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I M A G E S B Y Z H A N G W E I , F R O M A R T I F I C I A L T H E A T E R S E R I E S

has Taylor Swift on it. And all of these things happen because these are the safe bets. For someone looking to make money on their money, they want safe bets. This is the sort of culture that you get from that, and it is not just the cultural landscape that is shaped; it is even the physical landscape.

I live in New York City. Currently, in New York, in just Manhattan, there are 1,800 physical bank locations. That is up 60% from 10 years ago. You would think the ATM was never invented. The challenge with all these banks appearing on street corners— or chain restaurants, clothing stores, cellphone stores, whatever—is that what had been there before were lo-

IWANT to talk about some of the values behind Kickstarter and what I think it means to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start by talking about a series of works by a Chinese artist named Zhang Wei. These are obviously photographs of very famous, iconic people, except they are actually composite photographs of Chinese people whom Zhang takes portraits of; his thesis is that in this mass-media age, we are defined more by the media’s heroes than we even are by ourselves, so each of these photos is a composite of 1,000 different faces, Chinese faces, and it just shows how that is a lot of what defines us (see the accompanying image on this page).

Now if we think about footballers or pop stars or teenagers, we think, “Sure, everyone has their idols that shape the way they think about things,” but this is also true in technology. It is important to be aware of the ways we are influenced.

If you look at tech media and the way business is covered today, it is quite violent. It is extremely aggressive: Out for blood. Go to war. Own the world. Companies are judged not by how many jobs they create, but by how many jobs they end; those are the ones that are celebrated. It is very divisive.

At the core of this, of course, is mon-
ey. By investing money in these compa-
nies, people try to make more money
for themselves, and ultimately that is
the end goal for all these things: infinite
growth for the desire of infinite riches.
Of course, when all of society works
this way, the results are horrific. It is in-
equality. It is an incredibly imbalanced
society, and it is one that is increasingly
led by a money monoculture of people
trying to optimize their money to make
more money, and the rest of the world
is just a portfolio for them to operate
on. You see this across everything.

In music, Ticketmaster monopolizes the concert industry, a diverse ecosystem of labels is disappearing, and most pop songs are written by a handful of bald Scandinavian men. In Hollywood, most of what we see now is sequels or remakes of existing IP, all presented in IMAX and 3D. Every magazine cover

Viewpoint
What It Means to Be
an Entrepreneur Today
In his keynote address before the fifth edition of the Tech Open Air conference
in Berlin in 2016, Kickstarter’s cofounder and CEO Yancey Strickler
suggests the city’s tech community faces “a very rare opportunity.”
DOI: 10.1145/3055279

Composite photo portraits of Steve Jobs and Angelina Jolie created by the Chinese artist Zhang Wei.