning to hold onto ideas longer instead of rushing to share them.

This goes against everything the internet teaches us. "Ship early, ship often." "Build in public." "Find the others." Good advice, mostly. But publish too soon and the energy can dissipate before you know what’s actually there. Publishing can create a premature climax that marks a project as finished before it really begins.

This year I developed new respect for the slow burn. Ideas that start as loose threads but reveal themselves when given time to develop. Instincts that evolve when exposed to trusted collaborators before they're shared with the world. Though I still published a lot this year — a new book, three digital publications, and a new post very week on Metalabel for six straight months — I spent more time thickening and seasoning the stew than dishing it out.

This was the case with Metalabel — initially an insight into a new creative form I wanted to write about, then decided to research more on my own first. The benefits of that wait keep showing themselves. Right now two more such projects are brewing. One will become a book about creativity in 2025. Another is evolving into what may be my most significant public project yet. Both started as vague hunches I could have published, but instead kept privately exploring deeper. Even if neither project reaches its ultimate outcome, the process of exploring and learning on my own and with others is the true benefit.

The art of releasing

While learning to hold ideas longer, I discovered new ways of releasing work that felt truer to my values. Ways that weren't about chasing likes or approval, but about finding the right form for each idea.

This started with Metalabel itself. Rather than approaching the project as a tech startup, from the start we've strived to operate more like Factory Records and the other labels that inspire us: as a platform for releasing the culture and ideas we want to see. Sometimes releasing things we ourselves make — like the platform itself, its splits features, and our own creative work. Sometimes celebrating what others make — like our Fall-Winter Collection of releases. Sometimes directly collaborating with someone and helping them promote their vision.

Beyond these meta-releases, I personally tested three new forms of release using Metalabel:

"The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet" brought together twelve authors to publish a book about how we live online. Using Metalabel's splits and treasury products, we've collectively earned over $60,000 from 1,500+ copies sold and all funds have been seamlessly split between us. Most importantly, the project established a model for how loose groups of collaborators can create and profit together without traditional publishing structures.

"The Post-Individual" was an essay five years in the making that instead of just posting online, I released as a limited edition zip file that included research notes, audio recordings, and other context. Four hundred people collected it, earning me/the Dark Forest Collective more than $1,000 — the most I’ve ever been paid for an essay. The piece received more than 100 reader responses and continues to find new readers and resonance. Treat your digital work as tangible and substantive and others will too.

Two more releases — "Nine Creative Meditations" and "Promotional Principles for Creative People" — pushed boundaries further. “Nine Creative Meditations” is a multimedia single that pairs a video “A-Side” and an essay “B-Side” exploring what I’ve learned in my creative career to date that several hundred people have collected. “Promotional Principles for Creative People” takes what I’ve learned about releasing and turned it into a collaborative Google Doc that’s sparked hundreds of comments that are now part of the piece.

Each experiment revealed new possibilities for how ideas can travel and be expressed beyond the limitations we’ve become used to. A piece I especially enjoyed writing, “Formulary for New Media,” makes the philosophical and practical case for a new media approach to releasing work.

The alchemy of collaboration

The year's deepest lessons came through collaboration.

With Metalabel, I get to collaborate with eight co-conspirators at the highest levels I’ve experienced. We’re living our ideas and letting them manifest through us in ways that feel true to the project’s intentions. It continues to be a miraculous experience. I don’t think I’ve seen this phrase apply to an organizational context, but Metalabel almost feels like a form of true love?

Similarly, making "The Dark Forest Anthology" with some of my internet heroes was light years more fun and invigorating than publishing through the traditional system on my own. Co-conspiring how to spread the word, doing a public roundtable, and coming up with new work together have all been very rewarding.

This year I was able to work with Brian Eno and Bette A to help release their book “What Art Does." I was fortunate to spend time with them at Brian's studio on several occasions this year, and learned so much through the process.

This was also the year I became a book editor for the first time. After the Dark Forest Anthology came out, one of my favorite writers, Nadia Asparouhova, reached out with an idea for a book. Since May I’ve served as her editor, doing monthly calls and reads of a text she finalized this week and that the Dark Forest Collective will publish in the new year. Her book is crazy brilliant with a mind-bending new way of seeing the world. Getting to support someone whose work has meant a lot to me personally, and gaining a newfound appreciation for their brilliance at the same time, was peak.

There were collaborations beyond these too. Metalabel put me in a position of working closely with friends and heroes like Rob Kalin, Josh Citarella, Mikael Moore, Mindy Seu, Molly Soda, Hard Art, MSCHF, Rhizome, Other Internet, New Inc, and dozens of others with whom I was able to explore and support ideas. All people coming together around something larger than just them. This is what I mean when I write about post-individualism: not the end of the individual, but its amplification through larger networks brought about by the web.

All year I was blessed with collaborators who combine brilliant minds and humble spirits. People who show up with both confidence and openness, who trust the process enough to let it lead somewhere unexpected. Collaborators like these are critical for real magic to happen.

The invisible thread

Throughout the year I felt guided by forces larger than myself. Call it synchronicity, call it spirit, call it the creative unconscious — something was clearly at work.

In October 2023 an astrologer friend advised I spend my birthday in London to have a coming year of joy and collaboration. I made a last minute trip at her suggestion, then ran into a friend in London who invited me to join them in Brian Eno’s studio a couple days later. I moved my flight, met Brian, and the project that became “What Art Does" spontaneously began.

In April two colleagues independently suggested we needed a product leader for Metalabel. That same day my dream product person — someone I'd tried and failed to work with twice before — sent me an email out of the blue. Two weeks later she joined the team, becoming one of our most essential collaborators.

In June an acquaintance from a decade ago invited me to speak at an event they were hosting. The topic turned into a wider exploration that’s now become a major partnership between the two of us and our organizations that’s taken on a life of its own.

There are many names for this force — God, Source, the creative spirit. Whatever you call it, I believe it's real. There's a hidden order in the chaos, a path being revealed step by step. I've learned to trust these currents, to see them as signs that you're in flow with something larger than yourself.

The path ahead

As 2024 ends, a fog has lifted. Questions and ideas about creativity, collaboration, and new ways of organizing developed in isolation are being tested in the real world. I'm learning to navigate the tensions between individual vision and collective creation, holding ideas and sharing them, and thinking and doing. I’m growing through it all.

This year showed me that we don't have to choose between being solo or a corporate cog. There's a third path: weaving individual visions into larger collaborative projects. Seeing creative work not as products to ship or a status to build, but as an ongoing dialogue with the world and each other.

The way forward for me is clear: build and participate in spaces for genuine collaboration and illumination. Explore new forms of creative release. Stay open to the mysterious currents guiding me toward something new.

This is a path you can follow too. The recipe isn’t prescriptive or exclusive. It’s a matter of changing your mindset, opening up yourself to others, and flowing where things take you.

After everything I've experienced this year, I'm more convinced than ever that this path isn't just possible — it's essential. The old ways of creating and releasing work are breaking down. The new ways are still emerging. In that gap lies immense possibility. Here's to exploring it together in 2025 and beyond.

Peace and love,
Yancey

Books I read in 2024

History
The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawn
The Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawn
Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts
The Power Broker, Robert Caro
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

Art and Creativity
The Cult of Creativity, Samuel L. Franklin
9.5 Theses on Art and Class, Ben Davis
Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, Chaim Gingold
This Must Be the Place, Jesse Rifkin
Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Complex, John Beck, Ryan Bishop

Ideas
Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson
Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout
Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson

Fiction
Babel, RF Kuang
There is no Antimemetics Division, qntm
The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan
The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan

Music I loved

Cindy Lee, "Diamond Jubilee"
Mount Eerie, "Night Palace"
Terry Riley, "Shri Camel"
Don Cherry, "Mu: Second Part"
Can, “Live in Keele 1977”
Galaxie 500, "Uncollected New York Noise"

Most read posts

01 "The post-individual"
02 "Formulary for new media"
03 "The Prestige Recession"
04 "How to build a newthing"
05 "Rethinking the unbearable weight of self-promotion"

Personal achievement I'm most proud of

I ran a personal record 522 miles in 2024.

<3

I've felt it so many times I became someone who loves to write but hates to publish. It can feel safer and more fulfilling to stay in the safety of my own imagination than subject my ideas to the non-response of others.

These feelings were especially acute as I prepared to publish “The Post-Individual,” a piece I've worked on for several years. It tells the history of individualism and how it’s been changed by the internet. I started with thoughts of making it a book, but as Metalabel emerged as a practical application of similar themes, I decided to turn “The Post-Individual” into an essay instead.

The piece was finally ready to publish earlier this year. But how? It was more than a blog post to me. I wanted to express it as part of a larger body of work that builds on the idea of others.

Then, an idea: make a “Digital First Edition” — a ZIP folder containing a PDF of the piece; audio and video recordings of me reading and talking about it; and research notes. A multimedia collection that would capture the work and the work that made the work.

To give the “Digital First Edition” added meaning, I limited it to 250 editions for $5 a piece or pay what you want on Metalabel. As I pressed publish, I had no idea what to expect. Five dollars for an essay? I couldn’t remember seeing that before. Would anyone buy one? Would anyone read it? Would people be mad at me for even asking?

Digital first edition

We live in an aggressive media environment. Everything we see advertises for our attention. Information is constantly pushed onto us.

As the torrent increases, it devalues more and more information that comes our way. All social media is advertising. Even my posts are essentially ads for my work and point of view. Newsletters have become overwhelming. Nobody needs to read the next newsletter they get because somebody else’s will come ten minutes later. Things that aren’t disposable have started to feel like they are.

I didn't want my work to feel that way, even if it meant less people reading it. A “Digital First Edition” seemed like a way to make my work feel different. Digital, tactile, homemade. I took time to structure its contents, including a Notes screenshot to establish the provenance of when it was completed.

I gave the 250 limited editions a suggested $5 price, but people could pay what they want. Five dollars felt like both a lot and a little. I wasn’t sure what people would do. 

The response

I sent a newsletter that introduced the experiment that Sunday. The first day there were 91 collectors. The second day there were 53. I didn't promote it very much. I wanted to see what would happen.

Day by day, the collector count grew. And then, on the tenth day, the 250th edition was collected. Half in the first 48 hours, half in the following week. I felt a sense of accomplishment. 

Surprisingly it also added up to real money: $955 in support from collectors. More than I ever got paid for a piece of writing during my years as an arts journalist. All funds are going to the Dark Forest Collective — the label I published this piece through — to fund work by others exploring similar themes.

It could have been more. During the first 48 hours, a UI bug on Metalabel resulted in most collectors defaulting to collecting for free. Of the first 100 collectors, 66 were free and 34 were paid. After this was fixed, collectors paid an average of $5.25 — slightly above what I asked — or $1,300 across 250 editions. 

My earlier question — would people pay $5 for an essay? — was a yes.

Collectors

The collectors defined the experience. Rather than the passive broadcast system I’d learned to fear — sending newsletters into the void — people weren’t tolerating the work, they were seeking it out. Every collector was someone explicitly asking to be part of something I’d made. It felt exciting.

After two weeks, I sent a personal email sharing how much their support had meant, and to offer to credit them on the piece if they shared their name. I added an optional box where they could give feedback on the piece if they wished.

Nearly 100 people responded with thoughts and reactions — the biggest response I’ve gotten to anything I’ve written. It felt like we were all part of a small club that was more private and non-performative than the internet at large. I’ve shared some of those reactions in this separate post, which are interesting on their own as people openly share how the internet impacts their sense of identity.

Private success > public success

In my past experiences publishing, I sought public success assuming it would lead to feelings of private acceptance and satisfaction. This unthinking assumption was misguided.

