You may or may not know the name Yancey Strickler — if you follow startups or venture capital at all you might, since he was a co-founder of Kickstarter, arguably one of the most successful product launches of the last couple of decades. It has taken in about $7 billion in funding over the past 15 years or so, and it was also one of the first companies I know of to become what’s called a “public benefit” corporation, which means that its corporate goals specifically include making a positive impact on society.
Since Kickstarter got big, Strickler has gone on to do a number of things, including writing a book called This Could Be Our Future, about building a society that looks beyond profit as its core organizing principle. The book also introduced a philosophical decision-making framework that Strickler calls “Bentoism,” since it involves the use of quadrant boxes that look a little like the Bento box you might get at a Japanese restaurant and is designed to get people to think about more than just the short-term personal benefits of a particular decision (Strickler says the name is short for “beyond near-term orientation”).
I don’t know about the whole Bentoism thing, but it is an interesting way of trying to get people to broaden their perspectives. But I really wrote this post to highlight a specific essay that Strickler wrote in May about the development of something he called a “post-individual” approach to society. I’m not endorsing everything Strickler writes in this essay, but it is worth reading and it gave me lots to think about. Here’s part of the intro:
Because of the internet we don’t need to define our identity based on where we physically live, who we’re born to, or what we look like, as has been the case in human history until now.
The ability for people to separate themselves from their geographic, familial, and physical realities by creating new identities continues to reshape the world more than we realize. Computers and the internet have changed how we see and understand who we are, how we socialize, and inspired humans to act in ways closer to how algorithms and machines see us: segmenting the micro-personas and qualities within us into distinct alts and platform-specific identities that can take on lives of their own.
We’re in the midst of a significant evolution in what it means to be an individual. This experience and confluence of forces is what I call post-individualism — a term intended to capture the ways computers and the web have changed our sense of self and how society is changing in response.
Another good Strickler essay from 2019 looked at what some have called the “dark forest” theory of the internet, where people are moving off of public platforms and into private forums, chats, email lists etc.
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