Luke Robert Mason: You’re lis­ten­ing to the Futures Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to co-founder of Kickstarter and author, Yancey Strickler.

It’s large­ly my the­o­ry that the post-internet inno­va­tion won’t be like AR or AI or what­ev­er; anoth­er tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion. I think the rev­o­lu­tion after the inter­net is consciousness—human con­scious­ness. The net­worked organ­ism of all of us. I don’t mean that in a sin­gu­lar­i­ty kind of way.
Yancey Strickler, excerpt from interview

Yancey shared his insights into the dan­gers of finan­cial max­imi­sa­tion, why we should give greater con­sid­er­a­tion to our future selves, and how we can cre­ate a more abun­dant society.

This episode is an edit­ed ver­sion of a recent live stream event. You can view the full, unedit­ed ver­sion of this con­ver­sa­tion at future​spod​cast​.net.

Luke Robert Mason: Now the mod­ern world is defined by a val­ues sys­tem that has nar­rowed into a mon­ey obsessed con­di­tion. In his new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, Yancey Strickler argues that our focus on max­imis­ing finan­cial gain has led to a short term deci­sion mak­ing that pri­ori­tis­es what we want and what we need, right now. This is fast becom­ing dis­rup­tive to soci­ety, but it does­n’t have to be this way. By giv­ing a greater con­sid­er­a­tion to our future selves, the peo­ple who rely on us and the next gen­er­a­tion, we can all find ways to cre­ate a new soci­ety focused on abun­dance for all.

So, Yancey, I want to kick off by ask­ing you—I guess—the obvi­ous ques­tion: why decide to write not just a book, but a manifesto?

Yancey Strickler: Um, it’s a great ques­tion. I sort of found me, more than I start­ed out. My life before Kickstarter was that I was a music crit­ic, a music jour­nal­ist. My whole life, all I real­ly cared about was writ­ing. Becoming an entre­pre­neur was an unex­pect­ed side track. I stepped down as the CEO of Kickstarter almost three years ago, and was­n’t sure what the next project was going to be, but dur­ing the last few years at Kickstarter we’d spent a lot of time think­ing about the macro-economic cli­mate that the com­pa­ny resided in. This led us to become a pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion. To reclas­si­fy Kickstarter from a clas­sic for prof­it cor­po­ra­tion to a pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion as a legal struc­ture in the United States—where I live—where a com­pa­ny must bal­ance share­hold­er val­ue with pro­duc­ing a pos­i­tive ben­e­fit to soci­ety. This is a legal stan­dard. That move was a long time com­ing for us, and let us do a lot to research and bet­ter under­stand what these expec­ta­tions were for for prof­it companies.

For us—artists and acci­den­tal entre­pre­neurs who turned into founders of an impor­tant tech company.

Seeing that water that we swam in, feel­ing how dif­fer­ent our own val­ue sys­tem was from it just made me very aware of the incen­tive struc­ture that com­pa­nies live within—that most star­tups and for prof­it com­pa­nies live inside of. How, even if you’re someone—say like me and a lot of people—who are try­ing to do ​‘the right thing’, it’s quite dif­fi­cult. The sys­tems are opti­mised for very spe­cif­ic out­comes. The out­come that dom­i­nates over and over is what­ev­er choice pro­duces the most mon­ey. The lit­mus test, the secret code that runs the world is that the right answer in any deci­sion is whichev­er option makes the most mon­ey. If you apply that lens to how the world oper­ates, the world starts to seem a lot more rational.

A lot of the ways that reg­u­lar peo­ple are screwed are extreme­ly prof­itable. Forcing peo­ple to raise their incomes through debt rather than through pay­ing them more mon­ey increas­es the mon­ey sup­ply, and you get inter­est on that mon­ey after the fac­tors. There are all sorts of ways that it makes sense if you just imag­ine that the end result of every deci­sion is some­one mak­ing more mon­ey than they would in anoth­er path. So, I want­ed to under­stand the his­to­ry of that idea, and I want­ed to under­stand the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of it. I felt that through Kickstarter—both what the com­pa­ny did and how we approached the struc­ture of the company—it was obvi­ous to me that there were oth­er paths avail­able. The notion that all options fun­nel down to this one way, that all ideas must be opti­mised for prof­it maximisation—that’s just absurd. That’s sim­ply the first and most pow­er­ful fun­nel that exists, but it’s not going to be the last one.

Even our shift to becom­ing a PBC, and even the notion of crowd­fund­ing, where ideas are being sup­port­ed not for finan­cial self-interest, not for self­ish ​“ratio­nal” rea­sons, but to help some­one. To be a part of some­thing, for all sorts of valid rea­sons and val­ues that are also real, and that also dri­ve human behav­iour, and that get lost in a prof­it dom­i­nat­ed world.

I was moti­vat­ed by my own per­son­al expe­ri­ence and also just a real belief that these are all things that are change­able, because this ide­ol­o­gy entered the blood­stream more recent­ly than we think. Many of us have watched this change hap­pen in our life­times, which says that this change in this world that we live in is imper­ma­nent. It can evolve some­where else, espe­cial­ly if we have a con­scious vision of what that some­where else should be.

Mason: That idea of finan­cial maximisation—that’s real­ly the prob­lem that’s at the core of this book. I just won­der: how does this idea of finan­cial max­imi­sa­tion, how does it real­ly encom­pass the entire predica­ment we find our­selves in, in soci­ety today?

Strickler: You know the way I talk about being made aware of it was: I used to live in New York City, lived in New York for 20 years. In the low­er East side, where I lived, there was an old place called Mars Bar. It was a punk dive bar that had been there for­ev­er. One day, it got torn down and replaced by a new bank, a TD bank branch. At the time, there were already three oth­er branch­es of this exact same bank with­in a 15 minute walk of that same cor­ner. I lived right around the cor­ner from it and could­n’t under­stand why this was hap­pen­ing. It was like there was this virus infect­ing the neigh­bour­hood overnight, just flip­ping store­fronts into chains. I learned that more than 1000 bank branch­es opened across New York City over these years, shut­ting down local businesses.

What is the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this? I, as some­one who lives in the neigh­bour­hood, prob­a­bly lose out in that sit­u­a­tion. Mom-and-pop shops clos­ing is a neg­a­tive for the neigh­bour­hood, so what is the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion? The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is real-estate spec­u­la­tion. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is large mort­gage pay­ments that have to be remade and those get forced on small­er busi­ness­es who can’t remake it and then it even­tu­al­ly splits over to chains who can afford to pay that amount of money.

Basically, the rea­son why cer­tain things die and cer­tain things sur­vive, the rea­son why entre­pre­neur­ship has shrunk and the mar­ket caps of com­pa­nies have risen, is because every­thing has oper­at­ed accord­ing to this phi­los­o­phy, which is sim­ply try­ing to amass eco­nom­ic pow­er, using that eco­nom­ic pow­er to change the rules in your favour, to encour­age more of a monop­o­lis­tic envi­ron­ment, and to more and more secure a mar­ket share, to secure a mine share. In the book, I show how this is a process that began in the 1970s with the finan­cial­i­sa­tion of the econ­o­my. You could see the cul­tur­al change—and that is what I think is real­ly profound.

I show a study that UCLA here in the United States has done for about 50 years. Every year, they inter­view incom­ing col­lege fresh­man, 18 and 19 year olds. They ask them about their goals in life. One of the goals in life has to do with mon­ey; being well off finan­cial­ly. In 1970, the per­cent­age of col­lege fresh­men who said being rich was essen­tial, or very impor­tant, was just 28%. The most impor­tant life goal that year—1970—was to ​“devel­op a mean­ing­ful phi­los­o­phy on life”, with 84% of col­lege stu­dents say­ing that was essen­tial or very impor­tant. The most recent year that the study came out, in 2017, the per­cent­age of col­lege fresh­men who said that being rich was essen­tial or very impor­tant was 82%. The per­cent­age who said hav­ing a mean­ing­ful phi­los­o­phy of life was less than half. If you chart all 15 val­ues that are being asked each year, the growth in belief in being rich is by far the biggest change. The desire to become an artist, the desire to have a fam­i­ly and the desire to excel in your career are all fair­ly con­stant. This belief in wealth has real­ly grown.

I think the val­ue sys­tem of soci­ety shift­ed from moral values—beliefs of what is right and wrong—to eco­nom­ic val­ue. Something that is trade­able, own­able, uni­ver­sal, and that is exploitable and gives pow­er. It gives indi­vid­ual pow­er and rein­forces an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic cul­ture. To me, that has been the shift. The pow­er of human­is­tic values—those things have all shift­ed to eco­nom­ic val­ue. We’re rely­ing on price and mon­ey to basi­cal­ly be the proxy for every­thing else. We’ve been told that if we do that long enough, then in every way it’ll even­tu­al­ly work itself out. The prices, the mar­kets will set­tle things out. But you know, we’re 50 years into this experiment.

