Labelmania

Meinhof and metalabels

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is where you learn about something and immediately start noticing mentions of that thing everywhere. (Its name comes from a guy who had this happen to him with a German terrorist group called the Baader-Meinhof Gang.) There’s a more abstract version of this, too: you notice a pattern, but you aren’t quite sure what to call it or how to make it rigorous or even what all the examples have in common. Then you hear a term and it immediately clicks. It gives you a handle for a concept you didn’t know you knew.

Then there’s a third, weirder phenomenon that’s only recently started happening to me. I learn a concept and just… reject it. My ontology of the world stays staunchly in place. I’m like “meh, okay, I don’t really see how this delineates a coherent category.” It’s like digesting a low-bioavailability food. After the unsatisfying chew, one of two things happens.

One is that the concept will turn out to be hopelessly slippery, no matter how simple it is: I’ll forget what it is, regoogle it, remember it with the duration of a goldfish, forget again, repeat fifteen times till I give up. Maybe one day a switch grudgingly flips. This happened to me for years with Python decorators and is occurring to this day with Nouns DAO, fuzzy logic, and cybernetics.

But the other possibility is that the world begins to rearrange itself around that concept. The blanks fill themselves in – oh, and it also has the benefit of x, and it gets around the problem of y, and it suggests corollary z. It doesn’t live rent-free in my head – it builds a residential development that other ideas start clamoring to move into.

This happened to me recently with a… company? project? movement? they’re cagey about categorizing it – called Metalabel¹. It all started when I read an explanatory essay written by Metalabel’s founder, Yancey Strickler (who previously cofounded Kickstarter). A metalabel is like a record label, where they give musicians money and then the label gets a cut of the proceeds, except it’s run cooperatively by the people in it, and it’s not limited to one medium, and generally it’s supposed to be a less icky and not-music-specific alternative to Big Music Industry for the creator economy. The way Strickler puts it, “Labels are startups and institutions for culture.” Which sounds like the kind of sentence I’d be an absolute sucker for, but it just bounced off. I read the essay at the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend and it did nothing for me. Like, okay, cool, friends work together to publish stuff. And then there’s some kind of unifying brand. To me, it just didn’t seem particularly novel or groundbreaking.

But then for the next couple of days I found myself constantly thinking about metalabels². This is a record of the thoughts that occurred to me over that time. It is called Reasons Why Labels Are Interesting And Neat And Maybe A Promising Structure For Creative Work.³

Reason One

Keeping the (metaphorical) baby alive becomes distributed. Different people can pick up the slack at different times. And a shared expectation arises that there’s something there. What is a public company? What is a startup? On some level, just a bunch of people who agree something exists? I was thinking about this recently in the context of preseed companies. They might not even have a product! They’re a company in the sense that some people agreed to do something! But it’s harder for a group to forget about an idea than for an individual to.

Lately I’ve been extrapolating the concept of note-taking to a broad range of actions with different levels of hardness. One, take a note somewhere it’ll immediately disappear. Two, take a note somewhere you could find again, but only if you searched specifically for that thing. Three, file it in a semantic way somewhere, so if you wanted to look up your notes by subject, you could find it. Four, file it somewhere you’ll see again, like a todo list or a post-it on your monitor. Five, softly involve other people; mention it to them. Six, file it with teeth: invoke a commitment device, like making a bet with a tool like Beeminder so you’ll have to pay out if you don’t get around to taking action. Seven, actually involve other people: reach out and move parts of the world around, make interpersonal commitments, entangle yourself in collaborations. This last method is the most powerful. It’s the active ingredient in the stone soup you initiate by declaring, together, that something exists.

Reason Two

The actual work becomes distributed: pubbing, marketing, and getting it into the right people’s hands. There’s built-in curation, like self-perpetuating moodboarding: moodboarding is governed by your taste, but if the creators of the items on the board share some ownership over the board itself, then you’re not just exercising taste but also leveraging it. You’re curating the curators. The Mood Board of Directors.

It’s like mutual aid, without the adverse selection. The opposite, rather: wind-at-your-back mutual aid. When we’re producing commodities together, if I produce more, your incentive is to produce less, because we’ll get diminishing returns on top of what I’ve already done, and maybe you can just free-ride off me. When we’re producing art together, the opposite happens – my producing more inspires you to produce more too: by making it enjoyable for you to work alongside me; by generating little pieces of infrastructure and economies of scale, like shared materials; by giving you something to riff off of; and by giving you leverage, where if we attach our work together more people will see it (since people who like your work trust your taste enough to follow the trail of your affiliation with my work and vice versa).

