Metalabel's Yancey Strickler on Building a Post-Crypto Haven for Artists
Sign up for this week’s live conversation with Metalabel co-founder Yancy Strickler, a trailblazer at the intersection of art and technology.
Artwrld editor-at-large Andrew Goldstein will be hosting a live conversation with Metalabel and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler this Thursday, February 27th, at 12:00 PM EST.
RSVP to attend the discussion and participate in the audience Q&A at the end.
About the Conversation
A few years ago, the Kickstarter-cofounder and creative entrepreneur Yancey Strickler went down the crypto rabbit hole.
In his brilliant 2019 essay “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” he had articulated his realization that the social web had become a hunting ground for extractive tech companies that preyed on your time, attention, privacy, agency, and money. If artists wanted to escape their clutches and build sustainable careers on their own terms, they needed to hide out in private forums—and the NFT space, with its tight-knit community and promise of decentralization, seemed to offer a safe haven in the scary thicket.
So when he founded Metalabel in 2021 as a new kind of platform for creatives based on communal making, automated revenue splits, and friction-free social distribution, it seemed natural to build it on a crypto foundation. But soon a new realization dawned: there were dangers in the rabbit hole as well, with speculation and a drive toward profit maximization creating a casino environment that many artists found inhospitable.
So, after going down the rabbit hole, Yancey went through the rabbit hole, and out the other side.
This week, I am very pleased to talk to Yancey Strickler about why he thinks right now is such an amazing time to be a creative, how Metalabel is helping build a new economic model for artists, and his own personal journey to becoming “post-crypto.”
Podcast
Missed our live Artwrld conversation with spatial computing visionary Tom Emrich, author of The Next Dimension? Listen to the podcast now available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
About Artwrld
Artwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vanguard of creativity.
More at: artwrld.com