Mason: You men­tion the 1970s but part­ly, was­n’t it the RAND Corporation and the emer­gence of game the­o­ry that real­ly forced this idea of how we should build busi­ness­es and society?

Strickler: Yeah, I mean game the­o­ry was real­ly impor­tant for a cou­ple of rea­sons. This was devel­oped at the RAND Corporation after World War II to strate­gise for the Cold War. Game the­o­ry is sim­ply a math­e­mat­i­cal process that lets you see basi­cal­ly every out­come; out­comes on out­comes, how events might change.

The chal­lenge with game the­o­ry is that it pre­sumes that inter­ac­tions are com­pet­i­tive and are not coop­er­a­tive; that inter­ac­tions are a zero sum. Basically, what game the­o­ry nets out is that the ratio­nal desire for an indi­vid­ual in any sort of sce­nario is to max­imise their per­son­al self-interest. This is where you get things like pris­on­er’s dilem­ma where you’re taught that the ratio­nal choice for your self-interest is to rat out a friend because that is what sat­is­fies your imme­di­ate needs. This, which is an extreme­ly valid math­e­mat­i­cal con­cept, got applied more broad­ly as a philo­soph­i­cal defense of indi­vid­u­al­ism, and of the notion that we have shared respon­si­bil­i­ties as a fic­tion. That’s some­thing that they’re just telling you to do to try and con­trol you, but in real­i­ty we’re all indi­vid­u­als and we have no respon­si­bil­i­ty for any­one or any­thing else. This is what Thatcher rep­re­sent­ed. A lot of the per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty move­ment is real­ly about—it’s all about the indi­vid­ual and there is no col­lec­tive oblig­a­tion. Really, that mind­set is about free­ing those who have resources from hav­ing any oblig­a­tion. It’s try­ing to negate that cul­tur­al val­ue of look­ing after your neighbour.

The way I’ve come to visu­alise it: in tech we have tech stacks. You have your data­base, you have your back-end archi­tec­ture, your front-end archi­tec­ture. Then final­ly, you have your graph­ic inter­face for the end user. I think val­ues func­tion the same way. At the bot­tom layer—the data­base level—there are cul­tur­al and moral val­ues and beliefs. The things that you believe are right and wrong, that are unique to you and your soci­ety. But built on top of those cul­tur­al val­ues, are rules, laws and norms. Laws are an expres­sion of our cul­tur­al beliefs, the rea­son why we say cer­tain things are right and wrong is a reflec­tion of some deep­er moral core. Finally, built on top of those rules and laws are met­rics and incen­tives. How do we mea­sure the out­comes of our expres­sions of value?

Each of these lay­ers onto the next. Moral-cultural, rules on top of that, and met­rics and incen­tives on top of that. What’s hap­pened over the past 40 years is that the incen­tive lay­er, which today is mon­ey, has got­ten all of the pow­er. Incentives are being used to rewrite the rules. The rules are being used to reset cul­tur­al val­ues, and instead of being a soci­ety ori­ent­ed from a moral/cultural val­ue space and build­ing on top of that, we’ve become a soci­ety root­ed on an incen­tive lay­er. We’re reverse engi­neer­ing our world around that. To me, the chal­lenge is: How do you change that cultural/moral lev­el at the deep­est root lev­el? Because if you change at the root lev­el, oth­er things start to build and cas­cade from there.

The the­o­ry I come up with in the book—which is about expand­ing how we define self inter­est, and expand­ing how we define value—to me is that cultural/moral change, where that sense of oblig­a­tion changes from just now indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, short term indi­vid­u­al­ism which is the reli­gion of the West today, to some­thing that is more active­ly aware. If you look at his­to­ry, you could argue that human his­to­ry has been a pro­gres­sion of con­scious­ness. A rais­ing of con­scious­ness. To me, the next log­i­cal exten­sion of con­scious­ness is to the net­work; to each oth­er. That is a reflec­tion of how the tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing us and as some­thing like what we’re going through now shows us, it’s also just true—that we do have tremen­dous influ­ence on one another.

These are all visualisations—kind of a UI—to imag­ine what is a very com­pli­cat­ed process. But I think some­thing like that is what has changed, and I think that’s how it changes again.

Mason: To a degree, all of that has led us to define val­ue through these very sim­ple things. In the West—or across the world in fact—it’s GDP. We use GDP as the only effec­tive mea­sure of val­ue. But as you say in the book, in actu­al fact GDP is a very inef­fec­tive way to mea­sure value.

Strickler: Yeah, it’s a great proxy for the things it’s meant to mea­sure. It cer­tain­ly has a wealth, has a rela­tion­ship to oth­er traits and qual­i­ties, but the notion that you aim for some­thing that is, at best, a pos­si­bly dis­tant proxy of what is actu­al­ly impor­tant, I think is prob­lem­at­ic. This is where you’re see­ing the par­a­digm shift begin­ning to hap­pen. With New Zealand, Iceland, Finland and Scotland all shift­ing to nation­al gov­ern­ments ori­ent­ed around human well­be­ing; try­ing to numer­i­cal­ly and math­e­mat­i­cal­ly define what that is; to define the spheres of well­be­ing that states must think about; the spheres that mar­kets will think about. To me, that is absolute­ly the right kind of change com­ing. Amsterdam is shift­ing towards Kate Raworth’s dough­nut eco­nom­ics ori­ent­ing its city gov­ern­ment. All of these are states led by women who are embrac­ing what, to me, is a more active­ly aware and holis­tic notion of val­ue and of self. To me, it’s a pro­gres­sion. It’s not refut­ing the impor­tance of GDP; it’s not refut­ing the impor­tance of wealth. It’s yes, end­ing it, it’s build­ing on top of it. History is build­ing on top of it. History is not rev­o­lu­tions and rip­ping off the last thing and replac­ing it with some­thing new. Generally, we build on top of what’s there.

The rea­son why I think this pro­gres­sion of exten­sion of self-interest and expan­sion of val­ue is because it’s still a pro­gres­sive world. We are still grow­ing, we’re just learn­ing to grow dif­fer­ent types of val­ue rather than just finan­cial val­ue. It’s still let­ting us have that tar­get to work towards, and so I think that there is a wide­spread feeling—really because of how exag­ger­at­ed the past 20 years have been, economically—there’s a much stronger feel­ing that there’s a need for a shift, that the anom­alies of this sys­tem that we’re in have added up for too long. So you see peo­ple will­ing to take a chance.

What’s excit­ing about this is the tech­no­log­i­cal moment that we’re in. The amount of data, things we’re able to mea­sure. The amount of ways that we inter­act with one anoth­er that we’re bet­ter able to see and per­ceive makes the embrace of new forms of val­ue or the mea­sure­ment of new kinds of inter­ac­tions pos­si­ble, for the first time ever. At any oth­er point in his­to­ry, how would you pos­si­bly mea­sure things like this, or how would you define them? You would have month-long syn­cret­ic dia­logue on what loy­al­ty means. Today, loy­al­ty is maybe some­thing that a team spends a year try­ing to cre­ate the right algo­rithm to try and define a loy­al inter­ac­tion when they see one. So that is sort of where we are now, and how tech­nol­o­gy and val­ue are going to inter­act. I believe what it will even­tu­al­ly pro­duce is some­thing that we may grow to call post-capitalism.Where we are cre­at­ing trans­ac­tions, green­light­ing projects based on the growth of val­ues on top of finan­cial val­ue. Projects will have to meet some finan­cial min­i­mum but real­ly, they’re opti­mis­ing for a com­mu­ni­ty ben­e­fit or a sus­tain­abil­i­ty ben­e­fit, or some pro-social ben­e­fit. This is some­thing that we’ll be able to do intel­li­gent­ly and ratio­nal­ly. It won’t be a polit­i­cal choice—it’ll be some­thing that we all see as value-creating.

Mason: What are some of those val­ues that you think we should actu­al­ly pri­ori­tise? Instead of pure­ly mon­ey and finance, what would you like us to see prioritise?

Strickler: I mean, the ones I would think about are: Fairness—fairness is a real­ly inter­est­ing thing to think about. To try and cal­cu­late the fair­ness of sys­tems. If you try to think about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of social goods from the per­spec­tive of fair­ness, it gets into a lot of inter­est­ing ques­tions about deserv­abil­i­ty. I think you get into inter­est­ing reverse Dutch auc­tions of need with abil­i­ty to pay. Fairness is one that’s impor­tant to think about.

Certainly, the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of our prac­tices. If there’s a lan­guage that we devel­op to know for how long we can con­tin­ue doing some­thing that we’re doing.