When we seek private satisfaction through public success, we give up our power to the outside world. We hope that all the energy we put into our work will be returned in the ways that we crave. It doesn’t often work out that way. When we judge ourselves on this desire for approval, we diminish our work and voice based on outcomes beyond our control.

This experiment showed we can invert that by being more honest with ourselves and our work. I didn’t simplify or dumb down “The Post-Individual.” I shared its full context and released it to a group that already resonated with my ideas. The acceptance I’d previously sought in the wider public was instead met on terms I set. Those 250 collectors satisfied my entire Maslow’s hierarchy of creative needs in a way that throngs of anonymous reader never have.

Many of us spend our lives pursuing private acceptance through external success. But no matter the award or honor, our inner doubts will remain. True acceptance comes from inside us. It takes asking ourselves challenging questions like: What do I want from my work? What’s most important about it to me? How would I create my work differently if I prioritized my private success? Then we must take the second step of acting in a way that honors those desires rather than our fears or the waters we swim in. 

Even the first step of simply asking myself these questions opened up new paths for my work. They give me a clearer sense of what my true voice — stripped of a desire for public approval — sounds like. They make me want to publish more, not less, and keep doing it on my terms. What if you gave yourself the gift of inner acceptance? What would it open up for you?

Linknotes

• “The Post Individual” Digital Edition

• “The Post Individual” essay and reactions from readers

• Learn about Metalabel

Download and collect a Director’s Cut containing research behind this essay.

On the internet we can be whoever we want to be. We can choose from any number of qualities, real or imagined, and express ourselves and live our lives from that point of view online.

To go online is to become re-individualized — an individual in a whole new way and place. You still exist in the physical world, but you gain a new social existence that floats over-top of, around, inside of, and as a force within almost all other areas of life.

Because of the internet we don’t need to define our identity based on where we physically live, who we’re born to, or what we look like, as has been the case in human history until now. 

The ability for people to separate themselves from their geographic, familial, and physical realities by creating new identities continues to reshape the world more than we realize. 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: segmenting the micro-personas and qualities within us into distinct alts and platform-specific identities that can take on lives of their own. 

We’re in the midst of a significant evolution in what it means to be an individual. This experience and confluence of forces is what I call post-individualism — a term intended to capture the ways computers and the web have changed our sense of self and how society is changing in response.

While these dynamics are new, they echo the experiences of our ancestors that led to the creation of modern society as we know it, and even earlier societies too.

I. Kissing cousins and individualism

Our story starts more than a thousand years ago around 1000 A.D. when humans were going through a series of changes not dissimilar to what we’re experiencing now.

As recounted in two excellent books — The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich and Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop, roughly 1,000 years ago was when the modern concept of the “individual” — someone with agency in what happens in their life socially, professionally, romantically, spiritually — gained momentum in Western society.

Before this turning point, civilization was less a teeming throng of diverse masses than a collection of closed miniverses bound by blood. The vast majority of people lived among extended families in clan-like settlements. As Henrich writes in WEIRDest People in the World, the family was the first religion. Who you were born to defined your whole existence.

Most people’s identities, belief systems, and paths in life were determined by who they were born to. People were members of clans and families first, individuals second, if at all.

One way families would preserve power was to marry cousins to each other. Yes — cousins. Cousin marriage reinvested the family's power directly into the future fortunes of the clan.

For centuries, cousin marriage was a dominant force. But about a thousand years ago, its prominence began to decline because of a surprising source: Christianity.

In the ancient world where wealthy and influential men held virtually all power and all others were seen as lesser beings, Christianity’s promise of universal salvation was a liberating secret that gave each person the right to their own inner purpose. As Christianity spread over the next thousand years, spiritual equality and, along with it, individualism did too.

Around 1000 A.D., Christian churches pushed individualism from the spiritual to the physical. Leaders of the Catholic Church, potentially intending to break the clan-based power that dominated their parishes in Southern Europe, issued a decree: it was forbidden for first cousins to marry.

Within decades, the custom of intra-cousin marriage began to decline. The structure of society changed along with it. For non-cousins to marry, places and ways for people to arrange marriages and find a partner were needed. New spaces and customs arose.

Within a century of the Catholic Church's prohibition, three major institutions of Western history became newly prominent: the city, the guild, and the university. All either had their growth take off (cities) or were largely invented (the guild and the university) within roughly a century of cousin marriage’s prohibition.

Some of the deepest foundations of modern society started because families weren’t allowed to marry first cousins anymore. 

II. Individualism

What happened to those first individuals?

Neither Henrich or Siedentop’s books cite personal experiences documented by people living at the time, but seen through the lens of broader social changes that began in this era, we can make some educated guesses.

The rewards of individualism weren’t the right to be left alone, they were the right to choose who to align yourself with. The first individuals used their freedom to seek other people with whom they could live, work, love, raise families, and study. They (men, in particular) gained more sovereignty over their lives.

This need for alignment was critical because left on their own, early individuals were vulnerable. They risked being robbed, harmed, and exploited by others. They lacked easy entry to a trade. They were limited in what they could be or do.

As this process of people seeking safety and opportunity repeated generation after generation, trading posts grew into villages, villages became cities, and repeated interactions became institutions. The first university opened, attracted students, and gained influence. More followed. Guilds that provided a regimented path to work in the trades were established in increasing numbers of professions. As these institutions grew, more and more people left the countrysides for these bustling assemblies of individuals. Within centuries power shifted from the blood of clans to organizations of individuals, and the individual-driven system overtook the clan-based system it emerged from.

This process is why today disputes are settled by independent courts rather than family elders. It’s why I introduce myself as Yancey Strickler or just Yancey rather than Son of the Stricklers or however my ancestors said things. This isn’t true everywhere, but in many parts of the world today the family is less the focus than the individual because of these changes.

By the end of the 20th century this process played out to such an extent that people were expected to stand out on their own as individuals. To self-actualize as “Me” became the pinnacle of social success. The human experience became reoriented around an individual’s need to self-actualize through consumerism, as recounted in Adam Curtis’ documentary series The Century of the Self.

The force of individualism created a world of abundance for many. But in the most individualistic societies (the U.S., U.K., and Australia top the list) the costs included growing loneliness and the decline of social institutions. A 2021 study reported: “The role of friends in American social life is experiencing a pronounced decline… Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.”

We had reached this line of individualism’s final form: isolated, shrink-wrapped humans ready to self-actualize with each purchase.

III. Post-individualism and the self

This changed, like almost everything else, with the internet.

The internet opened up a new inner-outer virtual world where our thoughts were typed, confessed, searched, expressed, and manifested with the thoughts of others. A world where we became born again as individuals in a new realm.

No longer were we constrained by physicality or geography. We could be whoever we wanted to be. We could be however many we wanted to be. Our inner lives multiplied. This change came not just with the internet, but with the emergence of its underlying medium: the computer.

In 1984, M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle published The Second Self, a sociological survey of the first computer users, including schoolchildren, secretaries, and stockbrokers in the 1970s and early ‘80s. Turkle observes from the very beginning that a computer wasn’t like a normal tool. Deborah, a middle school-age girl, tells her:

“When you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind and now you can see it. I mean, the computer can be just like you if you program it to be, your thoughts, your pictures, your feelings, your ideas, not everything, but a lot of things. And you can see the things you think and change them around.“

Turkle observes:

“Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world. The new machine that stands behind the flashing digital signal, unlike the clock, the telescope, or the train, is a machine that ‘thinks.’ It challenges our notions not only of time and distance, but of mind… The question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?”

As the title of her book observes, computers and especially the internet change how people feel about themselves. They open up new notions of self and new forms of identity. In part because we learn to see ourselves the same way computers do.

Ben Thompson, author of the technology publication Stratechery, once illustrated in an essay how the internet had shaped his identity with a simple visual:

As an individual, Ben (the circle in the center) is the amalgamation of many distinct interests and identities. Each of the petals of the Ben-flower represent a part of his life and who he is. Because of the influence of social media, Ben sees these dimensions as identities to make distinct and further invest in. He writes:

“Separating my identities on Twitter does not mean a lesser experience, but a far superior one; social interaction in any medium is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me at some point or another. The magic of the Internet, though, is that you can be whatever you want to be.”

Earlier generations were bound by family, geographic location, and their physical being. People today face few limits on their ability to explore, express, and manifest distinct identities. But our approaches are shaped by the platforms and algorithms we identiate through.

The spaces previous generations filled with close human relationships we fill with identities. This is how people are more connected than ever while being lonelier and having fewer close relationships than any generation in modern memory. We’re more connected to the many selves within us than we are to each other.

For individuals before the internet, the key existential question was “Who am I?” After the internet, it's “Who all am I?

IV. The post-individual

Classic individualism is a life-defining quest to establish who you are and to grow into that person over the rest of your life. But in a world where the quest for individualism can be started and repeated merely by logging on or creating a new account in a digital world, the meaning of this process has changed. As K-Hole put it in 2014’s “Youth Mode”:

“Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.”

This is the post-individual experience. It happens when someone accepts their individuality, but feels called for a variety of reasons (social, creative, metaphysical, financial) to seek greater meaning and context with others. Post-individualism isn't a rejection of individualism. It's a graduation from it.

People are not born post-individuals. Our social environments spark this desire for a specific kind of shared meaning. This especially happens online, where individuality creates the feeling of intellectual and emotional sovereignty, but also makes us lonely, thirsty for attention, and prone to being red-pilled by ideologies that aren’t true to our spirit or may harm us and others. 

Like our ancestors 1,000 years ago, we're learning that leaving the safety of one’s real-world clan can be an isolating and dangerous experience. As I wrote in “The dark forest theory of the internet” in 2019, the web has become the place where powerful forces fight for influence and control:

“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ‘90s web is gone… The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”

A thousand-plus years ago our ancestors's need for safety and context sparked the rise of cities, guilds, and universities. Our current needs as internet-liberated individuals are sparking a similar burst of organizational experiments, including the maturation of Reddit boards, Discord channels, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and newer and repurposed forms of online communities. These are all post-individual proto-institutions that speak to the desire for safety, meaning, and social, creative, and financial prosperity we as online and offline individuals share.

Tellingly, these institutions are focused less on our entire selves than on aspects of who we are. Like content feed algorithms, the internet grants us the ability to segment our micro-personas into distinct identities that create and join communities with the micro-personas of others. On the internet our inner selves come alive to manifest parallel realities so powerful they’re overtaking the world that created them.

Evidence of the post-individual state is abundant.

• A new “whole self”: We know not to judge a book by its cover, but now we might not be able to entirely judge a book by its words either. As people learn to carry an increasing number of alts and slices of self, defining who we are becomes more complicated.
  
  People are used to interacting with each other as surface-level individuals, but today we don’t always know how the physical person in front of us matches the multitudes within them. What if we discover the stranger is an ideological enemy we did not immediately perceive? How can we act without revealing the values of all our selves?
  
  This larger “whole self” is why it can feel safer to interact online where everyone is in avatar mode than in physical environments where our identities are sometimes less clear. These are questions of inner and outer safety that generations today newly face.

• Post-individual collectives: In an era of individualism, how many followers you have is the key social indicator. In an era of post-individualism, it’s what groups you’re a part of that matters. The individual isn’t erased, it’s supported and strengthened by aligning with others. As more of our social and inner lives are lived online, internet-based groups will increasingly be how social value and power are attained. (See the classic Squad Wealth by Other Internet.)
  
  Message boards and internet communities have existed since the start of the internet, but they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated. They now have the ability to raise funds, share decision making, and legally incorporate themselves. These internet-first organizations have already proven to be extremely influential online and off, and this will only grow. What the corporation was to the 20th century, online-first collective structures will be to the 21st.
  

