Yancey Strickler

Yesterday, I announced the concept of an Artist Corporation via @TEDTalks. What is an A-Corp, and why is it better than existing structures (LLC, S-Corp, etc.)? Put simply: A-Corps allow creative individuals to fully participate in capitalism, without sacrificing their creative…

Can’t even begin to tell you how amazing the next two Dark Forest Collective releases are shaping up to be Legit heroes joining the squad 👀 👀 👀

AI will commoditize most things. What stays distinct? Voices, opinions, personalities. Use it or lose it.

"Society itself is a codified hero system... The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has setup." — Ernest Becker, "The Denial of Death"

The next Disney will start as an Artist Corporation — a creative vision brought to life by a person or group of people that changes how the rest of us see the world.

For all of human history up until now, we’ve had to define our identity based on where we physically live, who we’re born to, or what we look like. The internet gives us the freedom to be whoever we want to be, and however many we want to be.

Creative people don’t need charity or government handouts. We just need to be treated like adults and real economic actors.

If you want to understand how challenging the future could be for creative people, just look at what's happening with musicians right now. Up until the late nineties, people either listened to music for free on the radio or by buying a physical copy to listen to at home. But…

Creative people are already entrepreneurs. We just don't have the structures to match how we actually work. Despite what you hear about the creator economy, just 13% of creative people earn a full-time living from their work. There's no automatic healthcare, no retirement…

Today we own less and rent more. This is bad for artists, but great for platforms. Artists need new legal structures to properly value their work and empower them with agency beyond platforms, who will always seek to maximize their own profits and interests in the long run.

Let’s say a band starts an Artist Corporation. Here’s what would happen: First, they’d no longer be five (or three, or four, etc.) individuals. They become people who together own an organization. Together, they would collectively own their intellectual property, their gear,…

The problem isn't that creative people lack entrepreneurial instincts. The problem is we lack entrepreneurial infrastructure.

Creative people today are conditioned to think solo success is the only path. The mythology runs deep: the tortured artist, the lone genius, the solo star. We celebrate the outliers who "make it," while ignoring the thousands who burn out trying to compete in a system designed…

Love this @robinhanson piece. This is why @ystrickler's 'dark forest theory' of the Internet is true. We should really reward risk, originality, unorthodoxy, and weirdness more. overcomingbias.com/2023/02/why-is…

"In the age of infinite content, finite and intentional might be the most radical choice."

A traditional magazine might pay you $1000 for a feature. Your own Substack might pay 10x that. The economics have flipped in favor of those who build their structures.

The algorithm wants us to think bigger numbers always win. But could 1,500 of the right people be enough? @JoshuaCitarella and I started a podcast called "New Creative Era" earlier this year. The numbers (about 1,500 downloads per episode) were smaller than expected. But after…

sublime.app/collection/the…

The 20th century was dominated by multinational corporations. The 21st is for creative collectives.

Sometimes the ideas that scare you are the ones worth sharing.