Purpose: a sense of pur­pose, a sense of con­sis­tent­ly work­ing towards some­thing. To me, one of the hard­est things as an indi­vid­ual or as a com­pa­ny: You can know where you want to go, but how can you con­sis­tent­ly make choic­es in that direc­tion over time? Some way of guid­ing you towards that end.

Awareness is some­thing that’s inter­est­ing. The abil­i­ty for us to under­stand how much we’re per­ceiv­ing or not perceiving.

But in the book, the exam­ple that I write about that is being used today and that I think is the type of very spe­cif­ic appli­ca­tion is Adele dis­trib­ut­ing con­cert tick­ets using a loy­al­ty algo­rithm. Adele try­ing to break scalpers reselling tick­ets for hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars more, and using an algo­rithm that would approx­i­mate how loy­al a fan was to her as an artist, and to dis­trib­ute tick­ets based on the top per­centile in each mar­ket. There’s a dystopi­an ver­sion of this which is the Chinese social cred­it sys­tem, where you don’t get into a restau­rant or some­thing unless your loy­al­ty score is so-high. There’s a utopi­an ver­sion of this which is that Adele cre­at­ed a post-capitalist trans­ac­tion that solves a finan­cial min­i­mum and then opti­mis­es for a non-financial max­i­mum, on top of that. In that way it’s not an altru­is­tic choice, it’s a value-maximising choice, but just with a dif­fer­ent frame­work of val­ue that we cur­rent­ly think about.

I think that there are a cou­ple of oth­er exam­ples that have hap­pened recent­ly. One was in the US: the peo­ple that pro­vide the SATs which is a stan­dard­ised test that any­one going into col­lege takes. They had built an algo­rithm to try and build a hard­ship score where they would analyse a stu­den­t’s back­ground to change their score based on their per­son­al hard­ship. To me, that was a fas­ci­nat­ing attempt to do this. You’re see­ing that kind of thing, how do we mea­sure these social inter­ac­tions that we have? I don’t know if it’ll ever get to be as clear as that Pitchfork album score—“this is a 9.1 and I should check this out” or what­ev­er, but I think we’ll get to a notion of what is harm­ful and what is help­ful, to dif­fer­ent spaces of val­ue. A bank going into a neigh­bour­hood and replac­ing a local gro­cer can be judged as neg­a­tive and viewed from a wider set of val­ue per­spec­tives than who can pay the most rent.

Mason: The great thing about you, Yancey, is that you’ve had first hand expe­ri­ences of try­ing to get peo­ple to rethink what they val­ue. The exam­ple of that is Kickstarter. In what way did the for­ma­tion of Kickstarter and all of the lessons you learnt whilst build­ing and run­ning Kickstarter con­tribute to the cen­tral the­sis in this book?

Strickler: Tremendously. Tremendously. The core con­ceit of Kickstarter from the very begin­ning was…it was Perry Chen, who first had the idea for Kickstarter. Perry had had the idea for crowd­fund­ing and we start­ed think­ing about how this would work for cre­ative projects, because that’s the world that we both came from. It was just so obvi­ous that in the world of the ear­ly 2000s, if you were a film­mak­er or a musi­cian or a writer, you’re going to a book pub­lish­er, a record label, a film studio—a giant corporation—and you’re try­ing to con­vince them that you’re going to be a hit. That them putting mon­ey into your project will make them mon­ey. You go into a room and you’re look­ing to sell them on that fact, and you’re look­ing to con­tort your idea to meet their expec­ta­tions. This is what you’re expect­ed to do as an artist, if you don’t do that then you’re screwed. If you don’t do that, then you’ll have to rely on per­son­al wealth or you go into debt, or it just takes you a real­ly long time to do any­thing. So we were very struck by the notion that the whole cre­ative indus­try func­tioned on this idea: that the only good ideas were prof­itable ones; were ones that were like­ly to be prof­itable. That said, they did­n’t even per­form that well to begin with either, they had plen­ty of misses.

The notion of Kickstarter was: if you pro­vide a place where peo­ple can con­tribute to an idea and there is no hope of finan­cial upside—because from the very begin­ning we say, ​“If you put mon­ey into a project you don’t get mon­ey in return. You get a copy of what’s made. You get to be a part of it. You get a social cred­it but you don’t get a finan­cial credit.”—that peo­ple will still do that. In fact, a greater diver­si­ty of projects and ideas will be fund­ed, if the rea­sons for fund­ing encom­pass a broad­er swath of pos­si­ble rea­sons oth­er than just finan­cial motives. A Kickstarter project is fund­ed because the neigh­bour­hood needs it; because it’s a cool tech and peo­ple who know tech­nol­o­gy think it’s rad; because the cre­ator is cute; because they did good things in the past; because they’ve earned some loy­al­ty. It’s a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons, none of which are finan­cial upside.

So, through that, five bil­lion dol­lars, almost, has changed hands for irra­tional projects—from any eco­nom­ic per­spec­tive. 150,000 ideas. It com­plete­ly changes the eco­nom­ic par­a­digm of why mon­ey should change hands. So, to me that real­ly showed, num­ber one: that the rea­sons for act­ing are far broad­er than we think, and that cre­at­ing space for oth­er rea­sons for action is incred­i­bly beneficial—a lot of dif­fer­ent things can hap­pen. Number two: the expe­ri­ence I had of watch­ing the world react to Kickstarter and watch­ing this idea become some­thing that peo­ple real­ly believed in was real­ly eye open­ing to me, because I kept wait­ing for some group of suits and a clip­board to come by and knock on our door and check that we met all the stan­dards for chang­ing things. I kept wait­ing for the peo­ple in charge to say, ​“Alright you’re good, here’s your green stamp.”

The fact that the plat­form and the idea had such an effect real­ly scared me at first, because it made me realise that that prob­a­bly meant that most things were as change­able as this had been. That most things had prob­a­bly come to be in a sim­i­lar way that our thing had been. I sud­den­ly felt like the world was less sta­ble than I had thought it was.

Mason: What you were real­ly doing with Kickstarter is you chal­lenged the sta­tus quo. There are so many chal­lenges that come with chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. I just won­der: how did peo­ple look at you back then, when you sug­gest­ed this new mod­el, and how—in the end—did you man­age to con­vince them?

Strickler: Well cre­ative peo­ple, artists, almost always got it. You would talk to some­one who’s an artist and say, ​“Listen, you can go straight to your fans instead of going through a label.” Artists would be imme­di­ate­ly like, ​“Yeah, total­ly.” Most of the first investors in Kickstarter were artists. We would pitch the idea, and some of them had done well enough that they were like, ​“Do you want help doing this?” People who came from the busi­ness side—their reac­tion would always be, ​“So I get a piece, right? If I put 20 grand into what­ev­er movie, I get a piece? If it’s a Blockbuster, I get a cut?” We’d explain, ​“No—that was­n’t the inten­tion.” and that just made zero sense. Artists under­stood it, fans under­stood it. I knew I’d give what­ev­er amount of mon­ey to David Lynch to do what­ev­er he want­ed, and I’d be thrilled to do that. I’d be thrilled. But for peo­ple who did­n’t come from the art world, the mind­set would be more like…I mean some­one once said, ​“Isn’t there already too much art in the world?” and so there is that kind of mindset.

What was amaz­ing is that, once it was out in pub­lic, it did­n’t imme­di­ate­ly take off. It was a slow build but it was imme­di­ate­ly val­i­dat­ed by cre­ative peo­ple look­ing at this and say­ing, ​“Yeah, this is that thing I need­ed. This is the way I can do that project that’s going to cost six grand to do, that no way am I gonna put on my cred­it card. That’s like three mon­th’s rent—it’s hard for me to do that—but I also think it would be awe­some.” So it cre­at­ed this door. It ends up that there always need­ed to be a door but no one realised that. There, it just got very method­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed, and once it was out in the pub­lic no one was ask­ing for that finan­cial upside. That con­ver­sa­tion dis­ap­peared. That con­ver­sa­tion only exist­ed with try­ing to get mon­ey for peo­ple who have mon­ey. It’s those demands of those peo­ple that then inch their way into a start­up and inch their way down to a user, then cre­ate preda­to­ry terms of use. You know, it starts at such a high lev­el. It starts at that moral-cultural lev­el, right? It just reach­es all the way down and through.