• Identityism: Post-individual dynamics and incentives lead to the proliferation of group identities. Many of these identities emerge through minute interests or points of difference between groups that create offshoots and factions. Micro-identities are a path to belonging.
  
  Because our identities are tied to our core values and who we are, differences between or criticisms of ideals or members of our group can feel like criticisms and attacks on us. At times this resembles the clan-driven society that predated individualism with its many miniverses more than what we’ve known in recent centuries.
  

• Memes: As in-group collective language and references, memes are a native form of post-individual communication. Learning one’s in-group language is a critical rite of passage that proves someone belongs. Memes are core internet communication that have already broken out of the web and embedded themselves deeply in everyday language. These post-individual signifiers reveal what tribes you're a member of and how deep your awareness extends.

V. The century after the self

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle witnessed immediate changes in human psychology from the invention of the computer. As an interview subject told her:

“I like to think of my work as ‘out there.’ And I am ‘in here.’ The thing with the computer is that you start to lose track of the ins and the outs.”

I know this feeling first-hand.

For decades my identity has been in many ways internet-first. My professional development has been almost entirely on the web. I’ve been a longstanding member of several message boards. I have friendships with people all over the world that began and are sustained online that relate to different facets of who I am that the internet helped me discover. The internet is my social home.

I’ve experienced wonderful connections and discoveries from this. I’ve also experienced being on the fringe of so many worlds I don’t feel really part of anything. Moments when I’ve longed dangerously for attention. A lingering feeling of never really belonging anywhere except in front of a screen.

What I’ve come to realize is that while our potential identities are infinite, our energy is not. Energy put into one identity is energy taken from another. To be Very Online is to be Never Offline. To become infinite is to become infinitesimal somewhere else. As Turkle wrote in The Second Self:

“For adults as well as children, computers… offer companionship without the mutuality and complexity of a human relationship. They seduce because they provide a chance to be in complete control, but they can trap people into an infatuation with control, with building one’s own private world.”

This is something I'm still challenged by. But seeing myself as part of a larger tribe — a post-individual generation seeking meaning and clarity in a new world — gives the struggle context that's comfortingly bigger than just my experience.

This also isn't everyone's experience. It's most true for Very Online people who have allowed their self-identity and sense of self-worth to be tied up in these spaces. This is much less true for people whose lives are rooted in real-world communities. The state of the post-individual is not a default all experience the same way. It's a condition of environment. But as generations are increasingly born into digitally native social systems as Gen Z and younger are, the influence of the post-individual state will be an increasingly significant and perhaps welcome part of their lives.

As the journalist Adam Curtis told me in a conversation for The Creative Independent:

“The contemporary idea of freedom is very much an individualist one. I, as an individual, want to be free to do what I want to do… The idea of individual self-expression—whilst feeling limitless because the ideology of our age is individualism—looked at from another perspective is limiting because all you have is your own desires.

“The hyperindividualism of our age is not going to be going back into the bottle. You’ve got to square the circle. You’ve got to let people still feel they’re independent individuals, yet they are giving themselves up to something that is awesome, greater, and more powerful that carries them into the future beyond their own existence. That’s what people are yearning for.”

VI. The society of the selves

In Cinderella and Mrs. Doubtfire, identity conflicts are resolved by protagonists bringing their diverging personalities together. To marry Prince Charming, Cinderella must admit that it is she, a poor girl and not a princess, who the slipper fits. When Robin Williams comes clean as the boisterous matriarchal nanny, his children love him more.

According to Hollywood folk tales, merging your main and your alt is the moral thing to do. Is that the end game of the post-individual? To merge all our identities into one?

The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros— a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We. The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new pronoun?

In 2021 the artist Katherine Ball told The Creative Independent:

“I use the pronoun ‘they’ in my bio… because I like this idea of recognizing that there are more microorganisms living in our bodies than there are of us. The body is an ecosystem. I think somehow, there’s another self, more ‘us’ than ‘I.’”

In a post-individual society of the selves, this could be a global subculture for how people come to define their identity.

When we bring in the developments of AI, even more significant changes to individuality appear. With most AI models being powerful amalgamations of incredible amounts of human-generated data, the notion of an individual mind could become a relic of the past. It’s striking to return to that comment from the middle school girl in the early ‘80s from The Second Self:

“When you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind and now you can see it. I mean, the computer can be just like you if you program it to be, your thoughts, your pictures, your feelings, your ideas, not everything, but a lot of things. And you can see the things you think and change them around.“

These changes can feel alarming. But if we go even further back in history, they could be bringing us closer to earlier roots. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent book The Dawn of Everything recounts how early Mesopotamian, American, and African societies moved between individualistic and collective periods based on how people procured food (hunting, individualistic; planting, collectivist) with a fluid complexity to identity and function:

“The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today.”

A frequent shift between individualistic and collective social systems is rooted in the human experience. But the dominance of modern institutions created top-down, hierarchical structures we've forgotten are meant to change.

And now they are.

At this very second, message boards, group texts, social media, dark forests of the internet, and other digital worlds are challenging institutions coded a thousand years ago. The 21st century and perhaps many future centuries will be heavily influenced by post-individualistic, internet-based principles about what a self really is. Online communities have already evolved from one person one vote to one identity one vote. How distant the Victorian Age feels to us now will be what life before the internet feels like for generations to come. 

The internet's infinite private worlds at times feel more like the clan-based societies that predated individualism. But where past worlds were bound by blood, today’s are bound by interests, desires, identities, and what the algorithms governing these spaces — helmed by capitalistic KPIs —nudge us to do.

If the experiences of past generations are a guide, what lies ahead isn't the collapse of civilization. It's the invention of a new one based on a very different idea of what it means to be an individual.

Thank you

Thanks to Adam Curtis, John Higgs, Pia Mancini, Priya Parker, Elizabeth Anderson, Heather McGhee, Jamie Kim, Brandon Stosuy, Clare Farrell, and Charlie Waterhouse for conversations that helped shape this piece.

Thanks to Joseph Henrich, Larry Sidentop, David Graeber, David Wengrow, Sherry Turkle, Katherine Dee, Ben Thompson, Visakan Veerasamy, K-Hole, and Aaron Lewis for their writings that helped inform these ideas.

Thanks to Ilya Yudanov and Laurel Schwulst for creating visuals in this piece.

Linknotes

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich
Inventing the Individual by Larry Sidentop
The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis
The Second Self by Sherry Turkle
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Social Networking 2.0 by Ben Thompson
Youth Mode by K-Hole
Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression in The Creative Independent
Katherine Ball on striving to be an amateur by The Creative Independent
Multiple Personality Disorder, or D.I.D., seems prevalent online by Katherine Dee
Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on Twitter by Aaron Z Lewis
My notes from reading from Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self”

Provenance

This essay started in 2019 and was completed in late 2023. It was written in Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, and New York City.

It was first published in The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet in 2024 by The Dark Forest Collective.

"The Post-Individual" was released as a standalone single through the Dark Forest Collective that included a video introduction, an audio recording of the piece, and research notes in April 2024.

That first edition was supported by 250 collectors.

Download an edition of this work

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something essentially all ambitious people felt compelled to do.

Nadia described the Dark Forest as representing the next era of the internet — where we are now. Where instead of seeking to maximize status — which some of us still do — more of us find ourselves seeking safety and context online instead.

The changing web 

Eugene’s piece was published in February 2019. The Dark Forest piece was written in May 2019. Did something major happen in those three months? Not that I can remember, but this is the nature of culture: the same moment someone is crowning something as hitting an apex, someone else is ready to move on. 

That shift from one social order to the emergence of a new one with new rules, new physics, and even new goals is the topic that the pieces in The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet give voice to. They track the realization that we were moving away from “Status as a service” and towards something more like “Status as a context.” The worlds where we could create status rapidly expanded, but none were as towering as the status cathedrals from before. This confusing post-Babel time is where we stand now.

Dark Forests are real life

Looking back five years after the initial Dark Forest essay and pangs of concern, what most stands out is something that those of us who are drawn to Dark Forests have felt longer than most: that the internet is real life. What we do “in here” matters just as much as — and for some of us, problematically, even more than — what happens “out there.” 

What happens in here is real life. Our experiences online are adding up to something bigger than any of us. It’s so early in this geological-like process it’s hard to tell where it’s going, but the changes aren’t going to stop. What lays ahead is a future defined by the web. 

The mesaverse

In recent years we’ve gotten tied up in this infantile vision of “the metaverse” where we port over our physical embodiments onto screens. It’s a vision based on a 20th century imagination of what computers would do. 

What’s actually happening is even more incredible: the internet is a mesaverse. It’s concerned with what’s within (mesa = ~within). The internet isn’t meant to give a graphical representation to our bodies. The internet is what allows what’s inside — our minds, our souls, our many selves — to interact with the insides of others. The internet is where our alts come alive, our internal monologues become dialogues, and a stray thought becomes a globally resonant meme. This is its miracle.

The Post-Individual

For the past five years I’ve been working on a deeply researched history of this journey called “The Post-Individual” — a term meant to encompass a state of being in which people seek new forms of identity. What we’re going through now feels unprecedented, but weirdly enough 1,000 years ago some of our ancestors went through changes that echo what we feel today. 

“The Post-Individual” appears as the final piece in The Dark Forest Anthology, but the work has yet to go online. In the coming weeks I’m planning to send out the proper essay to Ideaspace subscribers, but today I want to try an experiment by releasing an early look at the work in a new way.

“The Post Individual: First Edition” is a bundle that collects much of my research and output around the post-individual into one downloadable package. The zip file includes:

• A video of me introducing the work

• “The Post-Individual” essay as a PDF

• An audio recording of me reading the piece

• Slides from a talk I gave at the University of Michigan on the post-individual

• Early drafts and research notes

I’ve made 250 of these First Editions available to collect with a suggested price of $5, but people can pay what they want (including $0). Collectors get an early read of the essay, credit as a patron of the work, and a digital first edition.

If you’re interested in exploring “The Post-Individual” and participating in an experiment, collect it here:

Collect "The Post-Individual"

More from the Dark Forest Collective

Two more updates from the Dark Forest Collective world this week:

The Dark Forest Collective released a second printing of the sold-out Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet this week, just as the first editions were arriving in mailboxes around the world. The response to the book has been very enthusiastic. If you missed the first printing you can pick up a copy here.

Ten members of the Dark Forest Collective came together for a Roundtable discussion for collectors this week — our first time all meeting without avatars. The whole experience was so warm and fun. Like the moment we as a group became truly alive. Watch the video here, and thanks to everyone for coming.

Peace and love,

Yancey

The power of the old world came from us being isolated individuals (we were told) who had to look out for number one (we were also told). But behind this was a secret: the corporate owners actually did act together through the power of contracts, copyright, and market forces they negotiated and set. Big picture, the owners were united. It was only the artist who was isolated.

The system banked on us competing against each other so fiercely we’d never look up. It worked for a long time because the channels were so tightly controlled. But once the internet broke them open, it was only a matter of time.

The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical world that created them. This has happened for good and for ill.

As creative people we especially know this. We all know creative lives negatively interrupted by the internet. It’s happened to musicians, filmmakers, journalists, and many more professions whose context was negatively reset by the web.

As creative people we always adapt. We like new things, we like creative tests, we’re open to learning tools in service of our work. The internet has overall been a massive net positive in terms of raw tonnage of self-expression, for which we especially benefit, even as the economics remain unsteady.

