Finding hope beyond the cringe

A conversation with Kickstarter/Metalabel founder Yancey Strickler

Thank you to everyone sending love notes about our 2024 limited print zine called Whoa, Vol. 1! Our friends at Printernet have shipped out the first batch of physical zines, so be on the lookout for those!

Our first batch is sold out, but you can buy the mystery-colored second edition here. And good news for our international friends—we've set aside a limited batch of copies here.

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Yancey Strickler is like the Forrest Gump of the cozy internet—any time something big is happening, there he is.

First, he founded Kickstarter.

Then, he coined the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.

Now, he’s changing how creative work gets released on the internet at Metalabel. In fact, our decision to release the physical and digital zine on Metalabel came largely from this conversation. You can learn more about Metalabel on their Substack here.

Besides being a therapy session (thank you Yancey), we covered a lot of ground including:

• The tension between promotion and creativity

• The idea of cathedrals versus practices when it comes to releasing work

• Why smaller, more intentional audiences are often better for both the artist and the art

The part that’s most stayed with me, though, is when I asked Yancey about how he stays optimistic. Here’s that for you now:

Alex

I have noticed in myself this sort of knee jerk negativity, cliche judgment of basically everything.

Like, someone else I talked to brought up how the David Foster Wallace, This is Water speech is really important to them. And it's really important to me too. But I've seen it shared so much online that now I'm like, well, that's not cool.

Everything is not cool because everything is shared. We’re all so cliche-pilled that we’re frozen into doing nothing at all. And I just wonder, you seem so much more optimistic than me.

What's that experience for you of all this stuff?

Yancey

Yeah, I know the feeling.

It’s this sensitivity to like, ‘my God, everyone's so boring saying the same things’ because we worry that's true of us. We're all looking to break out of this thing. The way that gets manifested is in an egotistical way, showing ourselves as being bigger or better than this. 

You can see the universe by trying to take in all of the universe. You can also see the universe by looking at grains of sand with a microscope. Both contain everything.

Similarly, we can look to the internet to try to understand what else is going on in the world and what are all the ways I need to up my game and max myself and whatever. It's also possible to look internally and get so much of the same effect.

Where I have arrived is number one, I just assume everyone's just playing the same games. So, I’ve developed an eye for what's personally novel or different. Anything that isn't that, I let it be a wind that blows by. If my antenna picks up that there's something truthful there, I dig in. Otherwise, it doesn’t bother me.

So, yeah, someone started reading a message board four years after you so they’re four years later in the journey than you. It's pretty cringe to look back and feel, I hope I was never like that. But of course we were all like that. But none of that actually matters to you because ultimately someone else's life isn’t going to affect how you feel about yourself truly. This is all just a storm within you. 

When you begin to have an eye for that, I think it creates a different sort of radar. Every single one of us is trying to figure out who we are and is trying to love who we are. I am on my journey and so is somebody else.

The only thing I should feel is compassion because that’s the only thing I wish for people to feel for me. So I will do my best to give grace to everyone. But often the hardest thing is to give that grace to ourselves.

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To read, listen, and watch the full conversation, get your copy.