Mason: I have to think of the exam­ple of Oculus Rift and what hap­pened when they were sold to Facebook, because then that entire mod­el was ques­tioned. You were so suc­cess­ful in chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo, and then sud­den­ly this Kickstarter fund­ed project gets bought by a large cor­po­ra­tion like Facebook and it feels like every­body has a lit­tle chip on their shoul­der over the fact that they did­n’t get a cut of the bil­lions of dol­lars that sold to Facebook. What we began to see was us revert­ing back to those old val­ue sys­tems yet again. I think in the US—and cor­rect me if I’m wrong—you had some­thing called Regulation or Reg‑A, which was going to argue for the fact that peo­ple could put in small bits of mon­ey and get small bits of the com­pa­ny. Do you feel that this was the old sys­tem push­ing back on Kickstarter? That you were almost there with chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo, and yet the sta­tus quo chal­lenged you?

Strickler: Yeah, it was hard. When Oculus went up on Kickstarter, Palmer Luckey, the creator—he was lit­er­al­ly a teenag­er in his garage. It was a demo, and the video was all these great gamer peo­ple being like, ​“I just tried this, holy shit.” It was awe­some. Then he built the tech­nol­o­gy that lived up to that. The Facebook acqui­si­tion was very chal­leng­ing. It was chal­leng­ing to the val­ue sys­tem, and it was hard. We would nev­er ask any­one to bind them­selves to cer­tain terms by using Kickstarter. Even if those terms said, ​“You can’t revert to the old game.”—because even if you set any restric­tions it’s still kind of the old game. The oppor­tu­ni­ty there would have been for Oculus and Facebook to have found a way to acknowl­edge that. Where maybe, you say that, ​“We get that legal­ly, this exist­ed in a dif­fer­ent kind of way, but we know that from a social per­spec­tive and the way that peo­ple feel about Oculus—how impor­tant this com­mu­ni­ty has been to Oculus—we’re going to try and do this oth­er step.” That was there for them. Knowing the Oculus founders, I’m sure that they would have liked for that to hap­pen, but you’re talk­ing about Facebook; a giant pub­licly trad­ed company.

It’s a clash of those val­ue sys­tems, and it shows which val­ue sys­tem is more pow­er­ful. It’s the one that writes the cheques, that still ulti­mate­ly has that pow­er. But it’s chang­ing, because…it’s a small thing, but I saw the video last week of the 17 year old kid who’s run­ning the biggest COVID-19 web­site data­base thing, and the fact he’s refus­ing to put any ads up. There’s still this don’t sell out mind­set that exists. Certainly a part of Kickstarter’s ethos comes from our back­ground in the music indus­try, and the cre­ative indus­tries. The Oculus moment was tough.

There is equi­ty crowd­fund­ing in the US—there’s a lot more of it in the UK, and it’s been much more suc­cess­ful in the UK than in the US. But gen­er­al­ly, here, the projects going out look­ing for mon­ey on those plat­forms tend to not be the most attrac­tive kinds of invest­ments. Community ori­ent­ed projects are great, but I think the notion that this could be the great democ­ra­tis­er or, ​“You could be the angel investor in Facebook.”—which is what peo­ple were promising—I think that’s unlike­ly to hap­pen. To me, more like­ly than just con­tin­u­ing to expand the appli­ca­tion of the exist­ing par­a­digm of how mon­ey should be used which is: mon­ey should be used to max­imise more mon­ey—that instead the more inter­est­ing move is to jus­ti­fy the use of mon­ey for new reasons.

So basi­cal­ly, to me, I think the piv­ot that’s begin­ning to hap­pen now—and we’re see­ing it with the fund­ing into vac­cine research—is to see invest­ing finan­cial resources into the pro­duc­tion or growth of non-financial val­ues. It’s ratio­nal, and it’s some­thing that should be done. Only using mon­ey to fur­ther cre­ate more mon­ey is a very lim­it­ed notion of the use of a very use­ful tool. But yet, we trapped our­selves to where the only good ideas—like the world of cre­ative projects before Kickstarter—the only good ideas are the ones that can be the S&P annu­alised return. There’s still that invis­i­ble lit­mus test. That’s why PPE mate­r­i­al was­n’t being made fast enough; it just was­n’t quite prof­itable enough. You need these oth­er val­ue sys­tems, you need these oth­er ori­en­ta­tions to dri­ve behav­iour that prof­it ori­en­ta­tion isn’t going to speak to.

Mason: Do you think, in that case, it’s some­times less about chal­leng­ing our def­i­n­i­tion of val­ue, and instead chal­leng­ing our def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess?Because in so many ways, suc­cess is very much tied to finan­cial wealth and gain­ing finan­cial resources. Do you think we should start with how we look at suc­cess in the world, before we start look­ing at value?

Strickler: I think those things are very tied because I think that behav­iour role mod­els do a tremen­dous amount to shift behav­iour. I feel like I watched—it’s a minor moment—but I feel like I watched the cul­tur­al role mod­el move from Julian Casablancas of The Strokes to Mark Zuckerberg. The height of cul­ture is to be a cre­ative per­son who does­n’t give a fuck—that’s like The Strokes. Then the height of cul­ture becomes to be a busi­ness per­son who does­n’t give a fuck, but who also makes lots and lots of mon­ey. I think that these role mod­els do a lot. They sort of draw a bulls-eye on the board.

If I look at the growth of the belief in being wealthy, I think you see a shift in those cul­tur­al values—but that is chang­ing. In that same UCLA poll, there’s been an emerg­ing answer of what is impor­tant, and that’s to be ​“a val­ues entre­pre­neur.” which is their term they use for some­one who is try­ing to ship val­ues, whether that’s through activism, or start­ing a non-profit or what­ev­er it is that they want to do. But that is some­thing that is start­ing to enter the scene.

I think that suc­cess equalling ​‘being rich’ is a loud mes­sage that exists in the world today. I think the more apt mes­sage is: suc­cess equals ​‘secure’ and ​‘self-coherent.’ Secure at liv­ing in integri­ty with who you are and where you are in life. It’s pos­si­ble for all of us to achieve that. There’s us chas­ing this mov­ing tar­get of reach­ing a lev­el of finan­cial sat­is­fac­tion which will nev­er hap­pen in the way that we want it to, but that’s a dead-end street. That leads nowhere. Even for the rich­est per­son in the world, they look at their mon­ey like, ​“All this mon­ey still needs to learn at least ten per­cent this year. This mon­ey does­n’t count.” It’s all about the com­pound­ing yet-to-come. I think we’ve just tied our­selves in this strange knot, but new kinds of voic­es are aris­ing. There’s def­i­nite­ly a new rise of solidarity—the con­cept of sol­i­dar­i­ty on young people.

COVID plays more into those kinds of emo­tions and feel­ings. I feel like we’ve already had the peak of individualism—near-term indi­vid­u­al­ism. We’re in the crum­bling of that empire at the moment. We’re shift­ing to some­thing more like a post-individualism, where yes—it’s incred­i­bly impor­tant that we’re all indi­vid­u­als and we all have some­thing spe­cial about us. At the same time, the fact that we’re all indi­vid­u­als and we all have some­thing spe­cial about us makes that less impor­tant. So, we can cel­e­brate our indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and cel­e­brate our shared traits. That’s a post-individualism. It’s not try­ing to put back in a box the fact that we’re all unique, it’s just say­ing, ​“Yeah, but that’s not the great­est thing. It does­n’t stop there.”

The same thing with the shift to post-capitalism: the notion of finan­cial val­ue being the only val­ue, that every­thing must be pegged to that. If we max­imise that one val­ue set and then trans­late every­thing after the fact of work. Instead, we’re going to shift to post-capitalism where we acknowl­edge that the spec­trum of val­ue sets that we should be build­ing is larg­er than just finan­cial val­ue. Financial val­ue is absolute­ly crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant, but there are prob­a­bly four or five oth­ers that are just as impor­tant, and that we can very eas­i­ly learn to man­age a soci­ety in which we think about all of those things. This is just the lev­el of com­plex­i­ty, the lev­el we’ve grad­u­at­ed to just to just demands this of us. Shit’s gonna get a lit­tle hard­er, so what? We can han­dle this. Every busi­ness per­son han­dles this, every per­son han­dles this in their lives, and so this is that tran­si­tion moment, I believe.

Mason: You active­ly exper­i­ment­ed with rethink­ing val­ue by turn­ing Kickstarter into a pub­lic ben­e­fit corporation—a PBC as it’s known in the US. What made this dif­fer­ent from oth­er Silicon Valley com­pa­nies and what did you learn from the process of actu­al­ly turn­ing this organ­i­sa­tion into a pub­lic ben­e­fit corporation?

