Yancey Strickler

And you print it, and then you self-legitimize.

But what always happened is by the time the first record would come out, like four other people would come and be like, we make music like you, can we be part of it too?

And it made me see that something like a punk label is not just putting out music, it's manifesting more punkness.

It's teaching people the worldview, how to adopt it.

And that same week I was learning about the history of the Royal Society.

It began in 1660 in London.

Christopher Wren and other natural law scientists start meeting at a pub on Thursday nights because they're annoyed that facts are determined by the church and the king.

So they start a club with the motto of take nobody's word for it.

And in 1664, they published the first zine, Philosophical Transactions, which is people just trying experiments, experimenting with the idea of experiments.

And those pages is like Funded the Babbage Machine, where Isaac Newton published, Benjamin Franklin's Kite Experiment, peer review, scientific method, all created through that process.

I came to feel like those two projects, a punk label and the Royal Society are the same thing.

It is, yeah.

It is an umbrella.

It is some organization that stands for a purpose.

It is open to anyone who reflects the criteria and promotes that same purpose.

And there's like some sort of economic or rules that determine how it functions together.

But I came to see that like...

Across history, that's been the most powerful form of culture creation ever.

But yeah, but I ended up like had that observation and wrote it up for myself and I wasn't sure what to do about it.

And I ended up sending it to like five people who I thought about when writing it who are people who run projects like this.