To date, the internet’s powers have been used mainly to recreate a mirror of the old model — the star system where everyone aims for their own channel, following, and competes for attention. That system has been enormously powerful, but it’s based on a limited vision of what’s possible with the internet. It’s trapped in the broadcasting model that defined the last century but not this one.

The internet’s miracle is that it gives us the power to see what the previous systems did not allow us to see: how connected we all are. Yes, we are all unique individuals, but between us are islands of connection whose depths carry infinite potential and the path to a new world.

This is the fire burning all over the internet the past decade. The spark that lights Dark Forests, drives memes, and makes internet magic. The fire of connection that the internet uniquely creates. The internet is where people from all over the world who look different and are different discover the meaningful connections between them. This happens billions of times a day, every day. It's so incredible and so common we rarely even notice it.

It’s pure magic. 

It’s this magic that unlocks what holds us back.

It’s this magic that creates our new beginning.

Our new beginning begins with us learning the power of banding into small, flexible groups of creative people aligned around the ideals, beliefs, and dreams we have in common. It begins with us coming together as individuals to become creatively, economically, and spiritually aligned around visions and goals we share.

Some of these are groups we’re already knowingly part of. Others are groups we might be members of but don’t yet recognize because our awareness of interconnection is limited. Still others are new groups that will begin to form once we notice the patterns and powers of connection that surround us.

Metalabel is one space where these new kinds of groups can be made. We call them labels — inspired by grassroots indie labels. Each a collection of unique people brought together by a feeling, a vision, a taste or aesthetic held in common.

In this model, artists and creative people take back their agency to organize and align with each other. Rather than play games to win the blessing of fickle external institutions, we create our own groups to legitimize each other. We advance each other. We sign each other. We split with each other. We design systems of economics, abundance, scarcity, sharing, and care based on whatever we wish.

In this new creative beginning we use the master’s tools but not their morals. We make decisions using our own creative values, not “industry standards.” We design our work and worlds from our best intentions, not our worst fears. We do it thinking not just of ourselves, but our creative brothers and sisters past, present, and future.

The old shit doesn’t work anymore and there’s so much to be excited about. The ground has shifted yet again. A new beginning is here.

Metalabel will begin openings its doors to projects next month. Tell us about something you’re working on and would like to explore releasing with us here.

Do you start with the parts? Do you start with the ends? Where does one begin?

How does one find out if there’s a newthing that wishes to be built?

How does one know if you have built the newthing correctly?

How do you know if the newthing needs to exist at all?

Newthings — ideas that become projects that become “real” — are organic machines. Living things made with material that originated in the Oneness manifested into metaphysically tangible structures in this realm.

They are magical. They are more powerful than us. Even when we think we have mastered them, they will remain a mystery.

This is how you build a newthing.

Feelings towards the existence of a newthing

The beginning is not with an idea but with the feeling towards an idea. Something you feel but do not know. It makes you anxious and gives you somersaults inside if you try to explain.

If you ignore this feeling it will go away, finding another soul open to its directions.

If you pay too much attention it will also go away, being made nervous by such direct energy.

The right approach is to notice it, be curious about it, but not demand anything of it. Allow it to show you what it’s meant to be.

Sensing newthing

The fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal and sensitive?

Are the newthing's true intentions the first purpose you saw or some other motive that has yet to be revealed?

Mix research, exploration, and experiments to discover newthing. Try expressing the simplest version of newthing for yourself. What happens? Did you feel the light inside you turn on?

Building newthing

Ah newthing, we think. I know what you are. Making you will be easy. The path is straight and sure.

Newthing hears your boasts and does not react, but knows how much you have to learn.

As you build newthing you will discover that building a newthing is a strange act where the harder you go about trying to do it, the harder it becomes. It will resist direct force and control. The more you relax and allow it to speak through you, however, the easier it will be.

When our goals for building newthing and newthing's goals for its own existence run in parallel, force magically accelerates. It is this synchronicity that we most seek.

Turning on newthing

Eventually newthing will have been sufficiently built and there’s no more tinkering to be done except to try turning it on.

When we flip the switch we discover the true nature of our newthing. It might run smooth or clunkier than expected. Maybe some parts of newthing are an unexpected delight, intuitive and pleasing, while others feel frustratingly unclear.

It’s our inner felt-sense more than our rational mind that leads us to truth in these moments. Our inner voice distinguishes what feels genuine from forced, what’s naturally alive from default dead. Listen to that voice and the tone of people you invite to experience newthing. Is it alive yet?

Newthing stays on

Once you have turned on newthing, the goal is often that newthing stays on. It ideally does not need direct human intervention by the creator for its continued use and existence. It is at this point that the newthing can start to, as they say, scale.

This process is a delicate one. Leave newthing unattended too soon and you risk it serving purposes you did not intend and might not be in its best interests. Hold the controls too tightly and you risk denying newthing what it wishes to be and where its purpose is best served.

A gradual approach is recommended. From more tightly controlled to less tightly controlled as you and newthing together define its boundaries and opportunities for existence.

Newthing stays true

Left on its own, newthing will become increasingly powerful in ways that serve it but may be in direct conflict with the actual goals that sparked its creation.

Newthings have a deep need to amass huge administrative teams of all shapes and sizes — middle managers, account managers, HR and finance specialists, legal. This team exists less to support newthing's purpose than newthing itself. They will slow down attempts at reform. They carry rumors and discord. They are powerful.

Newthings have a proven proclivity to attract people who love money. When these people get their hands on newthing, everything that makes the newthing beautiful and elegant and true to its essence will be challenged down to the penny. People who love money love money more than they love newthings. But newthings need money too, especially at the beginning. The tension runs deep.

Newthings also have an amazing ability to demand marketing departments — groups of people that primarily exist to hire more groups of people so that they can spend money in tribute to the greatness of newthing regardless of whether anyone else believes them. 

The goal is for newthing to stay true. To stay lean and immune to the forces that will naturally slow and distract it. That keeps away the people who love money and will tear it apart to get it. A newthing that stays committed to its reasons for existence.

All newthings die

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune.

The goal of newthing is to live as long as possible while staying true. The longer it does this, the stronger and more itself it will become.

But to do this, newthing must counterintuitively accept that one day it will die. Newthing's goal cannot be to not die, it must be to live fully as itself. Accepting the certainty of death, however far down the line, gives newthing the energy to thrive. Its life remains relevant.

If we hold onto a false belief that newthing will last forever, then we will eventually betray its essence. To prevent death, we will lower standards because the alternative is impossible to accept. So long as newthing stays alive, we will ignore lapses in values. There is no notion of life, just growth and the eternal postponement of death. This is how newthings die, even if their shadows keep moving.

When we make and serve a newthing, there is joy, pain, relief, feeling trapped, feeling lost, and letting go. We learn to love newthing, need newthing, and feel one with newthing. But as we mature, we learn something even more profound: that we must create space from newthing. That we must not forget the rest of our lives because of newthing. And, most importantly, we finally accept that we and newthings are separate entities, not one.

“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. 

“Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. 

“An increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”

The post struck a nerve. In the months and years that followed, hundreds of thousands of people read the piece, and some of the most brilliant voices on the internet — Venkatesh Rao, Maggie Appleton, Peter Limberg, Caroline Busta, Do Not Research, New Models, Trust Support, Leith Benkhedda — wrote their own pieces that built on, expanded, and argued with the idea.

Over the last year, the eleven of us have been secretly conspiring in our own Dark Forest channels to turn our asynchronous conversation into something bigger: a physical book that captures a critical moment in internet history.

The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet is a beautifully designed, 208-page book combining text and images to tell an alternately harrowing and empowering story of life on the web. Produced in a limited first-edition run of just 1,000 copies, the book is available for sale today through Metalabel in a collector’s bundle that includes:

Go here to explore the book and collect one of 777 copies available:

Purchase the Dark Forest Anthology

Metalabel

Today marks another significant debut: the Metalabel platform.

Metalabel is a new space for selling, releasing, and exhibiting creative work. It supports creative work of all kinds: physical, digital, IRL, music, video, writing, events, products, paywalled content, and bundles of any or all of the above. Like Bandcamp for everything.

Beneath the surface is a new operating system for groups of creative people to form labels — our word for creative groups who co-release work, share audiences, share funds, and pursue their goals together. Metalabel offers an entirely new (but yet very classic) way for creative people to release work and support one another.

We’ll be introducing an exceptional new drop every week for the next couple months to get Metalabel warmed up. Visit Metalabel here:

Visit Metalabel

Thank you

Thank you for being a part of this. Since leaving Kickstarter seven years ago, I’ve used this space to explore ideas, try out concepts, and engage in an extended open dialogue with you through these messages. I never would have guessed the many stops this would create along the way or where it would end up. I feel certain that without this space we share, neither I or this project would have landed in this exciting place.

Life is a gift that keeps giving.

Peace and love my friends,

Yancey

After college I moved to NYC and started working in full-time editorial capacities covering music and culture for a series of corporate ventures. In all of these I was part of an editorial team meant to legitimize what the businesses existed to sell (radio programming; live events; a digital music store). All of the companies operated in crowded markets, and “editorial” was their way to distinguish their product from the rest.

For my first few years I was lowest on the totem pole: an editorial assistant, an interview transcriber, a production editor. Eventually I became a staff writer, and, finally after five years, a Managing Editor, Editor in Chief, and part of strategic conversations among corporate leadership for the first time.

In those rooms I quickly learned how “editorial” fit in a corporate worldview. Nobody cared about what was being written or who was writing what. They simply saw editorial as a way to make their offering feel more quality – like a rug or oil painting meant to impart a touch of class.

This isn’t why I or my friends wrote about music, of course. I wanted to be another one of the greats: Nick Tosches! Richard Meltzer! Alan Lomax! I wrote to contribute to the amazing library of ethnomusicological understanding that is the music and arts writing canon. A collection of essays, classifications, and family trees crafted by professional and amateur obsessives who used their passion to help people better understand and appreciate a piece of art, its context, and the people who made it. 

Even during its heyday, music writing was criticized for being insular and navel-gazing (newsflash: it was and is). When Elvis Costello dismissed music writing as “dancing about architecture” – an awkward, unnatural, and sycophantic relationship – this is what he meant. It's another critique rooted in truth — see Almost Famous, whose writer-star dynamics I personally experienced more than once in much less dramatic but equally awkward fashion.

Their art was the art. We were the scribes there to record the story. Being in the presence of the myth was to experience God. Neil Young saying to me on the phone: “In the beginning, there was sound.” Can you imagine?

Us critics saw our role differently. We were also artists and our art was to interpret and reflect their art. A perfect meta-symbiosis. As writers, we spent hours searching for the right metaphor and reference to properly illuminate the lineage or genius of a work and help someone else feel what we felt and hear what we heard. A goal that mirrors what inspired the music we wrote about in the first place.

Now that era is ending. This week Pitchfork was effectively shut down by Conde Nast, the corporate overlord that bought it out a half-decade ago in what back then felt like the culmination and end of something. It was, and now it really is. Not just at Pitchfork. The editorial jobs like the ones I had two decades ago are long gone, unlikely to return. 

If I think back to those corporate meetings I was part of early in my career, it’s easy to see today's decision-making. A decade ago cultural criticism was a sparkly pixie dust you could spread over a business to give it a veneer of prestige. But in a world where TikToks dwarf all over forms of consumption and a video that someone spent a day making will get more attention than something a studio spent years and millions of dollars to make, who needs prestige?

The death of Pitchfork and cultural criticism is evidence that the mainstream is going through a prestige recession. It’s a value in decline. Witness the recent changes in programming decisions by the streaming services. Two years ago they were prestige maxing to garner cultural attention. But now it's the opposite. Values have changed.

