Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur whose work supports artists and creative people. He's the cofounder of:
- Metalabel, a project that helps creative people cooperate
- Artist Corporations, a new legal structure for creative work
- The Dark Forest Collective, a group of writers who publish books about how we live online
- Dark Forest OS, infrastructure for shared, private internets
- Kickstarter, which has helped creators raise more than $9 billion for their projects
- The Creative Independent, a resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people
- eMusic Selects, a digital-only record label
He's the author of the books This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (2019); The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (2024); and On the Creative Life (2025).
His career began as a music critic writing for Pitchfork, Spin, and The Village Voice. He grew up on a farm in Clover Hollow, Virginia.
Projects
- eMusic Selects (2006 to 2010). An early digital label with artist-friendly deals that helped launch artists like Best Coast and Hurray for the Riff Raff.
- Kickstarter (cofounder, 2009 to 2017). Platform that's helped fund more than 250,000 creative projects and move nearly $10 billion dollars in pledges.
- The Creative Independent (cofounder, 2015 to present). A resource for emotional and practical guidance for artists, built around in-depth interviews and essays.
- Micd (cofounder, 2015-2017). An audio-only app that let fans announce NBA games. Micd was mainly distributed via TestFlight to fellow NBA fans.
- The Ideaspace (newsletter, 2017 to present). Ongoing essay feed where Bento, Dark Forest, Metalabel, groupcore, and my writing live.
- Bentoism and The Bento Society (2018 to 2022). A philosophy and community built around the Bento framework.
- Cozy Cozy (2020-2023). A family music project exploring improvisation and joy through albums The Family Album (2021) and Animal Sounds (2022).
- Metalabel (2021 to present). A platform and philosophy for collective releases, shared revenue, and group-based creative practice, including A-Corps, the Metalabel marketplace, and Dark Forest Operating System.
- The Dark Forest Collective (2023 to present). A collective producing The Dark Forest Anthology, Antimemetics, The Sexual History of the Internet, and related work on internet structure and culture.
- Artist Corporations (A-Corps) (2024 to present). A proposed legal form for artists and creative groups that turns gig workers into owners through flexible, IP-centered structures.
Books
- This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking/Penguin, 2019). A book arguing that financial maximization as the default has distorted society, and proposes Bentoism as a framework for multi-dimensional self-interest and long-term thinking instead.
- The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Dark Forest Collective, 2024). A 208-page anthology documenting roughly five years of the “dark forest internet” — essays and artifacts about how people learned to live, create, and conspire on an increasingly adversarial web.
- Nine Creative Meditations (2024). A series of nine short pieces (video plus written) distilling lessons from my creative life into compact meditations on practice, resilience, and release.
- On the Creative Life: Conversations Toward a New Creative Era (2025). A book collecting 13 conversations with Joshua Citarella from the New Creative Era podcast focused on how creative people release work, structure careers, and build worlds.
- Antimemetics and A Sexual History of the Internet (Dark Forest Collective, 2025). For the excellent Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova, I served as both editor and publisher. For A Sexual History of the Internet by Mindy Seu served as publisher and supporter of an expansive, canonical work.
Videos
- Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation. (TED). Mainstage TED talk introducing Artist Corporations as a new structure for creative people.
- A Framework for Your Ultimate Self (99U). An introduction to Bentoism, focusing on the four-square grid (Now Me, Future Me, Now Us, Future Us).
- Yancey Strickler: Dark Forest Theory of the Internet | Doomscroll. The origin of the metaphor, examples of dark forest spaces, and where we are in history.
- The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet – Roundtable. Group conversation around the anthology with contributors, framing the book as a snapshot of a historical phase of the internet.
- Nine Creative Meditations. Video and written meditations on the creative life, focused on practice, resilience, and release.
- A New Era of Creativity (CreativeMornings New York). A keynote about the changing landscape of creative work and what a new creative era might practically look like.
Essays
Dark Forests and the internet
- The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (2019). Defines the “dark forest” as the private, semi-private, and non-indexed spaces where people retreat from the risks of the public platforms.
- Beyond the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (2019). Extends the original metaphor, exploring what might be lost as life moves into dark forests and how to think about public voice in that shift.
- The blessing and the thirst (2021). Reflects on the Dark Forest essay, my own retreat from public posting, and the trade-off between reach and psychological safety.
- The internet feels small here (2023). On the experience of intimate, well-curated online spaces that feel like towns rather than feeds, and the emotional texture of the cozy or dark forest web.
- The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside (2025). A six-years-later revisitation of Dark Forest: the mainstream web as battleground, the flourishing of real life in private, “inside” spaces, and how it relates to Dead Internet Theory.