Strickler: Well we’ve always been pur­pose dri­ven. We always said from the begin­ning, ​“We don’t want to sell out. We don’t want to try and go pub­lic.” Kickstarter’s suc­cess is in it being mean­ing­ful to the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ty over the long term, so that was always there. As a for-profit com­pa­ny, the legal expec­ta­tion was that we’d be max­imis­ing share­hold­er val­ue. As our lawyer would remind us from time to time, the fact that we spoke so loud­ly about the fact that we did­n’t do that put us at some the­o­ret­i­cal risk. In fact, if Kickstarter sur­vived to such a day that us as co-founders are no longer alive, and some­one else is run­ning the com­pa­ny, then the com­pa­ny can be how­ev­er shit­ty that per­son wants it to be. There’s noth­ing actu­al­ly lim­it­ing them from doing that. The fact the share­hold­ers at that point in time could say at that point in time, ​“Hey, you must fire every­body and max­imise prof­its right now.” To pro­tect our­selves from that, we real­ly need­ed to put our­selves in the cat­e­go­ry that tru­ly rep­re­sent­ed who and what we are.

So this is when we learned that the pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion designation—which just hap­pened in 2013—we learned about it just after Patagonia made this change. I was CEO and we made this shift, and our char­ter includes 12–15 dif­fer­ent provisions—some of which are spe­cif­ic to the busi­ness. There’s one sec­tion that’s just like…let’s imag­ine a code of con­duct for a good busi­ness. Let’s imag­ine Goldman Sachs could fol­low this. This includ­ed things like a pledge that the com­pa­ny would nev­er use legal but eso­teric tax avoid­ance strate­gies; that the com­pa­ny would nev­er lob­by for pub­lic poli­cies that ben­e­fit­ed the cor­po­ra­tion but not our end users; that the com­pa­ny would nev­er try to claim legal rights from its users that it did­n’t need to oper­ate its busi­ness. All of these sorts of ways that were just like: what is the fair thing to do? We know that the law is absolute­ly tilt­ed in the favour of cor­po­ra­tions. We knew that we could take advan­tage in all these sorts of ways. What is the way that you like to lay down that sword and say, ​“We’re com­ing to you as an hon­est per­son.” So there’s a lot of things like that.

What I did­n’t know at the time was: how much will this actu­al­ly change things on a prac­ti­cal lev­el? What I found is that it actu­al­ly had quite a mate­r­i­al impact. These were val­ues that we’ve cared about—the way that we thought about things. But in the past they were maybe like guardrails that you would bump into if you got a lit­tle astray. But instead, as a PBC, when they were in a char­ter of our legal­ly held respon­si­bil­i­ties, they felt more like things I was com­pelled to do. Things that we must do on a dai­ly basis. It’s not just, ​“Don’t break this.”—it’s like, ​“Actually, express this. Manifest this.” So the way that we thought about our respon­si­bil­i­ties as a com­pa­ny changed. We became much more activist. We’d always been more activist, we became even more so. We did things like cre­ate the Creative Independent, which is a com­plete­ly non-revenue pro­duc­ing project that ele­vates the voice of cre­ative peo­ple. We just tried to live up to this larg­er val­ue set, and tried to imag­ine our respon­si­bil­i­ty in a big­ger way. Kickstarter has seen noth­ing but ben­e­fit from that, noth­ing but ben­e­fit from that. It’s a strong sig­nal that you’re not a Silicon Valley com­pa­ny to the mar­ket. For the peo­ple that are most impor­tant to Kickstarter—the cre­ator com­mu­ni­ty; the backer community—it lets those peo­ple know that we’re not try­ing to get rich on their backs. You know who you’re deal­ing with here.

My per­son­al belief is that there’s about five thou­sand PBCs in America at this point, I believe. I don’t know that the PBC mod­el itself is going to grow, but I think that the PBC mind­set and expec­ta­tions are going to do a reverse takeover of C‑Corps. Eventually, every com­pa­ny in America is going to func­tion in this way. It’s going to hap­pen from mar­ket pres­sure. It’s going to hap­pen to try to appeal to a cer­tain work­force, to a cer­tain clien­tele and cus­tomer base. I think there’s a race to the top that’s hap­pen­ing there that’s going to put these non-financial respon­si­bil­i­ties and val­ues more and more into the hands of cor­po­ra­tions, in a way that is going to be what peo­ple have been agi­tat­ing for. Helping us to take more respon­si­bil­i­ty, on the one hand. On the oth­er hand, it might end up result­ing in com­pa­nies hav­ing even more pow­er. The bailouts, the stim­u­lus­es that have been hap­pen­ing here in the US…jobs are being destroyed by the mil­lions whilst stocks are going up by the bil­lions, and it’s because the changes that are hap­pen­ing are sim­ply rein­forc­ing that same pow­er struc­ture. Companies are get­ting stronger and stronger and stronger. That’s the macro game of this era, the Trump era. Companies are get­ting stronger. The state and oth­er insti­tu­tions are get­ting weaker—that’s why the stock mar­ket goes up. Companies are going to be tak­ing on more and more of that respon­si­bil­i­ty. It’s gonna get weird.

We might get to Proctor and Gamble spon­sor­ing house­wives around the world and pay­ing them a UPI to be ambas­sadors. I can imag­ine a world where com­pa­nies are pro­vid­ing UBIs to their most loy­al cus­tomers as a way to cre­ate brand pow­er. I think the lev­el of weird­ness that we’re going to head to—in terms of who steps up, espe­cial­ly when states fail to step up on these new fron­tier values—is real­ly going to reori­ent how we think about respon­si­bil­i­ty. I think it’s gonna get strange.

Mason: Do you real­ly think that UBI—Universal Basic Income—is a solu­tion? Or again, does that just feel like anoth­er byprod­uct of finan­cial max­imi­sa­tion? Would it be bet­ter to talk about things like Universal Basic Services?

Strickler: My instinct has been to think that the notion of UBI is very much a solu­tion of this finan­cial max­imi­sa­tion age, where the answer to a prob­lem is to give away mon­ey. It’s like the whole world is hon­ey, the answer is hon­ey, right? There’s a lit­tle bit of it that’s a reflec­tion of this time. I think of it as like: Can we guar­an­tee every­one the bot­tom two rungs of Maslow’s hier­ar­chy? I think most European soci­eties tend to do that. You pro­vide for phys­i­cal safe­ty through laws and policing—that’s in every soci­ety. You also pro­vide health­care, so you pro­vide that kind of phys­i­cal safe­ty. I think to me, it’s more about how we can answer peo­ple’s ​‘now me’ needs, in a way that peo­ple can lift their sights high­er? Where peo­ple can think more about their pur­pose in life; can think more about their oblig­a­tions to eachother; can think more about the world their chil­dren are going to step into. I do think that’s hard if those bot­tom rungs of Maslow’s hier­ar­chy are emp­ty. It’s hard to move for­ward beyond that. I under­stand UBI as: how do we guar­an­tee that kind of secu­ri­ty to every­body? I get the sim­plic­i­ty that my instinct is that the answer is more like ser­vices than cash. But, I root for every­one. I root for a solution.

Mason: The fun­ny thing is, in the book you actu­al­ly look at mod­els for indi­vid­u­als; how indi­vid­u­als can change their val­ue set. Oddly enough, the way in which you can change your val­ue set is tied to Japanese lunch. It’s called ben­to­ism. Could you explain what ben­to­ism is and how that changes our rela­tion­ship with things like the future me and the now me?

Strickler: I was pulling on this thread of our self inter­est being too lim­it­ed. We think of our self inter­est as this game the­o­ry ​“now me”—that’s all that real­ly mat­ters. One thing in my note­book I was doodling—I drew a hock­ey stick graph. A chart of a line going up into the right. Wherever your self inter­est is, it’s grow­ing so fast, the line goes up into the right. I was look­ing at this and had this thought: don’t both these axes on this graph keep going? The X‑axis mea­sur­ing time; it extends far out from now into the future. The Y‑axis mea­sur­ing your self interest—money, pow­er, fame, whatever—it also keeps grow­ing. I thought as our self inter­est grows, it grows in its dimen­sion­al­i­ty from me to us. The more self inter­est you have, the more respon­si­bil­i­ty you have. The dif­fer­ence between being sin­gle and hav­ing a fam­i­ly is huge, or being a work­er, or being an entrepreneur—it’s huge.

Suddenly, this lit­tle hock­ey stick graph is now in this much big­ger space. I drew box­es around it and cre­at­ed a very sim­ple two-by-two chart. I thought: this is actu­al­ly a more true map of self inter­est. In that space where there is the hock­ey stick graph—that space is ​‘now me’—what I want and need right now. That is how we think of self inter­est today. But in the bot­tom right cor­ner of this two by two, is ​‘future me’. The old­er, wis­er ver­sion of myself. The Obi-Wan Kenobi ver­sion of me that looks back through time and tells me what mat­ters; helps me make the right choice. In the top left, there’s ​‘now us’. My fam­i­ly, my friends, what­ev­er my respon­si­bil­i­ties are—those peo­ple. In the top right cor­ner, that is ​‘future us’. My kids or every­body else’s kids.