Rather than prestige, this cultural moment is dominated by metrics, as George S. Trow predicted in a 1980 New Yorker essay called “Within the context of no context”:

“That movement… from wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big — that was the movement of history...

"From that moment, vastness was the start, not the finish. The movement now began with the fact of two hundred million, and the movement was toward a unit of one, alone. Groups of more than one were now united not by a common history but by common characteristics. History became the history of demographics, the history of no-history…

"The New History was the record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there.”

It was once critics who helped shape cultural values – spotting a trend here, putting a scene on the map there – but now the process is driven by metrics. Context, the land of the artist and the critic, has been determined valueless (unless algorithmic) by the mainstream, which honestly never much cared for it to begin with. Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else. Who was it that criticized selling out in the first place? The critic, of course.

The decline of the critic mirrors the decline of the mediums they cover. Music and film are industries whose relative cultural value has dipped, thus their critics's cultural influence has plummeted. In realms like politics and the culture wars, however, critics are thriving. Where there's power and money, critics can have influence and get paid. When the money and power dry up, the beat does too. 

I echo the widespread mourning for the loss of outlets, the ability to make a living, and the diminished cultural value of cultural criticism and coverage. A lot of friends lost their jobs over the years through this slow-motion crash, me included. It’s always been hard to make a living doing it, but today makes the past look like a socialist paradise in comparison. 

There will be plenty of funerals for the critic, but I'd rather a celebration of life. The past hundred years a canon that defined modernity, post-modernity, and our world was established, celebrated, illuminated, and constantly revised by critics and appreciators who used the pen to make their case. They're the ones who helped establish cultural significance. They're the ones who remind us to marvel not at demographics, but at individual, collective, and spiritual genius both momentary and across a career.

At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It's beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn't happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.

Cultural criticism and contextualization aren’t going away. They're being de-professionalized. They're switching mediums. What was a grand(ish) vocation has been demoted to a hobby and another form of "content." It feels inevitable. We've gotten so used to it by now. 

Like my past forays doing editorial in companies whose business was elsewhere (all of which eventually shuttered or dramatically reduced their editorial investments, including me), building a creative economy dependent on businesses and leaders fundamentally unaligned with our values will continue to cause problems. It’s only when we establish ourselves on our terms — as Pitchfork, RIP, once did — that we build durable worlds of our own.

For twenty years Pitchfork was as independent as they came. But as time goes on the harder it gets. Legacies rarely last beyond a generation. From the beginning of history, ownership and leadership changes have been hard to get right even in the best circumstances.

But the real dance will continue. Artists will continue to need context. It's what brings value and understanding to their work. People — many of them also artists — will continue to delight in interpreting and helping other people understand creative work. It's what brings us joy. This is the dance that matters. It hasn't stopped and it won't stop. Some things never change.

The previous five years we were on the West Coast in nature and with family, disappearing from the world.

This year was our return. It ended up being one of the best years of our lives.

When I reflect on the year, there are a few themes that stand out. Those, as well as some book and music recommendations, are collected below.

West Coast vibes

I was anxious about leaving Vancouver for NYC.

My last experience in NYC was as a CEO with a crazy schedule that burned me out. What I loved about the West Coast was how easy it was to disappear. I could vanish and no one would know or care. After so much professional responsibility, disappearing fed me creatively and personally. Projects and dimensions of my life flourished from the space.

I worried that moving back to NYC would suck me back into past experiences and cost me my freedom. This worry wasn't unfounded. There are fewer hours in a day in NYC compared to a place like Vancouver. Still, this past year I managed to maintain my freedom. I didn’t make a big deal out of being back. I didn't build up a big social calendar. I protected my time and right to disappear. My schedule was more like an artist’s than a CEO’s. I plan to keep this up.

Home in motion

We moved to NYC without a place to live. This year my wife, seven-year-old, and I resided in 11 different Airbnbs and hotels while looking for a home. We lived out of our suitcases and treated the time as a weird in-between that may never happen again. It was an adventure that showed us what home really means — being together, whatever the situation.

Do less to do bigger

This year I had a simple but all encompassing set of focuses: myself, my family, Metalabel, friends, and writing projects. Looking back, I realize each of those focuses got all of my attention because it didn’t go somewhere else. I wrote way fewer newsletters (sorry/not sorry). I didn’t attend any conferences or do any public speaking. I didn’t respond to requests for advice. My energy was 100% focused on my priorities. I felt the benefits.

Growing and appreciating with Metalabel

Metalabel is the most fun I’ve had on a project. I love my collaborators. I love how we work together. I love what we make together. I also love the way the project allows me to see how I've grown since Kickstarter. I can feel my growth on a daily basis. How an earlier me might have reacted to a situation compared to the person I am today. I didn't expect to be founding another project like this one, nor did I desire to. The Metalabel experience continues to be a gift.

Climbing out of the rabbit hole

The past two years I spent a lot of time exploring the blockchain world. Midway through the year I made a choice to make crypto a minor rather than a major in terms of my attention. I wrote about this decision in a private Google Doc circulated with others in the space. I’m still interested in and excited by blockchains, but it's been a relief to separate my and Metalabel’s future from the prospects of a specific technology/industry.

People I love flourishing

Both my wife and son hugely flourished this year in their own ways. Witnessing them, supporting them, coaching them, knowing their journey is part of my journey, continues to be the best feeling. I also watched some of my closest friends reach dizzying heights in terms of influence and responsibility. There’s a deep satisfaction that comes with seeing people you love do well.

Seeing (almost) everyone I love at least once

I managed to see almost every key person from every era of my life this year IRL. This is something I’m going to make an annual priority moving forward.

Learning to love myself

This was the most important lesson of the year.

Over the past two years my wife has become dear friends with an 87-year-old painter named Paul Waters. Paulie is a remarkable human being with an unbelievable life story who's become a member of our family. The biggest reason we moved back to NYC was so my wife could be closer to him.

Paulie showed my wife (and she me) what it means to love yourself. At 87, he's the happiest he's ever been. Each decade of his life has been better than the one before. Why? Because he's learned the importance of loving himself.

The only way to be happy, he reminds us, is to love yourself. Another person's love can't make you happy. Material things can't make you happy. Awards can't make you happy. The only path to joy is to love yourself.

After hearing it so many times from both Paulie and my wife this year, it finally started to sink in. I began to understand what that really means and what it feels like. That knowledge, still nascent, has brought me more of an inner calm and light. I became less interested in looking to the world as a way of understanding myself, and spent much more time appreciating and understanding what's within.

My friends noticed. "You seem so happy," I heard more than one say. They thought it was me moving back to NYC — which is part of it — but even bigger is the inner love I'm finally learning to give and accept.

Books

Books I enjoyed this year:

History

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

• Theodore Rex by Edmond Morris

• Colonel Roosevelt by Edmond Morris

• The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm

• Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed

• Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M Zubok

• Napoleon — A Life by Andrew Roberts

I started the Teddy Roosevelt series by Edmund Morris after we moved back to NYC. I’d read “The Bully Pulpit” about Teddy before, but thinking of him as a NYC kid and thinking about my own child now growing up here, I wanted to go deeper. The three books are deeply satisfying. The man led an incredible life and was as principled as they come, but he didn’t handle his last chapters as well as he could. Because of it, his reputation diminished. There’s a lesson in here about the dangers of peaking early. Highly recommended.

“The Age of Revolution” by Eric Hobsbawm (and his wider “Age of” series) is an excellent overview of the political reality we now take for granted. This book covers the century (1780-1880) during which almost every country in the world went through a major revolution, largely inspired by the French. Fascinating to see the immensity of these changes presented comparatively across cultures and regions.

Hobsbawm inspired me to want to go deeper into more revolutions. I read a Napoleon biography and a first-hand account of the 1917 Russian Revolution called “Ten Days That Shook the World.” (Scene that stands out: Trotsky accusing the moderate reformers of being too weak. He tells them something he learned in artillery (paraphrasing): “Never aim for the edges. If you aim for the edges, it's hard to strike a hit. Always aim for the center. If you aim for the center, you’ll always hit something, even if you miss.”)

I also read “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” by Vladislav Zubok, which I found incredibly interesting. I followed the collapse of the Soviet Union closely as it happened from an American point of view, but to read about it from a Russian perspective was to see Gorbechev as less a noble revolutionary and more a bumbling reformer who accidentally weakened his country from within beyond repair.

Watching the Twitter/X saga unfold while reading this book made me realize how empires often end by inept “reformers” getting into power and making a mess of things. The collapse of Twitter is to the internet what the collapse of the Soviet Union was to the globe in the late '80s/early '90s. It was unquestionably one of the most positive events of the year for my own mental health (and a lot of people's mental health) in 2023, even as it represents a wider “enshittification” of the web.

Fiction

• Trust by Herman Diaz

• 1984 by George Orwell

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• Ulysses by James Joyce (in progress)

• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

• Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

• The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu

"Trust" by Herman Diaz was the best book I read. The story of a rich NYC financier during the run up to the Great Depression, it's imaginatively written and perfectly constructed. So good.

I re-read both "Brave New World" and "1984" (it had been since high school), and couldn’t stop thinking about how Huxley wrote “Brave New World” in the California desert while watching a Utopian commune disintegrate (as written about by Mike Davis in the last chapter of “City of Quartz”).

Started "Ulysses" during vacation because why not? Amazing read that requires meditation-like levels of concentration to follow. Thoroughly enjoyable. Got a third through and got distracted, but still gonna finish it (he tells himself…).

The fantasy/sci-fi books are all re-reads and research for different projects. All so satisfying.

Ideas

• The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung

• The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

• The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber

Always enjoy Jung, whose writing can be so conversational (this book was just okay, though). The breadth and depth of Joseph Campbell’s research are astounding. Jung and Campbell together are a powerful pairing in the worlds of myth and dreams. I admire David Graeber’s temerity to dream and imagine bigger than the rest of us.

Culture

• Organic Music Societies by Lawrence Krumpf

• Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

• A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno

• Everything Is a Self Portrait by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro

• Corporate Rock Sucks: The SST Records Story by Jim Ruland

• This Book is Broken by Stuart Berman

“Organic Music Societies” is a biography and creative catalogue for the musicians and artists Don and Moki Cherry, whose music and performances are some of my favorite music in the world (and what I listened to more than anything this year). The book has lots of pictures and wonderful details about their work. Highly recommended. Also highly recommended: “Things Become Other Things,” an exceptional photography and writing book from Craig Mod.

Music

• Don Cherry's post-1968 catalogue

• Pharaoh Sanders, "Pharaoh" box set

• Time Wharp, "Spiro World"

• Beach House, "Become EP"

• Phillip Glass, "Glassworks"

• Miles Davis, "Live - Evil"

• Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, "Jerusalem"

• The Phillip Glass Ensemble, "Glassworks" live at Roulette in NYC

• Pharaoh Sanders tribute show at National Sawdust in NYC

• Courtney Barnett live at National Sawdust in NYC

• George Coleman live at Small's Cafe in NYC

• Moormother live at Lincoln Center in NYC

Ten years ago the music part of this post would have been the longest part. These days I'm fully into my weird jazz dad era, staying heads down while listening to skronky, unconventional music and enjoying it deeply.

I listened to Don Cherry more than anyone else this year — especially anything live from the early '70s, when his organic experiments were in full bloom. A close second is the double-pairing of Pharaoh Sanders' "Pharaoh" record (with its gorgeous "Harvest Time") and the live Miles Davis record "Live - Evil," both of which were constant companions.

In terms of new music, the only things that got my full, repeated attention were the new Beach House EP (so great) and the Time Wharp record, which is a delight. Here's a short playlist of some of my most-listened to songs.