Reason Three

Consumers of art also want art that curates itself. Instead of canned recommender systems, you get a self-recommending system.

Reason Four

A powerfully underrated form of love is extending people just a little more trust than they’ve earned. You’re showing people you see their best parts and that you’re willing to relinquish a piece of creative control to them and to give them a stage.

Most debate isn’t really debate. It’s drawing attention to the other side’s worst manifestations, to their excesses and foolishnesses. Love as attention does this in reverse. It shines a steady light on the latent sparkles you detect in your friends, collaborators, future friends, future collaborators. Parallel play, queen, tonite and forever!

Reason Five

Labels have another sense that’s recently come into vogue: an organizational alternative to the folder hierarchy model. This is useful in the creative-label sense too. You can attach a label to something that already has a heading or a home or a host or another label.

This lowers the barrier to entry. You can sign stuff that’s already been published elsewhere, assuming no copyright, which with indie internet stuff usually there isn’t. And it facilitates cross-genre work. Because you can slap the label on things with different homes, you can have many different types of work under the same label – Linktree vibes.

Also, it engenders blurry social boundaries, mirroring the real world. It’s not a club where you’re in or you’re out. This reduces activation energy: it’s easy to pop in and out, do one collab, dip. You’re not asking people for much commitment up-front. And as the inviter, you don’t necessarily have to scrupulously vet every single person for Official Permanent Membership. There are natural roles that allow both sides to dip their toes. You can throw a party for Everyone Who’s Ever Contributed, or for Everyone Who Contributed To This Last Release, or Friends of the Label, or The General Public, or some subgroup you make up ad hoc. If rearranging your label doesn’t entail shaking up an entire hierarchical tree, then you can introduce divisions and inclusions at will.

Reason Six

You can cleanly unite not only people but multiple selves under a label. Your main and your alt can, instead of flesh-and-blood versus pseudonym, become more of an alter ego relationship. Slim Shady, not Superman. Costume instead of mask.⁴ Something you inhabit as opposed to something that shields you. Both can release under the overarching label, so you can convey “these share a common origin” without “these are the same individual.”

So do you have a label now?

Yeah. It’s little. It’s like five pieces right now and I’m so happy with it. Still a work in progress, but I go and look at it and I’m like, “look at all this neat stuff my friends did!”

After I got labelpilled, I went back to my friend syntacrobat, the one who had originally pointed me to Yancey Strickler’s essay, and showed him an early draft of this post. He said it reminded him of the giddy prolificacy that mysteriously overtakes people when they come into possession of a physical label maker.

1. To be clear, I have no affiliation with Metalabel – I don’t think I even understand their actual product enough to shill for it. I’m not even really sure if they’re officially a company or not.

2. A tedious note on nomenclature: I’m going to just use the term “label” rather than “metalabel”. This is because I think “metalabel” is confusing in two ways. One, uppercased it refers to the company but lowercased it refers to the kind of label the company is trying to facilitate, which is ambiguous when spoken aloud. (Reddit originally tried to call its forums “reddits,” not “subreddits,” and that never stuck.)

And two, those labels aren’t “meta” in the way that the company itself is. Metalabel is a label that produces labels. But those labels don’t produce other labels, they just produce stuff. I can see the case for wanting to draw the distinction between traditional labels, which have acquired connotations of being the villainous counterparts to the Taylor’s Versions of the world. But as far as I can tell, Metalabel basically wants to recreate a variant on the old days of small-time punk labels that genuinely bred creative scenes. When I talk about labels here, I’m talking about Metalabel’s vision for them: more or less old-school labels, except more cross-genre (thanks to the generality with which the internet facilitates distribution) and more co-oppy (the label is largely run by the creators who release work under it, sort of like an art collective).

If a new term is called for, I propose “neolabel.”

3. Thanks also to Timour Kosters, who embodied the Baader-Meinhof spirit when we met at a party several days after I’d gotten onto this label kick and it turned out that he happened to run the local chapter of a Metalabel release, and who helpfully explained what that meant and more about how Metalabel worked in general.

4. Or in the language of Keith Johnstone’s Impro, Mask instead of mask. Instead of a fake face you wear, a real face that wears you.