I thought, as I looked at this: Wow. Every choice I make leaves a foot­print in each of these spaces. Now me; future me; now us; future us. But I’m blind to every­thing but ​‘now me’. I know that the future mat­ters, I know that oth­er peo­ple in my life mat­ter, but I have a real­ly hard time con­cep­tu­al­ly hold­ing onto those things. Here seemed to be an expres­sion of what was actu­al­ly going on in my head. After I drew this chart, I wrote: What is this a graph of? And I wrote a descrip­tion: Beyond near-term ori­en­ta­tion. I thought this a graph to help me see beyond near-term ori­en­ta­tion, and then I sud­den­ly looked at that and realised it was an acronym for ben­to. I thought about the Japanese ben­to box. The ben­to box has four com­part­ments and a lid and it derives from a word mean­ing ​“con­ve­nience.” The beau­ty of the ben­to is that, because of its com­part­ments, it lets you hold a vari­ety of dishes—not too much of any one thing. It’s always a bal­anced meal. The ben­to also hon­ours a Japanese diet­ing phi­los­o­phy called Hara Hachi Bu, which says, ​“The goal of a meal is to be 80 per­cent full. That way, you’re still hun­gry for tomor­row.” So I thought: what I’ve drawn here is a ben­to for my choic­es, and my self inter­est. It’s a way for me to not just gorge myself on ​‘now me’, but for a way for me to keep in mind the now us of my fam­i­ly, my respon­si­bil­i­ties to oth­er peo­ple; my ​‘future me’—who I real­ly want to become in life, my ulti­mate poten­tial; and then ​‘future us’—what’s the world that’s going to be left after I’m gone?

This has become a way that I make choic­es. It’s a way that I iden­ti­fy my pri­or­i­ties. It’s a way that I teach work­shops to help peo­ple find their val­ues. But it’s sim­ply a way to expand our aware­ness beyond just this now me space, and to allow us to see the full impact of choic­es. The need for this is so acute, because when we only see ​‘now me’, the deci­sions that maybe sac­ri­fice the near-term for a longer term ben­e­fit look like bad options. Or, choic­es that are good for us now but bad for us in the long term look like good options. When we don’t see the whole pic­ture, we tell our­selves we’re mak­ing good choic­es but real­ly we’re com­mit­ting acts of self-harm.

I think that this expan­sion­al perspective—whether the ben­to lan­guage is what ulti­mate­ly sticks or not—I believe this expan­sion­al per­spec­tive is what’s hap­pen­ing right now with COVID-19 for sure. The future, the us, the col­lec­tive spaces are much more clear. I think that this is a kind of map for how we might imag­ine post-capitalist val­ues work­ing. For how we might imag­ine our shared respon­si­bil­i­ties work­ing, and how we might imag­ine new spaces of oppor­tu­ni­ty work­ing. For exam­ple, I think there could be com­pa­nies that serve the ​‘future us’ space. There could be a cer­tain type of entre­pre­neur who works on ​‘future me’ or ​‘now us’ kinds of prob­lems. I believe this is a map of whole new fron­tiers of ways to pro­vide val­ue to each oth­er and a way to work towards this larg­er goal of not just max­imis­ing ​‘now me’ finan­cial val­ue, but to pur­sue coher­ence; to pur­sue choic­es that are real­ly in line with all these spaces, show­ing that greater awareness.

Mason: It’s one thing to aspire towards hav­ing a bet­ter rela­tion­ship with your future self, but it’s real­ly hard to do that, isn’t it? It’s real­ly hard to act in a way to make that hap­pen. How do we keep our­selves account­able to our future selves?

Strickler: I use what are basi­cal­ly like method act­ing tech­niques, where I will try to step into those roles. Even the choice I made to write this book—I used some­thing like that. I used a process to come up with five dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble career paths as a next step and then spent a day pre­tend­ing I was each one of those things. I allowed that day of pre­tend­ing I was a teacher; pre­tend­ing I was a jour­nal­ist; pre­tend­ing I was mak­ing some video project. I allowed that expe­ri­ence to tell me what was right or wrong for me.

For me, step­ping into my ​‘future me’ space is some­thing I do on a week­ly basis. I have a week­ly prac­tice where I basi­cal­ly jour­nal and try to step into these spaces, pic­ture my ​‘now us’, pic­ture my ​‘future us’, pic­ture my ​‘future me’—where I real­ly do pic­ture Obi-Wan. I real­ly do pic­ture the holo­gram Obi-Wan. I just try to be qui­et and almost med­i­tate with those spaces. I’ll say, ​“Tell me what’s impor­tant.” With my ​‘now us’, I’ll reflect, ​“Now us, what do you think mat­ters?” and my ​‘now us’ will say, ​“Hey, you and your wife haven’t had a date in a week. Plan some­thing. Call these friends. Think of this way that you can be more giv­ing.” These are things that my ​‘System 1’ think­ing brain—my pas­sive, reac­tive brain—isn’t think­ing about. That part of my mind is just think­ing: self pro­mote; go get what’s mine—self­ish shit. Very, very self­ish stuff. I just get used to engag­ing with these things, and now these voic­es are more nat­ur­al to me. I will default to self­ish, ​‘now me’ think­ing. I don’t want to. I aspire to more than that. I don’t always do that—but there are moments when it’s hard to not always do that.

To me, some­thing like the ben­to frame­work is like a men­tal scaf­fold­ing. It’s like a tool of love that’s just say­ing, ​“Hey, here’s the stuff that’s hard to keep in mind, but it’s extreme­ly impor­tant, and here’s just a way to force you to do that—here’s a mus­cle mem­o­ry. Also, here is pos­si­bly a map towards greater mean­ing, greater coher­ence in your life, greater oppor­tu­ni­ty. Here’s what to look for beyond the ​‘now me’ of sur­vival.” It’s sim­ply mak­ing you aware of what you actu­al­ly think. That’s mean­ing­ful, because when you know what you actu­al­ly think, then you can act accord­ing­ly to what you actu­al­ly believe, and your choic­es like­ly change.

Mason: Yancey, it would be irre­spon­si­ble of me not to men­tion the ele­phant in the room, which is the cur­rent cri­sis. I just won­der how COVID-19 is chang­ing our ways in which we’re act­ing. Are you see­ing more peo­ple act­ing for ​‘now me’, or are you hope­ful that we’re going to start act­ing for things like ​‘future us’?

Strickler: This is a total ​‘now us—future us’ space. Normally when I do my ben­to, I start with ​‘now me’, because that’s the thing that’s the most obvi­ous to me. But that week, when I looked at ​‘now me’, I had no idea. What did I want? I had no clue. But when I saw ​‘now us’, I instant­ly knew. I have a four year old. I’m a home­school teacher for half a day now. I knew absolute­ly what my respon­si­bil­i­ties are, and now my entire ori­en­ta­tion has total­ly shift­ed. I’m very us ori­ent­ed now. I’m only as safe as my neigh­bour, and my neigh­bour’s neigh­bour. Suddenly I see the world very differently.

I think that’s like­ly to stay for a while. There is the weird thing of hyper-isolation that bal­ances that out. But I feel like the fact that we exist beyond ​‘now me’- that the future is real and coming—we could see that as we see we were ten days behind Italy, when the cri­sis was first hap­pen­ing. But we can also see that col­lec­tive space. Especially here in the US, where we pro­vide very few col­lec­tive ser­vices, the lack of health­care is going to be more and more of an issue.

The best thing that’s hap­pen­ing out of that—I mean, I think the glob­al pause is fan­tas­tic in many ways—but I’m excit­ed by the inter­net, the net­work, real­ly step­ping into its own even more. There’s a kind of col­lec­tive con­scious­ness that has been becom­ing grad­u­al­ly digi­tised but is now becom­ing much more alive, to where so many minds are col­lab­o­rat­ing on the same prob­lem set. We’re using this tool to bring our­selves togeth­er. The ben­e­fits we’ll see as a result of that are just going to be enor­mous. Enormous.

It’s large­ly my the­o­ry that the post-internet inno­va­tion won’t be like AR or AI, or whatever—another tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion. I think the rev­o­lu­tion after the inter­net is consciousness—human consciousness—is the net­worked organ­ism of all of us. I don’t mean that in a sin­gu­lar­i­ty kind of way, but just that we’re all neu­rons respond­ing col­lec­tive­ly to this cri­sis. With COVID-19, some parts of our body felt it first and tried to warn the rest of the body. The col­lec­tive con­scious­ness spits out flat­ten the curve as the par­a­digm to help us under­stand what needs to hap­pen, and then that rapid­ly gets dis­persed through­out the entire brain. All that, to me, is just outrageous—it’s kind of out­ra­geous. I feel a sense of awe in that, and believe in its pow­er. I can imag­ine a uni­verse where Donald Trump is not the pres­i­dent of the United States, where this is like the sci­en­tif­ic Olympics of the entire world com­ing togeth­er. This amaz­ing moment of cohe­sion. That moment, a hun­dred per­cent, could be here. That’s what’s sup­posed to hap­pen. That’s what’s sup­posed to happen.