Looking forward

This past year was the happiest of my life. It felt like the culmination of all my learnings and experiences actualized into an existence that more truly reflects who I am and wish to be. I enter the new year with no big goals or resolutions beyond continuing on this path, and gratitude for having found it. In this new year, I wish the same for all of you.

Peace and love my friends.

Yancey

On a recent hike in British Columbia, I silently asked the mountains to “fill my cup of creative manifestation,” not sure what response, if any, would return.

To my great surprise, the mountains answered my question by telling me a story I haven’t stopped thinking about since — the Parable of the Three Lakes.

In the mountains of British Columbia stand three lakes that reveal a truth about all great journeys. 

At the bottom of the mountain is Lower Lake — a clear and inviting turquoise bowl hugged by oversized ferns and thick canopies of evergreens. Lower Lake reflects childhood; the beginnings of an exploration. It's where every journey begins.

Once we pass Lower Lake, we begin to climb the mountain. The path becomes steep. The footing uncertain. A frothy torrent of whitewater tumbles alongside our trail. This is the longest and hardest part of the journey. The challenging steps that take us beyond the beginnings of our life and purpose. 

The challenging ascent is rewarded with Middle Lake: a tranquil milky-blue water twice as big as Lower Lake, so wide the towering trees on the other side look like tilt-shifted models. Middle Lake’s waters are calmed by the self-knowledge that stills what’s beneath the surface. They invite us to bask and explore. 

As badly as we will want to stay, Middle Lake is not the end of the journey. There’s one last climb to the top. The shortest leg of all.

Atop the mountain the rush of water slows to a crawl. Soft meadows of red, orange, and purple coat the ground. Upper Lake, enormous and carved into the mountain top, lurks in the distance. Along the mountain’s rim hangs a glacier suspended like an ice dragon. Its melting claws plummet in giant waterfalls that feed Upper Lake below.

It was here, at this scene, that the mountains finally spoke. They told me:

The journey felt like a climb from one destination to the next that demanded effort and perseverance. But the view from the top tells another story, equally true: that our life’s purpose is being fed by the glacier — the one true Source — all along.

The waters of who we become are the same waters of how we began.

The Three Lakes are not separate — they are one. 

Since encountering the beauty and truth these scenes revealed, its voice hasn't stopped echoing in my mind. You seek what you are already becoming, it gently murmurs. Keep going. Do not stop.

This is how we honor the Parable of the Three Lakes: we appreciate the Source, and we continue the climb.

• Permalink for this post can be found here, at a new personal website. I’m writing more frequent, shorter posts there that will only occasionally be sent out as emails. Some recent posts you might be interested in: The cultural Doppler effect on how ideas and aesthetics age, and Notes on hiring on ways my approach to hiring has evolved.

• In a dream come true, I was a guest on Josh Citerella’s podcast to discuss Metalabel, the post-individual, and more. Thanks to Josh for the warm invitation. Listen here.

• Metalabel dropped its ninth release this week: Lonely Writers Club, an ephemeral peer group for writers to collaborate and publish work with others. I’ll be participating in this experiment. To join me/us, go here.

  Thanks for reading. Subscribe to receive new posts. <3 <3

When you’re focused on something few others are thinking about, you find yourself constantly making the case to yourself and others that your vision is worth pursuing and worthy of other people’s attention. This ongoing need to justify your work creates a significant emotional overhead.

I speak to this emotional overhead from experience. Every project I’ve done — Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Micd, Bentoism, This Could Be Our Future, Metalabel — was initially a 1-of-1. Not something a bunch of people thought was obvious and were looking to do, but something I and the others who were part of them were convinced would matter even as the how and why were unclear.

In each of these projects I regularly found myself trying to convince friends, family, and potential future participants on the merits of these ideas. It was an uphill search for the words, frames, themes, and execution that would help others see it the way I or we did.

There were times when this was invigorating and rewarding. But there were just as many times I felt foolish for even trying. In those lower confidence moments I felt an urge to give up and try to be “normal.” To stop going against the grain and go along with what others were doing.

Despite these fears, I did believe in these projects to the degree that I and others poured years of our lives into them even during extreme uncertainty. But there was a constant questioning of whether if it was worth it and if we were crazy.

Pursuing a 1-of-1 purpose

Let’s say that despite the doubt and uncertainty, you decide you won’t give up on your idea and you’re going for it. How do you do that?

In my experience, you must be able to live inside of your vision in such a way that you can communicate its emotional essence, its core truth, to the immediate world around you. You must immerse yourself in the concept car version of the universe where your 1-of-1 vision clicks in an everyday way, and then express how that vision credibly relates to people’s actual lives.

When trying to make the case for what’s now called crowdfunding in the years before Kickstarter launched, my cofounders and I constantly talked to artists and creative people who we hoped would one day use the service. In those conversations — some deeply inspiring and educational, others awkward and even painful — we learned more about our project based on what connected with others and what didn’t. It was a years-long process of trying, failing, and iterating to find the language and expressions that would make what felt clear to us obvious to others.

With Metalabel we’re doing this in public. This is part of the power of the release club/metalabel form: it’s not a recipe for a single product that either succeeds or fails — it’s a long process of winning over an audience with many different expressions of a vision.

We see each release as a chance to increase the surface area of our purpose. We’re trying to make our vision tangible by releasing zines, experiences, and products that express our ideas. Every release is a chance to find the people who connect with our ideas, and for us to better express the essence of what our project is about.

Stubbornness is also important. In the short term a 1-of-1 purpose will almost always fail. Every day is yet another moment that people didn’t follow your vision and the world failed to transform according to your ideas. The failures are literally limitless.

With a longer view, however, this process looks different. Eighty straight days of struggling in the darkness can produce one powerful insight that lights the way for months to come. What feels like foolish drudgery in real time looks like an epic hero’s journey when examined from the rearview mirror of an arc that turns out well.

Thriving with a 1-of-1 purpose

Having the vision and motivation to go for a 1-of-1 purpose are the most important elements. But what if we want to thrive in the pursuit of our goal? What does that look like?

First, and one of the hardest parts: you must give up your desire for approval from others. When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know people — who are especially aware of social status and trends — will dismiss. But even though these cultural influencers shape the opinions of others (you pay attention to them, after all), they are not a real path to fulfillment or success.

In a C.S. Lewis piece called “The Inner Ring,” he notes that many of us are trying to move up a social ladder to be in an “inner ring” with the people whose approval we most seek. But Lewis points out that for every step you make up the ladder into an inner ring, you discover there’s yet another, more inner ring further in.

This process literally never stops. Years ago I spent time with a famous tech CEO who confessed that he felt a lack of self-worth because he compared himself to Jeff Bezos, who he fell short of in his eyes. No matter how high or far you climb, these feelings stick around if you don’t consciously move beyond them.

C.S. Lewis writes about how to avoid this:

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public… But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

Following your own ideas and instincts is how we create genuine confidence and craft in our work. True satisfaction is achieved by liberating ourselves from desiring the approval of others. While others might triumphantly social climb into various inner rings, it’s only from pursuing our own path that we find lasting fulfillment.

Manifesting a 1-of-1 purpose

Metalabel’s 1-of-1 purpose is to establish an organizational structure for groups of creative people to support one another and release work together. Our goal is to make release clubs easy to understand and a better path for releasing creative work that fulfills whatever goals we have in mind when making it.

After working on this together for the past year-plus amidst constant uncertainty, we’re learning how to manage our emotions and create work that expresses our vision. Especially important to our project:

• Be the thing — Don’t just theorize about release clubs, actively be one every day. By doing things we want as a release club, we learn what others might want. This act of progressive productization, where we first do the thing for ourselves and then make it available to others, has repeatedly revealed valuable truths that have helped us bring this idea to others.

• Increase the surface area of the idea — Each release is a chance to help more people see the world the way we see it. They’re opportunities to connect with people by showing them how our ideas can match their needs and fulfill their desires.

• Have fun — There’s a version of this work that’s hyper-analytical where we try to Moneyball our way to success. There’s another version where we’re living it, enjoying it, and having fun with it. Our best work comes when we’re having fun and enjoying what we’re doing, not when we’re overly analytical. Analytical thinking creates fear and uncertainty. Acting based on what’s fun and what we want builds energy, clarity, and momentum.

These three keys are specific to Metalabel’s 1-of-1 purpose, but I suspect something like this is true for most projects. To power through pain and uncertainty, we must feed our psyches with action and energy.

In a blog post this sounds easy, and of course reality is different. When I talk to strangers about what we’re doing, I often hear things like “collaborating is hard” or “collectives never work.” Some of the points people raise are valid and have helped steer us onto firmer ground. But we also need to be careful not to obsess over skeptical reactions. In many cases those are people who we haven’t learned to communicate our ideas to yet, or who just aren’t ready to hear them. That’s okay! For other peoples’ 1-of-1 purposes, we’re those skeptics too.

What they don’t see, and what we continue to experience, is that while collaborating can be hard, it’s also a more rewarding, fruitful, and uplifting experience than doing things on our own. Yes, it’s true that groups of people collaborating will run into some well-known problems, but it’s also true that we see ways to make that experience better, and that the upsides of even trying are genuinely life-changing. Whenever we have doubt — and we will continue to have doubts! — all we have to do is look at our own emotional and creative experience to know that what we’re doing is true in a deep and profound way.

Having gone through this a few times, I’ve finally come to realize that we should feel lucky when the universe gifts us a 1-of-1 purpose. It’s not something to lament or fear. It’s something to relish and embrace. When you’re called by a vision few others can see, trust that if you do your part, one day others will too.

P.S.

This piece was inspired after messaging with a friend about the challenges of working in an area no one else is working in. Here’s what I sent:

I’ve been finding it helpful to think about Metalabel as having a singular, 1-of-1 purpose: make joining and starting a release club so easy to understand and desirable that we inspire a new way to make creative work together.

This purpose is 1-of-1 because as far as I’m aware, no one else is working on this or sees it the way we do.

Focusing on that 1-of-1 purpose — rather than where we and other projects might have similar aims — has been transformational in clarifying who we need to be for this project to reach its potential.

I see a similar logic with Cabin. It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.

I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in something no one else can see, but trusting that if you do your part eventually others will.

After that exchange, I wrote a metablog for the Metalabel squad about the emotional and practical experiences of having a 1-of-1 purpose. Articulating this and talking about it as a group was an energizing framing for us. I’m posting a public version of that post to help others who are feeling alone in their projects, and to share ideas for how to manage what can be a very difficult — but also extremely fulfilling — experience pursuing a 1-of-1 purpose.

Recent work

• Metalabel recently dropped a new zine in a newspaper box we installed on Canal St in NYC near our office.

  

  A New Creative Era is a call for a new spirit of collaboration and mutual support among creative people. The zine points to patterns, tools, and paths to get there. Read the zine online here, cosign the release to receive an invite to workshops we’re hosting in NYC and online, and purchase a physical copy of the zine shipped to you here.

• This past weekend Metalabel co-hosted a post-internet art film exhibition at the Metrograph theater in NYC that was spectacular. This tweet gives you a sense of the wild vibe.

• Other recent Metalabel drops include a zine collecting some of the best writing about DAOs, a zine exploring multiplayer collaboration in novel ways, and the first-ever vinyl release on Metalabel, with a trippy concept album based on an obscure book about the concept of a “pluriverse.” As you can probably tell, we’re having a lot of fun. I hope you are too in whatever you’re working on.

“I’m talking to you,” he began, “because the old shit doesn’t work anymore.”

The established patterns for releasing music, going on tour, and putting work into culture, he explained, were no longer relevant. The infrastructure, the audiences, and the money just weren’t there.

