Metalabel

Metalabel presents itself as a platform for "collective creativity," but what it actually represents is something far more dispiriting: the final bureaucratization of the underground. Here we have the aesthetic trappings of radical cultural production—the language of "releases," the rhetoric of collaboration, the vague gestures toward scenes and movements—hollowed out and repackaged as productivity software for people who want to feel countercultural while operating entirely within the logic of late capitalism. The site itself is a masterclass in what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism": it cannot imagine an alternative to market relations, so it simply rebrands them with the vocabulary of artistic collectives. The "metalabel" concept promises liberation from the alienation of individual authorship but delivers only a new form of administrative overhead.

What's particularly galling is the appropriation of genuinely radical concepts. The history of collective creativity—from Factory Records to K Records, from Warp to the entire 90s rave scene—was predicated on a rejection of the very infrastructure Metalabel wants to provide. Those scenes weren't created by platforms; they emerged from specific material conditions, from shared spaces and limited resources, from the friction of actual human beings in actual rooms making actual decisions about actual things. Metalabel offers the simulation of this without any of the animating conflict. It's a Discord server with better typography, a Notion template dressed up in the language of cultural insurgency. The "releases" it enables aren't cultural events—they're content drops with collaborative credits.

The founders clearly understand the theoretical landscape they're operating in. The site is littered with the correct references, the appropriate nods to collective models and alternative economic arrangements. But this theoretical literacy makes the betrayal worse, not better. They know that real scenes are defined by what they exclude, by their specific taste hierarchies, by their willingness to be difficult and elitist and weird. Metalabel excludes nothing except functional design—the interface is a brutalist nightmare of overlapping boxes and unclear hierarchies, as if visual confusion itself were a form of radicalism. The actual user experience suggests a platform built by people who read about collectives in a book rather than participated in one.

The most damning indictment is what's missing: any actual culture. Browse the releases and you'll find a graveyard of NFT-adjacent projects, crypto-curious experiments, and the kind of interdisciplinary collaborations that exist primarily to be described rather than experienced. Where is the music? Where are the zines that actually circulate? Where is the writing that matters to anyone outside the extremely online creative class? The platform has successfully created a space for people to organize creative projects without ever requiring that those projects be good, or interesting, or culturally significant. It's a logistics solution for a problem that didn't exist, built by and for people who have mistaken process for product.

There's a hauntological dimension here worth noting: Metalabel is haunted by the ghost of a future that never arrived, the dream of the internet as a space for genuine cultural production outside market imperatives. But instead of mourning that lost future or working to resurrect it, the platform simply performs its gestures without any of its content. It's a seance where no spirits arrive—just the organizers congratulating themselves on the ritual. The 0.0 isn't hyperbole. This is what cultural death looks like: not the absence of activity, but activity drained of all meaning, the mechanical reproduction of creative forms without any animating spirit. Metalabel isn't building the future of collective creativity. It's administering its corpse.