Yancey Strickler has spent two decades building infrastructures for creators. He co-founded Kickstarter in 2009, changing the way artistic and cultural projects could be funded outside traditional commercial logics. But Strickler hasn't rested on his laurels: one glance at his resumé shows that he understands each.

Most recently, via his latest venture Metalabel, he has developed and disseminated the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (inspired by science fiction author Cixin Liu) that explores a movement towards a more private, decentralised internet, far from the gaze of big tech and major platforms. And with the DFOS (Dark Forest Operating System) he’s made a practical move, creating an infrastructure that allows artists and creators to retake control of what they make and sell, without surrendering data or independence to anyone else. This isn’t “just another platform”; it’s a way to step out of the game entirely.

His diagnosis is clear: after more than a decade of where the internet has been obsessed with scaling up, we’re now on the cusp of something new. Tools that we once - naively -  believed would be used for good have ended up being weaponised for power and financial gain. The internet that we knew and loved now increasingly feels hostile and alien. What comes next is neither the end of the internet nor the continuation of the current model: it's a fundamental break that heads towards a new, more private, trustworthy system. A place where we have more control over how, where, and by whom we're seen. But how do we get there? What does it look like? How do we make sure the new internet doesn’t simply repeat our past mistakes? All questions that he’ll start to answer when he appears at Sónar+D this year.