“I don’t know where things are going,” he continued, “But I know the old ways aren’t working. When I look at what you’re doing it’s interesting and at least it’s optimistic. So I‘m here.”

This same sentiment, worded slightly differently, has come up more than a handful of times in conversations with musicians, artists, record labels, gallerists, artist managers, and other creative professionals in recent weeks.

Behind these conversations is a fundamental change of the digital age that applies to essentially every creative field: in the past, consumers bought and collected physical editions of creative work, creating a direct value exchange between fans, artists, and producers. Today almost all creative work is digitized and essentially rented — lowering payouts, devaluing work, and redirecting the lion’s share of rewards to the platforms hosting the work rather than the creators themselves.

This change couldn’t be more obvious or widespread, but its downstream effects continue to gain momentum, even now. Industry insider newsletters across creative fields reveal similar trend lines: Box office receipts and payouts from some creator economy platforms are dropping. Touring is more expensive and impractical than ever for artists and fans due to monopolistic rents. Because of AI we may face a post-royalties future for musicians. A musician makes more money selling 10,000 vinyl albums than getting 4,000,000 streams. Netflix now cancels a lot of fan-favorite shows (after being the ones who famously delighted fans by saving Arrested Development). Once-trusted web platforms keep getting worse. Nobody watches music videos anymore. Legacy media coverage has decreasing influence. Indie film producer Ted Hope warns that it’s impossible to make movies like filmmakers used to and we’re heading towards an America without movie theaters.

Here’s how Oscar-winning film producer Chris Moore (Manchester By the Sea) put it in a recent blog post:

“How do we make a living and provide services for the subscriber-driven companies?… The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product. Makes sense – being paid on a regular basis before you make content is awesome, but in this subscription economy, we have lost the ability to place value on each individual film. [Instead this] places more value on the content provider and its library than the quality of each individual piece of content.”

The change from valuing individual standout creative work to valuing ubiquitous libraries of always-on content has made increasing areas of culture no longer art- or hit-making businesses, but ones of mass content-creation. Chris Moore again:

“Without the hit-driven business model, there has become no way for me to continue as an independent creative producer in the same way I was before. Development money + fees + bonuses + profit participation allowed for a speculative model of finding new properties, supporting new talent, and executing other people’s stories... But those days are gone.”

We know what the world is changing from.

What we don’t know is what it’s changing to.

The paths before us

As more and more of the pillars of the 20th century stop working the way we expect, where do we turn? Already there are several competing paths for how to respond to this moment of breakdown.

• Some people want to AI all the things. Bank regulators failed to supervise Silicon Valley Bank properly, so create AI regulators to do it, then apply this argument to everything. For this crowd the answer to the increasing complexity of modern life is to put computers in charge as the ultimate systems designers and admins. (This is a terrible and extremely dangerous idea, btw.)

• Others want to metaverse all the things. Only online, say these people, will we truly be freed from the “reality privilege” enjoyed by the rich. Instead, live fully online in immersive corporate servers where you purchase all your favorite brands and be verifiably you for only $12.99 a month!

• Another group wants to incite the public to ape in and drop out into a new separatist movement of sovereign “network states” where internet groups can create their own countries, avoid US laws, and ban and cancel whomever they want.

Among some of the most powerful and influential people in the world, these seem to be the three primary arguments for where we should go from here.

None of these paths is at all appealing to me personally. Instead, the path I’m opting into is one where we evolve with change rather than fight it, while holding onto and manifesting the values that are most core to who we are.

This is the spirit behind Metalabel — an operating system for groups of creative people to release work together. It’s a form that encourages people to collaborate and support each other in their creative projects rather than compete for attention, as “Creator Economy” platforms incentivize them to.

Metalabels are not an entirely new invention. They combine the social and technological structures of the internet with the centuries-long legacy of how creative people have traditionally come together to make culture. Think of projects like the Royal Society, the Whole Earth Catalog, The Paris Review, Def Jam, Dischord Records, and countless other collective creative efforts. A metalabel is how those same kinds of projects can come into being in the internet age.

The result is a structure that amplifies the benefits (global connectivity and shared context) and counters the drawbacks (loneliness and zero-sum competitiveness) of the web, while being optimistic about what the future holds. Our format of the onchain record (or, as another record label founder called it in a conversation, “a metarecord”), is one of those expressions of optimism. Onchain records let creators bundle different forms of media into a collectible release, creating a new direct value exchange between artists and fans.

So far, four creative works have been published using the onchain record format, and the early results have been exciting.

• After the Creator Economy by Metalabel sold out 200 copies of a physical zine, half via onchain records, half traditional ecommerce, while making a PDF free for anyone to download.

• The Quadratic Funding Collection by Gitcoin sold more than 9,000 editions of an onchain record that reissued an academic paper co-written by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, raising more than $1 million (including royalties) for public goods in a little over a week.

• B2B: A 2 Nite Experience by the musical collective Songcamp and onchain music store Catalog sold tickets to two upcoming concerts in NYC using a record, selling out those editions in just six minutes.

• Sacred Stacks, a zine collecting work by citizen journalists around the world organized by University of Colorado professor Nathan Schneider, dropped yesterday, selling more than 200 of its 300 limited editions in its first 24 hours, directing funds to eight groups around the world.

• Each of these records represents creative people selling editions of and getting fairly paid (and/or supporting others) through their work.

By combining multiple works, kinds of work, and the creators’s contexts in one bundle, onchain records provide creators a format that reflects the multi-medium, multi-message, worldbuilding reality of releasing creative work today, while also creating a canonical record of that work’s existence. More of these Quality Drops, as we call them, will be released in the weeks and months ahead (sign up here to be notified when they do).

Not all of the groups and creators I’ve spoken with about dropping work with Metalabel are going to. For some, we’re still too out there, and I get that. But most of the people I’ve spoken with are going to. Some because they’re really excited by what we’re doing. And some who are willing to take a chance because they don’t see a better option.

At some point the old shit doesn’t work anymore. But that’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to make new shit that does.

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“Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others… World-building means creating everything — not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself — the language, style, rules, and architecture.”

— Laurel Schwulst in “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?”

In 1967, the Beatles did two extraordinary things: they released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, widely regarded as a monumental work in culture then and now, and they pretended to be somebody else. These accomplishments were simultaneous. The very first song on Sgt. Pepper’s boldly asked listeners to suspend disbelief and go along with the four most famous musicians in the world pretending to be a band who’d been playing together for twenty years and were now backing a crooner named Billy Shears (played/sung by Ringo Starr).

That Sgt. Pepper’s was a universe different from the shared universe of 1967 was evident right from the famous album art: a photo shoot where figures from across cultural and historical eras – including an earlier version of the Beatles themselves – have come together for an extraordinary moment.

This record is famously called the first “concept album,” meaning it wasn’t simply the best thirteen songs the Beatles were ready to release, but a specially designed collection of tracks that, taken as a whole, added up to something bigger.

What inspired the Beatles to do this? Were they on drugs? 

Well, yes, but it was more than that. As documented in the book Beatles ‘66, Sgt Pepper’s began after Paul McCartney experimented with wearing a disguise during a six-week vacation. By wearing glasses, a mustache, and combing his hair back, he became anonymous. For one of the most famous people in the world, the experience was understandably liberating. After the trip he called the other Beatles and told them, paraphrasing, “We can’t make another Beatles record. We need the freedom of being somebody else.” This is how Sgt Pepper’s was born.

The record and its concept album form are legendary artistic achievements. The work is extraordinary, yet the structure and journey behind Sgt. Pepper’s is available to all creative people, and might even be necessary for consistently making great work while preserving your mental health. 

Sgt. Pepper’s has historically been known as a concept album. But these days we might classify it as a kind of creative act very much in the zeitgeist: worldbuilding. In the hands of an artist, worldbuilding is more than a tool for creating fictional worlds. It creates:

• A safe creative space separate from the earthly realm

• A connection to the larger entity you channel to create art

• The empowerment of the symbolic over the rational

• Visibility into the tensions and boundaries of what makes it into your work and what doesn’t

• New personifications and embodiments

• A new source of confidence and strength

This post explores worldbuilding as a form of creative resilience.

What’s worldbuilding?

Worldbuilding is the act of designing a self-contained universe: “creating everything — not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself — the language, style, rules, and architecture,” to quote Laurel again.

Worldbuilding is most common in fantasy, sci-fi, and fiction where authors and auteurs use vivid visions of worlds to tell immersive stories (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Dune). Worldbuilding grounds the story in a universe where the work’s characters and plot points make a self-contained logical sense while providing escapist fantasy.

In recent years worldbuilding has evolved in multiple directions: corporate creators like Marvel and Disney have used the internal logic and characters of their worlds to build larger stories and, most importantly, new IP cashflows; and through fanfiction, where online communities have collaboratively expanded existing universes with new ideas and directions. 

What planet are you from?

This piece is focused on another kind of worldbuilding: where an artist expresses themselves from a world, but where that world may not be explicitly or fully explained to the audience. A world that exists in the mind of the artist, that’s felt more than spoken, that lingers in the shadows and air, the source of life and truth from which everything emanates. Sgt. Pepper’s is one of the most famous examples of this form, but it’s far from the only one.

One of the most literal examples of this type of worldbuilding is the jazz musician Sun Ra, who famously claimed to be born on Saturn and denied any Earthly origins. Sun Ra and his Arkestra made music that sounded like it came from another planet, eventually establishing a wider free jazz scene – effectively creating an otherworldly world that other artists came to co-inhabit.

We now know that Sun Ra grew up in Alabama in the Jim Crow Era and his life was changed with a transformative moment when, as he told an interviewer:

“My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me... The world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.”

As a Black man growing up in the racist American South, creating an alternative universe for himself and his work feels like a tool of sanity and survival in the spirit of a long line of African-American self-care, from slavery to the Reconstruction to the Black Panthers (see Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s excellent Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice). But Sun Ra’s world is also a source of inspiration, figurative exploration, and a safe space to go deep into otherwise outrageous ideas. The world he created gives his work its own creative logic.

Artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is another extreme and evocative worldbuilding example, a dazzling universe with strange intersections between the familiar (high school football players) and the mythical (creatures and movements from an alternate reality). The Cremaster universe was realized through a series of five feature-length films and countless photographs, drawings, and sculptures released across nearly a decade of exhibitions in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s that the Guggenheim called “a self-enclosed aesthetic system.” In other words, a world.

Like the sci-fi and fantasy examples of worldbuilding, there’s a narrative-like world expressed through the art. But Barney uses this world as a text to explore his own ideals, creating a work that feels less like another world than art that comes from another world. We might think of the Cremaster universe as a place to be inspired from, just as Sun Ra’s origins as a native Saturnian inspired and informed his choices about his music, performances, and identity.

Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce persona, which debuted for her 2008 album I Am… Sasha Fierce, is another example. She explained the new persona to People by saying: “I have someone else that takes over when it’s time for me to work and when I’m on stage, this alter ego that I’ve created that kind of protects me and who I really am.” 

This isn’t dissimilar from Paul McCartney’s revelation. In both cases two of the great artists of the modern age saw an opportunity to derive a new source of confidence by creating an alternate persona. This gave them permission to override their rational fears and concerns, and to instead prioritize symbolic logic and artistic freedom when they entered their creative space (another evocative example of this: the band KISS).

Discovering your world

I have my own personal example inspired by Paul McCartney’s story that I’ve told in this newsletter once before. I was struggling with anxiety at the start of writing This Could Be Our Future, worrying what people would think, whether my ideas were too out there, doubting I had “permission” to say what I believed needed to be said.