The post-individual and group life
- The post-individual (essay and “director’s cut” release, 2024). A deeply researched essay arguing that the age of the strict individual is giving way to more entangled, networked selves. Released as a collectible bundle with notes, audio, and slides.
- The dangers of self expression with Adam Curtis (2017). Dialogue on self-expression, media, and how systems absorb and neutralize dissent with the journalist Adam Curtis for The Creative Independent.
- The dark forest and the post-individual (2024). A companion release bundling the essay, talk slides, and commentary, framing the post-individual as a natural evolution of my Dark Forest thinking.
- Defining groupcore (2025). Ongoing work naming and exploring “groupcore” — groups as the primary creative unit — across theory posts, case studies, and DFOS and Metalabel context.
- Why Artist Corporations? (2025). Explains A-Corps as the culmination of decades of trying to give creative people more structural power.
Metalabel and the creator economy
- Rethinking labels (2022). Introduces “metalabels” as labels for ideas and shared values rather than just products, setting the conceptual foundation for Metalabel.
- Introducing Metalabel (2022). Outlines Metalabel as a structure for collective releases and shared value among artists, and gathers early research and manifestos into a collectible archive.
- The internet culture era (2022). Frames the current moment as an internet culture era, with metalabels as a potential new form for cultural production.
- How culture is made (Metalabel Magazine, 2023). Uses historical case studies (Dischord, The Royal Society, Guerrilla Girls, and others) to show how small, aligned groups shape culture.
- Reinventing the record (2022). On releasing work in networks rather than as lone-artist drops.
- On competition (2022). Reframes competition in culture and business as a design choice rather than a default.
- Metablogging (2022). On using internal blogging to create a collective brain.
- What’s after the creator economy? (2023). Argues that the creator economy frame is exhausted and points toward collective structures.
- The onchain era (2022). Looks at onchain tools as infrastructure for new cultural forms and group economics.
- Climbing out of the rabbit hole (2023). A private Google Doc sharing our reasons for leaving crypto.
Creative practices and resilience
- Worldbuilding is creative resilience (2023). On how artists build worlds, not just works, and how worldbuilding provides resilience across a career.
- Time and the creator (2025). On creative time-scales and how different practices stretch or compress time.
- How to long game (2025). On learning to play a long game with your practice.
- The ever-expanding focused life (2025). On focus, expansion, and rebalancing attention across projects.
- Some things are worth the wait: Diary of a TED talk (2025). Diary-style reflections around my TED talk and the tension between process and outcome.
- What we lose when we start with the ending (2025). On how outcome-obsession can distort process and meaning.
- The law of fads and trends (2025). A compact model: the faster something grows, the faster it can die, applied to memes, scenes, and creative careers.
- How to get where you need to be when you don't know where you're going (2025). On resilience and adaptation.
Bentoism, values, and time
- The Bento (2019). Core explainer that introduces Bentoism as a theory of multi-dimensional self-interest across Now Me, Future Me, Now Us, and Future Us, and the Bento as a visual decision tool.
- The origins of Bentoism (2019). Narrative of how the Bento emerged during my Kickstarter years as a response to financialization and near-termism.
- How the Bento box can change how we see the world (TIME, 2019). How expanding self-interest beyond the immediate individual changes decisions in work and life.
- Post-capitalism for realists (2019). Sketches a pragmatic route toward “after capitalism” rooted in changing what we value and how we account for it, rather than pure utopian rupture.
- This is how long it takes to change the world (2019). How durable change happens on longer timelines — thirty years — than we tend to imagine.
- Rethinking self-interest (2020). Builds out a more pluralistic, values-driven notion of self-interest, linking Bentoism to broader economic and social questions.
- The values stack (2020). Explores how different layers of value interact and conflict.
- Theories of time (2020). A look at different experiences of time and how they shape our choices.
- The ownership crisis (2020). On structural issues around ownership, power, and the need for new forms.
Early criticism and personal essays
- Early music criticism for Pitchfork, Village Voice, and Spin (2000 to 2005).
- Why we started Kickstarter (2009). The canonical origin story of Kickstarter: motivations, constraints, and the values built in.
- The object offline (2014). Early essay about resistance, physicality, and objects in a digital world.
- Resist and thrive (2015). Talk and essay about money, culture, and resisting monoculture pressures.
- Taxonomy of a Top Ten (2005) and Finding myself as a writer (2005). Early meta-writing about lists, taste, and learning to write.
- Nobody cares about you (2017). A short essay about ego, attention, and why realizing that nobody cares can be freeing.