My year of releasing differently

A personal year in review

We live in a world that wants things now. An urgency culture that continues to increase in pace and demand. But this year I learned there's wisdom in letting things take their time. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is wait and let an idea reveal what it wants to be.

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

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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

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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"

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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"

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Personal achievement I'm most proud of

I ran a personal record 522 miles in 2024.

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