Metalabel's Yancey Strickler on Building a Post-Crypto Haven for Artists

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.