“There’s an opportunity for Berlin to have an ideology — for it to mean something for a company to come from here”
- TOA.life’s second post on Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s TOA talk explains why he thinks Berlin can be the alternative tech capital.
- “The rent gets jacked, and the person that’s been there for 30 years gets pushed out… this is how a city dies.”
- Does your company, or the one you work for, advocate for the many rather than the few? What could you change? What would it mean?
Yancey Strickler is passionate, principled, outspoken — and hugely influential. He views technology as “the predominant mindset” of our age, and thus his views on technology address culture in the widest sense — and vice-versa.
In the first of TOA.life’s posts drawn from his appearance at TOA 2016, Yancey spoke on rebuilding the culture of inequality around business, and how creators can be supported properly.
In this post, we share his thoughts on how a focus on money, not community, is killing cities, community, and culture. His ideas on the moral obligations of those with power cross the spectrum of modern culture, creativity, and personal advocacy.
Here too are his thoughts on TOA’s beloved city of Berlin; including the possibilities for — and threats to — its unique culture. They’re drawn from both his startling TOA 2016 Keynote talk, and an exclusive Q&A between Yancey and TOA founder Niko Woischnik (below).
If you have never sampled the uniquely inspirational TOA festival experience, you can buy tickets right here.
Provocative and blunt, Yancey’s ideas and observations challenge anyone who works in tech to ask themselves not, “could I do more?” but “could I do more good?”
Here’s how a city dies.
“I live in New York City. Currently, in Manhattan alone, there are 1800 physical bank locations. That is up 60 percent from ten years ago. You would think the ATM was never invented.
“The challenge with all these banks — or chain restaurants, clothing stores, or cell phone stores — appearing on street corners is that what had been there before were local businesses. They were small shops, run by New Yorkers, for their community. But commercial real estate has become the new easy way to make money.
“So the rents get jacked, and the person that’s been there for 30 years gets pushed out — and a Bank of America goes into its place. This is how a city dies. This is how a culture dies.
“And this is increasingly happening. This is the globalisation that is appearing around the world. It’s sort of a “moneyed imperialism” of changing local cultures. It’s really important to talk about this at the same time as Berlin is feeling it.”
“It seems quite likely that the gravitational force of technology innovation will shift squarely to Berlin.”
“It seems like any city that has any kind of dynamic, young culture starts to experience this “monied imperialism.” And it’s unclear what to do about it. There’s lots of ways to challenge the status quo — and that is a reason I was really excited to come to Berlin.
“This is a very interesting moment in the life of this community, after what happened in the U.K. [voting to leave the EU]. It seems quite likely that the gravitational force of technology innovation will shift squarely to Berlin — and that’s going to mean a lot of changes.
The internet needs a counterbalance and needs someone looking out for the rights of the individuals
“It’s probably going to mean a lot more money coming into this community, and mean more people coming here to start things. At a moment like this there’s a very interesting opportunity for this community to define what it means to be a company from Berlin.
“If you think about American Silicon Valley companies, there’s a lot of focus on hyper-growth, on disruption, power being amassed, and platforms — and users having very little power. I would suggest that there’s an opportunity for Berlin to balance that.
“There’s an opportunity to build a code around the building of products, services, or creative projects. Ones that empower the individual, or are about decentralising the web, or are about giving everyone more power over their data, or over what their experience is online, or about paying creators, and supporting people pursuing Open Source… projects that are not simply looking to make as much money as possible.”
“The internet needs a counterbalance… someone looking out for the rights of the individuals.”
“The internet needs a force like this. It needs a counterbalance and needs someone looking out for the rights of the individuals, because we’re moving towards the future at a very fast rate.
“And just a few projects, here, could really define a new way of thinking and a new future for the Web.
“This is a moment where people can make choices, and think about what it means for this city to be producing schools of thought that are starting to shape the world. This is the moment where you can really define that — and I encourage you to take advantage of that moment.”
“There’s an interesting opportunity for it to mean something to be from Berlin.”
“Berlin has the opportunity to become the second most important place in the world in terms of technology, after Silicon Valley.
“There’s an opportunity for Berlin to have an ideology — and for that purpose to be to counterbalance a lot of American technology companies, which are just creating tremendous power for themselves as centralised platforms.
“There’s an opportunity for Berlin to be a home for products that are focussed on individual advocacy: decentralised, seeking to empower individuals to act as a counterbalance to corporations who are too big and powerful. The world needs them.
“My hope is that there is a new ideology. One that has a different set of values, one that advocates for the rights of many rather than the few: there’s an interesting opportunity for it to mean something to be from Berlin.”
If you’ve not had the chance to see it, the full video of Yancey’s keynote talk is an unmissable highlight — and the condensed highlights are in Part 1 of TOA.life’s posts on his talk.
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