Dear reader,
How are you? How was your Summer? Or Winter, for those of you reading this from the South. Here in Athens, the temperature is still high. Most days easily slide above 30°C / 86°F. So I drink water in litres, walk in the shadow, and hesitate to write about the Summer in the past.
Nevertheless, Uno’s Summer holiday is over. On Friday, he went to his new school for the first day. He was so happy when I picked him up. Like that bubbly way humans can be when life is good. He also seemed taller as we scooted home; he looked like a boy ready to grow after two months' holiday with his parents.
And me?
I had a blast with Uno. But, I also realized that I couldn’t be with him 24/7 while maintaining all the other non-family things. So I decided to pause this newsletter and focus on counting stars with Uno… and then a whole lot of other stuff, which I’ll unfold over the next weeks, but which I’ll wait with now because I got some big news to share:
The Internet Phone Book is back in stock!
The road to reprinting the book was surprisingly curvy. In fact, so curvy that this statement deserves to be repeated: The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock! Let’s continue the chant! The Internet Phone Book is back in stock!
At the time of writing, we already sold 500+ copies, or more than half the books, in just one day. It blows my mind. People are buying the book from literally all over the world with hardly any marketing effort from our side. A couple of friends jokingly asked me how. I honestly attribute this to 99% luck and the fact that so many humans are longing for other ways of using the internet and connecting outside of social media. In this way, the Internet Phone Book is a drip in a flowing river.
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Convinced? Get your copy through our friends at Metalabel.
Selling the book with Metalabel allows us to split the earnings with the contributors. We are also sending 10% of the sales to the Living Web Institute treasury (more on this soon-ish). In other words, buying a book = supporting projects keeping the web alive = becoming part of the river = my eternal gratitude = a portal to +700 friends you haven’t met = an invitation to grow in an environment outside of social media = a yellow book.
With care,
Kristoffer
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
Yancey Strickler: Metalabel
Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur whose projects include Kickstarter, Metalabel, The Creative Independent, the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, and Artist Corporations.
What is Metalabel?
Metalabel is a platform for artists to release their work, and for collectors to acquire limited edition artifacts and support artists they love and discover. What’s different from other spaces is Metalabel was built to support people releasing work together. It makes sharing bylines, pooling resources, splitting profits, and collectively building a creative project and business easier than ever. The platform is part of a larger catalogue of projects we have made that are meant to help shift our creative default to cooperate rather than compete.
Why did you start it?
Several years ago I hit burnout with a project and community I was running. A lot of that burnout came from feeling like I was at the top of a hierarchy that would collapse without me, and that didn’t give me peer support.
I ended up reading two things back to back — Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, which tells the origin story of punk and hardcore bands in America, and the history of the Royal Society, a group that started in 1660 in London that’s largely responsible for science as we know it. With both punk bands and early scientists the labels they released under made them more powerful. Even for a small group of people, that identity gave them the power of legitimization and a permission to support work by others too.
This project is an attempt to manifest those same ideals and strategies, but in the world we live in today, and with the creative and internet values that are core to who we are and how we work.
Who or what inspired you?
How much time do you have? Some labels/projects/people that stand out: Factory Records, American Zoetrope, Dischord Records, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Touch & Go, Odd Future, Badlands Unlimited, the Situationists, the Abolitionists, MSCHF, pg Lang, the Royal Society, my peers in the Dark Forest Collective. The list goes on.
See everything Yancey has collected on Metalabel.
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Field notes
2.
Kristoffer Tjalve on the Internet Phone Book. This is a podcast episode. The host is the lovely Samuel Arbesman, and the other guests in the podcast catalogue give me imposter syndrome: Robin Sloan, Neal Agarwal, and Laurel Schwulst. These are all heroes. Anyway, I spoke about how inspiring I find the book ecosystem. You have libraries, archives, bookstores, and magazines fully dedicated to books. It would be incredible to grow a similar rich ecosystem for the web.
3.
Dialing Up the Internet Phonebook. This is a written interview between Piri, Elliott Cost, and me. My favorite part is Piri’s photos of the Internet Phone Book being added to local street libraries. Otherwise, during the Summer, I’ve been thinking about what type of business activity makes sense in this current world, and I think Piri is leading the way with his thoughts on Organic Software and Mom-and-pop stores. Maybe lifestyle businesses ain’t that bad?
4.
Poetic Web Calendar. The calendar returns next week. Feel free to add any events I should remember to include. Or send them to me on email.
5.
Call for Participation. This also returns next week :)
𓅰 𓅬 𓅭 𓅮 𓅯
Wayside flowers*
*Personal websites from the internet phone book edition
Last email was sent to 4829 inboxes. Twelve people support me with a paid subscription. You can send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com. I read everything you send me :)