Yancey Strickler
@ystrickler
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Cofounder @Metalabel_ @Kickstarter @TheCreativeIndp Author “This Could Be Our Future" "The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet"
NYC
Joined February 2009
The spaces previous generations filled with close human relationships we fill with identities. This is how people are more connected than ever while being lonelier and having fewer close relationships than any generation in modern memory. We’re more connected to the many selves within us than we are to each other.
My hottest take on this subject is I don't think social media is creating a "loneliness crisis." I think America's social crisis is, in some ways, the opposite of loneliness. The evidence that loneliness is rising for all ages that use social media is surprisingly weak. If we understand loneliness narrowly as something like "an experienced gap between our felt and desired social connection," then loneliness is kind of good, in small doses. Loneliness is social motivation. And we'd expect that a shock of social isolation—like, say, COVID—would lead to strong efforts among people to socialize more. But the data shows something closer to the opposite. Face-to-face socializing continued to decline between 2021 and 2024 and alone time increased, for almost all groups. I think a bunch of factors—incl., comfortable homes, ample entertainment, an on-demand delivery economy, and the dopamine-exhausting effect of non-stop phone use—are overriding, or fundamentally altering, people's desire to be physically around other people. The crisis is aloneness. And it's being partly caused by, in a weird way, our *inability* to connect with the healthy feeling loneliness
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RT @mrsngood: I wish I had posted notes too as I read this sublime piece 😍 My takeaways: “don’t outsource your thinking, the concept of “h…
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RT @metalabel_: In a world of global corporations, artists and creative people are 1099 NPCs with limited power and agency of their own
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RT @metalabel_: Collectors have spent more than $400,000 supporting independent creative work on Metalabel so far
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Our potential identities are infinite but our energy is not. Energy put into one identity is energy taken from another. To be Very Online is to be Never Offline. To become infinite is to become infinitesimal somewhere else.
@ystrickler I broadly agree with this and I think it’s an amazing thing to find safety in pockets of the internet, but I also feel personally that I’m somehow losing something with so many sub personalities spread across platforms. Maybe I’m just losing peace of mind 🥲
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Digital alts and multiple online identities redefine what it means to be our "whole self," making us feel safer behind avatars where we can decide which slice of our selves to share vs physical spaces we can't control and our many inner identities might accidentally be revealed
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RT @ystrickler: Remembering the day I went to David Lynch's house for coffee, bummed a smoke off him, and he told me to go out that night a…
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It can take years of blindly believing before you know whether the universe is listening
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RT @metalabel_: Creative isolation isn't natural. It's a byproduct of short-sighted assumptions that profit from keeping us apart
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Jalen Green is a Rorschach test to distinguish ppl who watch the NBA to have fun and people who view it as a math problem
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Remembering the day I went to David Lynch's house for coffee, bummed a smoke off him, and he told me to go out that night and smell the Jasmine trees — his favorite smell in LA RIP David 💔
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RT @metalabel_: Most creative people today operate without basic economic protections that other industries take for granted
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Love how Cory Doctorow uses Kickstarter. Back his new project!
*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton: 1/
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