Mason: Following that macro idea a lit­tle fur­ther, do you think COVID-19 might actu­al­ly expe­dite some of the changes that you’re advo­cat­ing for in the book? You put a 30 year time hori­zon on most of the changes you expect to see in the book, but do you think in fact COVID-19 could speed that up? Or do you think it’s actu­al­ly going to slow that down? Do you think that a 30 year hori­zon is now going to turn into a 50 year horizon?

Strickler: I believe in a 30 year the­o­ry of change. That’s like a gen­er­a­tional the­o­ry of change. Kind of at the heart of why gen­er­a­tional changes hap­pen is death. I think that peo­ple change their minds and then die, and peo­ple grow up in a new real­i­ty with a new set of cul­tur­al norms. We can imag­ine the medi­an line of opin­ion chang­ing as cer­tain peo­ple die and cer­tain peo­ple are born. In waves of mass death will accel­er­ate change and opin­ion in a very bru­tal kind of way. I don’t expect there to be an imme­di­ate bounce­back towards vir­tu­ous­ness. I mean, maybe in some of these well­be­ing soci­eties, maybe that hap­pens. But I would expect things to get dark­er in the near term. I believe we’re going to dis­cov­er that there are oth­er val­ue sets that can ori­ent our machines, and that we’re going to need those.

The oth­er sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tion that’s hap­pen­ing now will be from human labour to com­put­er labour—to AI and things like that. The chal­lenge for a human organ­i­sa­tion is not know­ing where you want to go—it’s get­ting a bunch of human beings to get there togeth­er, and to bat­tle in the dai­ly dis­trac­tions. For an AI sys­tem, there will be none of those human dis­trac­tions. Whatever met­ric or tar­get that we set, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly we’ll be able to get there in some way or anoth­er. The ques­tion is: What are those met­rics that we’re set­ting? What are those tar­gets? How are they being informed? How are we think­ing about the light and the shad­ow for each of those things? For me, the impor­tance of met­rics and the impor­tance of defin­ing the val­ues that we want to be opti­mis­ing for—will become more and more impor­tant. They’ll be mean­ing­ful­ly run­ning our insti­tu­tions and our sys­tems. If we allow those sys­tems to oper­ate accord­ing to the val­ue sets that we run today, then we’re going to have sys­tems that opti­mise for mon­ey, pow­er and atten­tion. That’s going to be the big three. There’s not going to be any­thing else that’s gonna have room for that. So I look at that as the lever­age point. I love the Donella Meadows essay on points of lever­age in a sys­tem. The val­ues lay­er is what oth­er things are built upon.

I think all of those things will get put more on the table in a post-COVID world. That this is a cli­mate change fast forward—the fact that this is teach­ing us that it’s pos­si­ble to pause the world and total­ly change things. Yes, the world ends in some ways—but also the world is kind of bet­ter in oth­er ways. It’s a great dry run and a great reminder of the ten­u­ous­ness of what’s here. I say all that while fear­ing it and not tak­ing it light­ly by any stretch. All this may be adding up to, ​“Ah, I feel, at the abil­i­ty of this thing—this tiny thing—to so great­ly affect us.”

Mason: We have a ques­tion on Youtube from Ian Forrester who’s asked, ​“Yancey, what’s your dream post-capitalism for humankind?”

Strickler: I keep com­ing to this idea of coher­ence, but I feel like the chal­lenge of the mod­ern world is that we end up com­pro­mis­ing a lot to pro­vide finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty for our­selves. Systems, on a macro lev­el, cre­ate a lot of insta­bil­i­ty and a lot of cor­rup­tion to try to max­imise for their own finan­cial self inter­est. The world I imag­ine is one where we sim­ply see finan­cial val­ue as a tool that’s used in exchange for oth­er val­ues. The idea that the rich­est per­son on the street is the hap­pi­est per­son on the street—that’s a move that we aban­don. We imag­ine that the most well off per­son is the one that’s the most bal­anced; the one who has their head on their shoul­ders; the one who maybe has the mid­dle class job, and they don’t have to work so much so they get to spend time with their fam­i­ly. I think there’s a dif­fer­ent notion of what it means to be a suc­cess­ful human being—that that hap­pens. I would love to see—in the same way we’re see­ing human­i­ty’s tal­ents com­ing togeth­er around health—I would love to see our tal­ents com­ing togeth­er around solv­ing oth­er prob­lems. Like lone­li­ness; like how we feel social­ly con­nect­ed. Like what it means to be a human being through the inter­net. Like the fair­ness of sys­tems. I think the most impor­tant met­rics and mea­sure­ments for shap­ing the future haven’t yet been invent­ed. That’s the process of the next 10 or 20 years.

Mason: What hap­pens to those who feel trapped by their mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances? It’s all very well and good to talk about, ​“Let’s move towards a post-financial future and change and have new val­ue sets.”—but what about peo­ple who are liv­ing pay-cheque to pay-cheque, where­by all they’re think­ing about is their abil­i­ty to sur­vive finan­cial­ly? How real­is­ti­cal­ly do they live with this new val­ue set?

Strickler: If your ​‘now me’ is hard—yes—it’s more dif­fi­cult to oper­ate in these oth­er spaces. But, I think that if you look at reli­gious rates, and how they relate to income level—generally, the less mon­ey you have, the more reli­gious you tend to be. I would say that some­one whose ​‘now me’ is hard­er, is in a more chal­leng­ing space. You have to lean on the ​‘now us’ of your community—the com­mu­ni­ty of your church, your fam­i­ly. You also have to think about the ​‘future me’ of sal­va­tion and the after­life, to give your life pur­pose and mean­ing. If your day to day is hard, what is the pur­pose of that day to day? Well, there is this larg­er goal of try­ing to live a wor­thy life.

I think for some­one who is extreme­ly wealthy, the chal­lenges of mate­ri­al­ism are ones of mate­ri­al­is­tic abun­dance that can cause you to lose sight of your oblig­a­tions to oth­er peo­ple; that can cause lone­li­ness; that can cre­ate a sep­a­rate­ness from soci­ety. I think too much or too lit­tle can iron­i­cal­ly have a sim­i­lar kind of out­come. I would say that maybe the wealth­i­er per­son has more time—maybe that’s the one thing that can be said. If you look at reli­gious doctrine—if you look at the Bible—Jesus would say that, ​“It’s eas­i­er for a camel to pass through the eye of a nee­dle than for a rich man to go to heav­en.” The notion that wealth is some­thing that blocks you from that lib­er­a­tion; blocks you from your great­est poten­tial. We’re in a world today where that incen­tive lay­er of mon­ey rules the show, so we think that hav­ing mon­ey is nir­vana. We auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that peo­ple have that, have what they need—and that peo­ple who don’t have that, don’t have what they need. I would argue that real­ly, that’s one of prob­a­bly five or six things that you need. Yes, it can bal­ance oth­er things out, but I don’t think that’s the answer on it’s own. I think the abil­i­ty to self actu­alise, the abil­i­ty to be more coher­ent might have an inverse rela­tion­ship to wealth. Monks are impov­er­ished for a rea­son. I think that we’re maybe a lit­tle bit trapped in the ortho­doxy of today, in assum­ing who this may be valu­able for.

Mason: Another ques­tion that fol­lows on from the ortho­doxy of today is from James Pockson on Youtube, who asks, ​“In what way do you feel that cul­tures are built on his­tor­i­cal precedent?”—the core of his ques­tion is, ​“Do you see any prefer­able val­ue sys­tems from our past that per­haps we should re-embrace, that allows you to achieve some of the things that you were talk­ing about—either from the past or from oth­er cultures?”

Strickler: Yeah, total­ly. I love that ques­tion because I think that we are kind of run­ning on a 17^th to 18^th cen­tu­ry play­book of val­ues and util­i­tar­i­an­ism. It’s amaz­ing how deeply that stuff runs. When I was doing a lot of research, the move­ment that became real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to me was called com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism, and this first was around when the United States was first begin­ning. It’s been a cou­ple of years since I read all of this, but com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism is real­ly based on val­ues plu­ral­ism, in that you could have a soci­ety where edu­ca­tion would be run by edu­ca­tion­al val­ues, and health run by health values—everything would be run accord­ing to its native script. Orienting a soci­ety around that would­n’t be utopia, but would cre­ate the best poten­tial of outcomes.