While struggling with these feelings, I read about Paul’s realizations that led to Sgt Pepper’s, and I too decided to change my appearance. For the first six months of writing the book I grew a mustache to feel less like myself. Normal Yancey was worried that his ideas were too out there, but Mustached Yancey didn’t care what anyone thought. Every time I looked in a mirror or touched my face I was reminded and empowered by my decision to become somebody else.

This Could Be Our Future doesn’t include any mention of the mustache or this search for confidence. Creating from your world doesn’t mean you have to describe what your private world looks and feels like. It means creating work inspired and strengthened by an intentional inner world. Creating from that place means being able to immerse ourselves in our own universes and lose conscious touch with the shared one. 

Creating work from your world takes conscious and unconscious practice. One way to do this through rules. A great example are the Rules for the Bill Nye the Science Guy TV show, a document that lays out how their world works. 

The show guide reads in part:

• “All the science we see has to be real science. No fictional ‘molecular resynthesizer’ machines that perform magic tricks, for example.

• “The science being explored provides the drama. For example, there is no time spent looking for someone's stolen lab coat.

• “Science Guy's reality is television. He can jump from place to place the way a viewer would expect anyone on television to be able to do. There is no need for something like the ‘Way-Back’ machine or the ‘Transporter’ or the ‘Door to Anywhere.’”

These rules create constraints and underlying assumptions that effectively pre-make how the show will work going forward. This helps establish the reality the project lives within and that viewers must implicitly accept when watching.

A similar example is the Dogme ‘95 school of filmmaking, which follows a rigid set of rules to manifest a specific creative style and vision. Those rules include things like:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)

3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.

10. The director must not be credited.

Rule-based worldbuilding can feel similar to a values discovery exercise, in that both involve digging beneath the surface to identify the underlying causes, motivations, and structures to how you work. But worldbuilding and values-setting are fundamentally different processes. Values setting is a search for the ephemeral beliefs that will hold you together and guide future decisions. Worldbuilding is imagining and creating the distinct universe that you speak from where your way of seeing things is the norm. 

By imagining and immersing yourself in your world, it becomes more alive in your awareness. Its environment speaks to and through you, generating ideas and directions that reflect where and how your work naturally exists. Worldbuilding isn’t a way to make decisions. It’s psychic infrastructure and environmental design for where your work lives. 

Applied worldbuilding

Once you’ve imagined your world, what do you do with that vision? How do you create from that place?

I recently applied a basic worldbuilding lens to our work with Metalabel, giving myself a series of prompts to brainstorm on. The experience brought immediate clarity to what we were doing, including our key differences from the wider world and why and how we speak.

I started from a big picture perspective:

Why does our world exist? How is it different from the shared world? Why do we need our own world at all? 

Wider world: Creative people who pursue similar visions or goals compete against each other for attention and status.

Our world: Creative people pursuing similar visions or goals cooperate with each other to grow the attention and status of what they care about.

Wider world: Organizations are vehicles for pursuing financial goals.

Our world: Organizations are vehicles for pursuing creative and cultural goals.

Wider world: Success means constantly winning in the battle to be the star of attention.

Our world: Success means making and expressing work that reflects your intentions. 

These questions identified key places of separation and points of difference between the place we come from and where others come from.

Next question:

Is the standard of time in our world the same as the wider world?

In exploring this I realized that within Planet Metalabel, time works not on a natural clock but in release cycles:

• A period of quiet while new ideas are explored and percolating

• A period of initial creation where ideas start to be executed

• A period of anticipation as the release takes shape and external excitement starts to grow

• A release day when the drop goes live, sometimes with press and supporting moments

• A following month(s)-long release window where the release bounces around culture

This realization immediately shifted our internal energy about how, where, and why we communicate. This allowed us to let go of the expectations of our shared world (where we’re supposed to clout-chase alongside everyone else) and to stay true to our own.

Who are you in this world? 

• We are participants. We’re one of the first to consciously begin this journey and our journey is ongoing.

• We are designers of the metalabel structure, recognizers of the form, users of the form, and teachers of the form.

• We are fans, curators, and consumers of all the great work made possible by the metalabel form and the people who use it.

How do you and others communicate in this world? In what mediums, in what languages, and in what frequencies? 

• Releases are our most powerful forms of speech. Our releases express and manifest our world in the wider shared one.

• We speak about groups of people contributing to shared creative and cultural visions (both our own and others).

• We speak with a sense of optimism, a belief in cooperation, and a respect for the worlds of others.

• We communicate as a group in longer form every two weeks. We speak as individuals whenever we like.

What does your world feel like? What does it smell like? How does it feel to walk around?  

• Like a scene that has yet to be discovered

• Full of life, energy, positivity, people banding together

• Not perfect or spotless, not without problems

• A future you’d be happy to live in

• The group vacation you hope never ends

Identifying these and a much longer list of questions created a material feel to the Metalabel world that the seven of us reside in. This brought us closer to our ultimate source of inspiration, and gave us permission to follow the internal logic and instincts of our own world rather than the expectations of the wider one. Our output needs to reflect and inspire these same feelings in others for the Metalabel world to grow beyond the seven of us.

Creating without a world

Without the grounding of a place of origin for your work, holding onto your distinct voice and way of seeing is more difficult. It’s logical to be swayed by the overpowering rationality of the wider world. It’s human to be affected by the judgments and critiques of others. It’s seductive to be drawn in by market influences and the slavish devotion to attention that dominates creative culture.

Creating with your feet firmly set in the shared world ties your work, its spirit, and its meaning to the dominant strands of the cultures that surround you. Rather than creating a path of escape as the best creative work does (whether that escape is internal or external), your work will reflect whatever you’re consuming, is currently popular, or what everyone else is doing. If you want to pinpoint the difference between art and content (or art and critique), this might be it. 

To make work grounded in the shared world is to be haunted by “shoulds” – Should I be more commercial? Should I do what my peers are doing? Should I chase financial opportunities? These questions are not the friends of great art.

Identifying the place where this comes from and the rules that hold it together is what enables creative rather than rational ideas to flourish. It puts these “shoulds” in their place. Worldbuilding prioritizes the symbolic and inspirational over the practical and rational. This is critical to making art! Here’s the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi:

“The thing about making something is the tickling of the imagination. The possibility of making it, or the experience of making it, creates the imagination or invites the imagination. There is no end to art. There is no beginning, no better. It can be different, but it cannot be better art.”

Noguchi accepts a kind of truth to art – that its possibility, the experience of making it, and the imagination it sparks in the artist and others are objective truths about art that the artist should not overthink or doubt. Art is a truth that originates somewhere else. Alan Moore’s concept of the “ideaspace,” the inspiration for this publication’s name, is a similar theory about the other world where art and ideas are born.

The dangers of worldbuilding

Still, we cannot go so far as to say worldbuilding is always beneficial or purely good. As this exceptional Mike Harrison piece from 2007 (h/t Robin Sloan) emphasizes, worldbuilding can be:

“an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake.”

If we think about the worldbuilding that underpins gaming and NFT projects, we can see the danger that Harrison speaks to. Those worlds can be explicitly designed to justify behaviors that benefit the owners of the world at the expense of its audience, like paid upgrades and add-ons that give players special abilities as rationalized by the imagined world but have no value beyond it. Worldbuilding can be a powerful tool for financial exploitation.

The path from worldbuilding as creative resilience to worldbuilding as exploitation is not a winding one. It’s quite easy to see how worldbuilding taken to an extreme rationalizes these steps. As Robin Sloan put it to me after reading an early draft of this post, “I think a few voices of ‘be careful!’ might be useful & welcome as you encourage folks to consider this tool.” Agreed!

Worldbuilding is creative resilience

Last year the artist Laurel Schwulst (quoted at the start of this piece) wrote in an essay called “To write, I first must world”:

“For those of us who feel different, who don’t easily fit into structures of this society or this world, we have to make our own structures, definitions, and taxonomies to feel at home — that is, to build our own world. And while others might be confused why we spend so much energy inventing new names and containers seemingly constantly, it’s important to remember doing this helps us simply exist … so that we can connect in this one world we share.”

Artists like Sun Ra and Beyonce and projects like The Cremaster Cycle and Sgt Pepper’s rank among our greatest artists and works of art in part because of how “self-enclosed” and self-defined they are, and their confidence in their state of being. The confidence with which they express their world encourages the audience to accept their truths as self-evident. They convince us to hand over our imaginations like a Hollywood exec tossing car keys to a valet. We accept and respond to worlds without thinking.

This is what building an internal world as an artist achieves: it creates a space where your non-rational, non-Earthly desires and beliefs and instincts have permission to roam free, and their logic (or anti-logic!) pile up on each other, making something bigger, sturdier, more true. That world becomes a source of inner confidence and light that doesn’t dull, that sees beyond the rational and the normal, that’s ignorant of the reactions of the “normal world.” It’s a spirit and light that can endure hardship and doubt. A place of strength and resilience we can return to.

For those of us struggling and aching to say something different, to be distinctly our own, to reject the stifling rationality of the world around us in favor of the symbolic, the creative, and the divine, creating a world is our path. And that path is only the start. As more people come to view and appreciate that world, the unthinkable happens: it transforms. What started in one mind makes its way to many. The world, once only an internal creation, breaks free. The world comes alive.

Further reading

• “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” by Laurel Schwulst – A beautiful meditation on how even a website can be a world.

• “To write, I first must world,” by Laurel Schwulst — An expansion of a conversation she and I had on worldbuilding as a form of self-care.

• “Very Afraid” by Mike Harrison – Critical and knowledgeable piece about worldbuilding from 15 years ago.

• Beatles ‘66 by Steve Turner — An excellent in-depth exploration of what the Beatles did every day of 1966; the source of the Sgt Pepper’s anecdote.

• Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard — An inspiring overview of self-care and mutual aid from the historical lens of the African-American experience.

• Chaos, Magic, and the Band That Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs — A masterful book about the band the KLF, who are worldbuilders almost beyond compare. This is a dazzling book about where ideas come from, and how they flow around us.

• Planet Metalabel by me – My first first draft worldbuilding the Metalabel universe. 

Other fun examples of worldbuilding from early readers of this piece:

• The musician greydient of Songcamp writes: “Donald Glover/Childish Gambino's Because the Internet album was a whole world. There's the album, there's a script, he had art exhibits which recreated "the boy's" room which is the main subject of the album. If you want to learn in depth, the Dissect podcast goes into deep detail about it.”

• Brandon Stosuy of The Creative Independent, who suggested including KISS in this piece, writes: “Heavy metal/hard rock and worldbuilding is such a cool zone. I remember this old interview in The Believer re: black metal where the guy basically said, ‘we created this dark, 'satanic' world because our everyday was actually so bland.’”

• Gonsher, a member of the Metalabel community, shares a quote from Brendan Gillen aka BMG from Ectomorph and Interdimensional Transmissions, which says: “Drexciya is like a music project from the thought plane of existence and it doesn’t matter who is involved and when... Drexciya should be mysterious, like the creation myth of the Dogon. It shouldn’t be a butterfly pinned to a board – it should be a butterfly that you never actually catch.” What a beautiful image.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife Jamie Kim, whose ideas, references, suggestions, and personal experiences as an artist and producer make her a shared author on this essay. Thanks to Austin Robey, Brandon Stosuy, Laurel Schwulst, Robin Sloan, Kevin Strasburger, gonsher, Anna Bulbrook, Brandon Valosek, and Severin Matusek for reading early drafts of this piece. Thanks to John Higgs for all the conversations we’ve had about creativity and the ideaspace over the years.

Much love from my world to yours,

Yancey