Alone, Together
A conversation with Yancey Strickler, founder of Kickstarter and Metalabel
We made a print publication!
In case you missed it, you can read the announcement here. We’re releasing excerpts from a few pieces digitally. For access to all of the essays, Q&As, and features, purchase a copy — there are not many left.
Today we bring you “Alone, Together”, a beautiful conversation between
and .Yancey Strickler is the co-founder of Kickstarter, Metalabel, The Creative Independent, and Bento Society. He is also the author of the seminal essay - The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
Severin Matusek is a strategist, editor, and founder at Co-matter, thinking deeply about technology and culture.
Enjoy :)
Alone, Together
A conversation with Kickstarter and Metalabel founder Yancey Strickler
Interview by Severin Matusek
SM —
Why are we lonely on the internet?
YS —
You could think of the internet as a network; a global town hall. But if you imagine being the new kid at school and you walk into the busy cafeteria, I think that's what the internet feels like. You're in your own little private world and you see a lot of people having fun. You see a lot of people who are more progressed in their social relationships. “Comparison is the thief of joy”, as the line by Franklin Roosevelt goes. The internet is really powerful at revealing what you don't have.
People’s struggles with loneliness predate the internet. It’s a trend that really comes with mass media in general, like television. Television drove loneliness. Our internet experiences are these private worlds that we have. Only we know what tabs we open and obsessively close and feel bad about. It is a networked space, but we largely still experience it as individuals with their own private lives. The internet holds up a mirror to that. But it doesn't really solve those inner questions of who you are and how you feel less alone.
“Comparison is the thief of joy”, as the line by Franklin Roosevelt goes. The internet is really powerful at revealing what you don't have.
SM —
Mass media like television was one-directional broadcasting, though. There wasn’t much interaction possible. That’s probably why, when the internet emerged, we used metaphors like “global village” for it, because it allowed us to connect with everyone. It makes it sound like people are being together more. But they actually aren’t.
YS —
Part of me wants to say it's feeds that create this difference. When the web was so small that the Yahoo directory was important, there was a sense that you were browsing from one place to another. Blog rolls were really important, like who you linked to in your sidebar was a strong show of belonging and a way to have a reciprocal relationship with other people and projects. At that point, the internet was also a smaller part of our lives. You could dip into it, but it was quite segmented and isolated.
But when I think about, feed-based internet and phone-based internet, those are very different experiences. That’s where it’s closer to TV. It is closer to, “Oh yeah, we’re all just looking at the same memes. Memes are powerful, but memes are – what commercials were. It’s still a passive experience of just vegging out, you know.
The pullback and refresh just provides infinite novelty. These things remove personal agency. We’re becoming a passive consumer of advertisements and chest thumps from other people's egos. And that's what we do for hours a day.
SM —
What I admire about Metalabel is that you’re not just complaining about this, but you’re actually trying to build infrastructure that can help people cooperate better. Do you think tools and technologies can achieve that?
YS —
We're launching a platform in the fall that will make the process of a group of people, creative people starting a group together, publishing work as a group, collaborating on things together possible in a way that to me is not the false promise that we're gonna have a giant Miro board and we're gonna collectively make a masterpiece, or whatever. It has a more honest understanding of what it is to collaborate.
Lowering the cost and the challenge of taking that step makes a really big difference. But that's only a piece of it. That has to be paired with real desire. It has to be paired with a meaningful promise that gets delivered on. It's not gonna create matter, it's going to redirect matter that already exists. There has to be a reason that's compelling and that reason needs to be personal.
I think that tools achieve a lot, but they can't manufacture something out of nothing. At best, they probably reflect and amplify what's already there. It’s like crypto – in one version of the story – is unlocking a decentralized, collectively-owned universe. I think zero events of the past X years have in any way said that's true.
What has crypto unlocked? Well, there's a widespread desire for speculation and to get rich quick. That is the latent true energy that the tool set has unleashed.
SM —
A few months ago, you wrote this short post called “the internet feels small here” in which you reflected about your move back to New York City and how the hustle and bustle of the city reduced the meaning and importance of the internet to you. I think a lot of people can relate to that having gone through the pandemic years. Do you think we often overestimate the importance of the internet?
YS —
A hundred percent. I mean, that's just true of very online people. And there are a lot of very online people and it's a life that's very self-fulfilling and self-referencing.
It's similar to any cult. If you're a Scientologist, you just interact with other Scientologists all the time. So your worldview is constantly being affirmed and deepened. And I think for the very online, everyone else is an NPC [non-player character], right? That's the view today. If you're not using whatever tool I'm using, you're irrelevant.
Once the algorithms know you, how do you break those things? Let's say you go down the rabbit hole. How the f**k do you get out? How do you get out and reorient yourself as a different type of person? That's a very real question for me lately. I feel like I know what I need to know. That's the thing I'm searching for right now.
Once the algorithms know you, how do you break those things? Let's say you go down the rabbit hole. How the f**k do you get out? How do you get out and reorient yourself as a different type of person? That's a very real question for me lately. I feel like I know what I need to know. That's the thing I'm searching for right now.
SM —
For the last 15 years or so we have been incentivized to create for likes, or comments, or similar metrics that reward us online. But this often results in work that might be forgotten or replaced by algorithms the next day, or even the next hour. Do you think we're being tricked into creating tons of so-called “content” online that doesn't have any meaning?
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