People end­ed up exper­i­ment­ing with this, and most impor­tant­ly, one of the great thinkers in game the­o­ry, John Nash—who cre­at­ed the pris­on­er’s dilemma—he end­ed up mov­ing to a com­mu­ni­tar­i­an com­mu­ni­ty in the 1970s. This is how I end­ed up find­ing out about this move­ment. There is a book I read called Spheres of Justice which had a tremen­dous effect on me, which argues that the form of all injus­tice in the world is when a val­ues sys­tem rules beyond its right­ful domain. The most clas­sic exam­ple is Galileo being asked to refute the laws of sci­ence, because the val­ues of the church were more pow­er­ful at the time. That’s a form of injus­tice, and real­ly, all injus­tice in the world is root­ed in this kind of idea. That book was writ­ten by Michael Walzer. The notion of try­ing to find the right lens of value—trying to find that match between: What is this sit­u­a­tion? What is the val­ue at stake? And then act­ing—rather than always assum­ing there’s a sin­gu­lar val­ue at stake. That’s kind of the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­ning of my whole line of think­ing. So then orig­i­nal­ly from this notion of val­ues pluralism—that val­ues are expres­sive, they are ratio­nal in the eye of their beholder—and that a soci­ety could actu­al­ly flour­ish if you allowed every­one to act accord­ing to their val­ue sys­tem. We may imag­ine that as some sort of dis­cord­ed val­ues orgy, but in real­i­ty it’s prob­a­bly more like a rain­for­est. It’s prob­a­bly more like an ecosys­tem that would emerge if we just allowed peo­ple to live tru­ly to their val­ue systems.

Mason: We have anoth­er ques­tion from Youtube—this time from Kate Hammer. She’s ask­ing, ​“What do you think mat­ters most, that also evades mea­sure­ment?” So it’s great to talk about these new val­ue sys­tems, but if we can’t mea­sure that, how do we even iden­ti­fy it as a value?

Strickler: The way I come at met­rics and mea­sure­ment being so impor­tant is not that I want that to hap­pen. The idea that mea­sur­ing things removes the love and mag­ic from them—I emo­tion­al­ly buy into that. But if I think about auto­mat­ed sys­tems and the kinds of infor­ma­tion that they require to oper­ate, then I think that the idea we should­n’t be in the met­ric game because we think it’s not indie enough—that’s hard for me to stom­ach because the influ­ence of these things is gonna be so strong. But what we’re going to have to do is to find sig­nals that approx­i­mate these dif­fer­ent kinds of met­rics. We can look at exam­ples of how indus­tries as a result of new met­rics being added. If you think about food—where say calo­ries are being forced to be displayed—we’ve put our­selves into this inter­est­ing dual deci­sion mak­ing process, of price and calo­ries togeth­er. I think we don’t quite know the lan­guage of how to do that. But here we see the shift from a mono­lith­ic val­ue sys­tem to now some­thing more like a val­ues plu­ral­is­tic sys­tem. You can even see it in sports where, say, data analy­sis has been used to com­plete­ly re-engineer how teams play, because they’ve shown their pre­vi­ous strate­gies pro­duce less desir­able out­comes than dif­fer­ent kinds of strategies.

If I imag­ine how these new kinds of val­ues might be accept­ed, it’s not from every sin­gle CEO get­ting woke in the same way. It’s from these val­ues being ratio­nal­ly expressed. It’s from these being demon­strat­ed as pro­duc­ing bet­ter out­comes that we all agree upon. That’s the world where you get some­one who dis­agrees with this polit­i­cal­ly to actu­al­ly take this up and apply this in their busi­ness. If we’re just try­ing to speak on this cul­tur­al val­ue woke space, you’re only gonna talk to the choir. The impor­tance of this, the mean­ing of this and the goal of this should be that this is not the new indie hit that lets peo­ple feel supe­ri­or to anoth­er group of peo­ple. This is the fuck­ing main­stream, this is the game. This is what suc­cess is, this is obvi­ous. How do you work to that real­i­ty? To me, that’s where you get to a glob­al scale of change, and it seems to me that any­thing less than that is like, ​“What are we even doing here?”

Mason: I want to ask you anoth­er ques­tion about our cur­rent state and the pan­dem­ic that we’re deal­ing with. A lot of peo­ple will look to you and look to Kickstarter as free­lancers and as cre­atives. What is your advice, Yancey, for those sorts of indi­vid­u­als dur­ing this very dif­fi­cult time?

Strickler: Cut costs. Cut costs. You’ve got to live as light as you can. I have my own ver­sions of these things, where I had a com­part­men­tal­i­sa­tion of hav­ing a child, of hav­ing a work self, of hav­ing all of these oth­er selves. Now they’re just piled on top of each other—it’s just cacoph­o­ny. Trying to pull out my now me and my ​‘future me’, the part of me that’s cre­ative, that’s work­ing on projects—getting that per­son to focus has been dif­fi­cult. To do that, I end up doing an exer­cise to step into my ​‘future me’ self, where I imag­ined a year and a half from now, the last of the lock­downs is over and the vac­cine is done. Let’s imag­ine you feel espe­cial­ly proud of your­self dur­ing that time. Well then, what did you do? What are those three things that you did? When I went through that process, in addi­tion to my fam­i­ly oblig­a­tions, I focused on com­plet­ing a sin­gle long term project. The idea that I would just be grind­ing on some­thing bit by bit each day. That, I thought, would be the right kind of cre­ative out­put for me. Knowing that means I have to change the cost struc­ture of my life. I have to have this thought of: What if income is not any­thing like what I expect it to be for the next year? Then to give myself mean­ing, to let myself still feel motivated—I’ve tried to set this tar­get of a project that I’m com­plet­ing bit by bit along the way. People are going to launch Kickstarter’s patre­ons and things like that, to make up the eco­nom­ic gaps that they face. Some of those will do well—I think some will be hard­er because not a lot of peo­ple feel secure right now. It’s real­ly, real­ly tough.

Mason: I guess my final ques­tion is: How do we become active advo­cates for this new way of think­ing about val­ue? What must we do, as indi­vid­u­als, to force a change to the polit­i­cal economy?

Strickler I think it does start with indi­vid­u­als becom­ing more aware. Developing that active aware­ness. Having that lan­guage of dimen­sion­al­i­ty of self inter­est. Not view­ing the eco­nom­ic choice as always being the right choice. Being able to voice that in a meeting—being able to grad­u­al­ly shift the cul­ture of your com­pa­ny in that kind of way. I believe there is a groundswell, and a direc­tion that is def­i­nite­ly against the excess­es of cap­i­tal. There is an anti-groundswell that’s hap­pen­ing, that I think will only grow. The fuse has been lit, and what we’re going through right now is just going to exac­er­bate it. But the ques­tion is: what do we step into? If not what we have now, then what? How can we have a vision that’s not destruc­tive? To me, the con­struc­tive vision is where we’re own­ing the spaces where we have impact. We’re own­ing our future impact. We’re try­ing to be very con­scious of how we affect one anoth­er, and we’re doing that in our per­son­al lives. We’re doing that in our organ­i­sa­tions. If this kind of lan­guage comes to be accept­ed; if the future comes to be seen as ratio­nal; if the col­lec­tive and the ​‘us’ comes to be seen as just as real as the ​‘me’, then I think the kinds of choic­es and the val­ues that we’ll pri­ori­tise are just going to change from now. I think for now it’s just becom­ing com­fort­able with these real spaces that exist.

I think 30 years from now, every­thing I’m say­ing now is going to be so basic and bor­ing it’s going to seem absurd that any­one had to explain it. I firm­ly believe that’s going to hap­pen. It just comes from being com­fort­able. I can say for myself—having done this for two years now—it’s hav­ing a mean­ing­ful impact on how I think about myself and my space in the world. I realise that because of macro chal­lenges that we’re talk­ing about, all of this sounds very, very small, and it may be, in the larg­er scheme. But this is how things begin, and grow. I saw it with Kickstarter—you look at any­thing through his­to­ry. This is how things hap­pen. There isn’t this spon­ta­neous com­bus­tion where there’s this big bang of wok­e­ness, and every­one just wakes up and believes the oppo­site of what they believed the day before. We need a cred­i­ble path that owns what’s good about the present, that yes, and?​‘s it, builds on top of it, and that isn’t just preach­ing to the choir. To me, that future looks some­thing like this.

Mason: So on that note, I want to thank you, Yancey, for join­ing us for one of our first Futures Podcast live stream events.

Strickler: Thank you so much.

Mason: Thank you to Yancey for shar­ing his thoughts on how to cre­ate a more gen­er­ous world.

You can find out more by pur­chas­ing Yancey’s new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World—avail­able now.

And don’t for­get, you can watch the full unedit­ed video of this con­ver­sa­tion at Futures Podcast dot net, where you can also find out about all of our live stream events.

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