Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur whose work supports creative people. He's the Co-Founder of Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest Collective, and DFOS (the Dark Forest Operating System).
FCAT’s VP of Research John Dalton connected with Yancey recently to discuss the evolving architecture of the digital world, from the rise of private ‘Dark Forest’ networks to the legal innovations necessary to protect the modern creator.
That feeling has gone mainstream. When I wrote that article, I was talking about my personal experiences on the Internet. What I was noticing is that although I had always been kind of a citizen on the web, I felt that I was increasingly reluctant to share my real self online. In the past, there had always been this value in being vulnerable, showing your real self, and that was to earn attention, gain social status. But as the Internet became a battleground for power—financial power, political power, social influence—it wasn’t safe anymore. I think more people feel that way now. That condition I observed in myself, is increasingly mainstream today.
Recently, Metalabel launched DFOS, the Dark Forest Operating System. You’ve referred to DFOS as “infrastructure for the new private internet.” What is DFOS and how does it work?
For the past year I've been working with a small team of people on a project called DFOS, or Dark Forest Operating System. It starts with a provocative thought: what if we could each start our own shared private internet where, effectively, we can choose when it is we want to appear publicly. We still have public channels to post our ads when we need to, but our actual selves and the way we live is happening in these private spaces that actually can feel closer to real-world relationships and can be much more powerful than we know them to be today. Right now, dark forests take the form of private group chats, closed communities, and invitation-based online spaces. We use the tools that are most accessible to us. But what we've made is an operating system, an OS with a protocol underneath that makes it so you own your data. And inside each dark forest space are a series of apps. You have a group chat, you have your own social and publishing feed where anyone can share larger ideas, and you have a treasury of shared monies where you can pull money together and programmatically distribute it with each other. And there's even an app store where you can build or install other apps specifically in your space.
You pitched the concept of an A-Corp last year in a TED talk. Colorado is currently considering a bipartisan bill that would formally endorse A-Corps in that state. Tell me more about that.
The publishing collective I co-founded, called Metalabel, is all about exploring how creative people can do more together. We sold thousands of dollars’ worth of books a couple of years ago, which is amazing, except I realized that I’d made no corporate structure to hold us. We were sort of YOLOing the whole thing so I started working on a new legal form for creatives called an artist corporation, or A-Corp. We spent a year interviewing people, blue-chip artists, TikTokers, artists at every level. We also conducted a big survey online of more than 1,500 artists asking about their creative practices, what was hard and what they wanted, and we used that to craft a law.
There are a few key pieces that distinguish the A-Corp from an LLC. One is that an A-Corp must be 51% owned and controlled by artists. It has an artistic mission that is legally protected in the charter, much like how Public Benefit Corporations (PBC) work. There's a fascinating IP regime that we created for this. In particular, that creative IP that's contributed to your A-Corp counts as a capital contribution to your balance sheet, meaning it should be calculated using other comparative assets that exist, other songs, other movies, whatever that type of work is, and that should be used to determine the valuation of the A-Corp. This allows people to gain greater economic access, to get access to more money, the sort of things that today artists have to sell their catalog to get. The A-Corp creates that with the check of a box; you can create shares and equity for your practice. And this will make a new security, the A-Corp share, that could be a way that creative work can be valued and protected, that can be used as compensation with collaborators, or to sell a stake to investors, and as a path for artists to actually benefit and have more upside in their work.
Colorado was first. We have worked there to build a bipartisan bill sponsored by leading Republicans and leading Democrats in both the House and the Senate that has the governor's approval. That was just proposed about a month ago, and last week we had our first committee hearing where it passed by a 5-0 margin, and we're heading towards likely passage. After that it’s New York and California, then Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont and Tennessee – it's a long list.
And finally, how do you think professionals working in finance should think about their fiduciary responsibilities going forward?
I think what’s most important for any brand, company, or institution is going to be brand and trust. With LLMs and agentic coding, ultimately all information and experiences will be replicable. You’ll be able to turn anything into a lie. We’re in the Napster-era of AI right now. There’s lots of illegality happening, and so for any brand, you have to be building your brand by actively establishing trust and becoming less reliant on platforms. The notion that you can just build your brand on somebody else’s platform, that thought needs to reverse. We have to invest in our own channels, our own brands that we fully control that are building trust. There's a longer-term game there to think about, but I think the mode and all the best practices for how to behave as a brand online the past 15 years, I think all those are going to be rewritten. It's all been running on playbooks that are about maximizing a specific sort of engagement that's increasingly valueless.
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