The internet needs a phone book

It’s not hard to get us on our feet to celebrate great creative output, especially when it comes to projects that transform the internet into "real life.” For those of us who know the internet is real life, projects that turn the connectivity of the web into material presence are especially meaningful. This week’s featured releases include one internet-to-IRL experiment that’s maybe the most endearing we’ve seen yet. 

Internet Phone Book
By Living Web Institute

For those in the know, there’s nothing better than when the new phone books are here. In this case it’s not the yellow pages of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but a new yellow book: the Internet Phone Book. Created by collaborators Kristoffer Tjalve (of the Tiny Awards) and Elliott Cost (who previously worked on The Creative Independent), the Internet Phone Book is a physical directory of 700 websites in categories like Publishing, Ecology, and Atmosphere. Across 176 pages, some of the most unique and hard to find spaces around the web are lovingly indexed. The first edition sold out in just hours. This second edition, released exclusively on Metalabel, has only a few of its 1000-run of copies left. Living internet history!

Do Not Research Fall 25: Bootcamps
By Do Not Research

It’s Joshua Citarella’s world and we’re all just living in it. We joke, but as we look around and see the social and political landscapes being remade by confusing online-first ideologies, the worlds he and his Do Not Research collective have explored are scarily relevant. What’s especially relevant to Citarella and his work is not just his content but how he approaches it: from his high-gloss Doomscroll production to his annual reading and weightlifting syllabus to this latest project, the Fall 25 Bootcamps. Last week Do Not Research launched three new classes on Metalabel that offer four-week immersive explorations into internet subcultures. All three courses immediately sold out, but they’re still taking names for the waitlist. Not one to miss. 

Boom and Dust
By Jason Reed and Barry Stone, Folding Table Cooperative 

Photographers Jason Reed and Barry Stone document the “Petroplex,” a 40-mile stretch of oil extraction and refinement infrastructure in the heart of Texas. Their gorgeously produced photobook stitches and collages photographs taken from the back of a pickup truck as they crawled the long highway expanse. This release offers first-edition copies of the book, as well as a special edition that includes a cassette, both of which provide access to an accompanying soundtrack collage of the sounds of highways, toxic artificial lakes, and oil fields layered with lap steel guitar. All copies/editions are currently sold out! Follow them to get updated when new copies are made available.

In celebration

Some achievements to celebrate this week from around our community.

• Last weekend Mindy Seu put on a sold-out performance of her SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET at Pioneer Works in NYC. The night included the distribution of the very first copies of the book, straight off the plane from the Berlin printer.

• This week the the New Yorker named its Best Books of the Year So Far. One of them? Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova, published here on Metalabel. Amazing and well-deserved. Congratulations to Nadia.

Have something happening with your work you want to celebrate? Send us an email about it: hello@metalabel.com.

❤️
Metalabel