The Dark Forest of Creative Capital

Yancey Strickler on Metalabel, Digital Scarcity, and the Coming Creative Revolution

Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler unveils his vision of a radical economic future where artists become society's power brokers. Through Metalabel, he's building the infrastructure for collective commerce and creative ownership that could transform how we value and exchange culture.

“In 50 years, artists won't just influence culture—they'll control capital”

Key takeaways:

• {00:13:10} - “The concept of art and creativity that we think of today that we take as givens that we're like, “Oh my God, I have to promote my drop again today,” are incredibly modern inventions.” - Yancey
• {00:24;51] - “I believe {this project} will produce a world where 50 or 60 years from now, artists and creative people are the most powerful members of society. They will have the greatest influence. They will have the greatest access to wealth. They will be the most powerful people in society, and this is a structure by which that will occur. And that's a project we'll announce next year.” - Yancey
• {00:26:20} - “We all want to be able to homestead and have our own spaces that are ours, but we also want to be part of spaces where we can be discovered. And so how can our catalogs exist in a world like that? Artists right now are excluded from capitalism. Let's change that.” - Yancey
• {00:28:53} - “People are still just looking in the dead channel, the dying channels…where we've been trained to look for what is new and what matters. And the answer is that that's not where those things are happening now.” - Yancey
• {00:38:09} - “Anyone who's 20 years old today, born and raised on the Internet, there's just like a mentality, a metamodern, just flat openness, super well-curated sort of vibe that I just think lends itself quite well to operating very specific, but I think very successful, small to medium-sized creative businesses.” - Yancey

Associated Links:

• Pre-order the LORE Journal by Future Commerce on Metalabel
• Connect with Yancey Strickler and learn more about Metalabel
• The Dark Forest Collective
• Kirby Ferguson’s New York Times piece, Is Creativity Dead?
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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