This Could Be Our Future

Yancey Strickler is one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, which enables the support of creative projects that wouldn't get a foothold in our current markets. In addition, instead of going the shareholder-benefit way, they registered Kickstarter as a public-benefit organisation. The book looks at how our economy and therefore our culture today is completely ruled by financial maximization. It looks at how we got here (all the financial incentives and short-cuts that enabled monopolies to arise) and how people's values have shifted over the last couple of generations (“having a meaningful life” has lost to “being financially well off”). All of which is super fascinating, and reads like an easier-to-digest version of [a:Mariana Mazzucato 2137305 Mariana Mazzucato https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1501937786p2/2137305.jpg]'s theories about how we need to reinvent our measures for successful and healthy nations. The second half of the book presents Strickler's philosophy called bentoism: Now me, Future me, Now us, Future us. Which is a toolkit that could help invidicuals and companies when making decisions. I found the first part of the book was stronger, and it was a bit lacking when it came to the how-do-we-change-this-shitty-world part. But if that part would be easy to write, then we wouldn't need this book :) So this is a great book to get us all thinking.

A great read, particularly as the world changes and adapts to whatever commerce is going to look like during and after COVID-19.

Strickler pitches is on the need for society to adopt an approach to valuing and decision making that takes into account the broader context of “who” and “when”. In other words we are all invisibly embedded in the largely invisible context of time and community and when we fail to take these into account we limit the intelligence of our actions. His Bento box model is a simple tool to help with this. Easy to read