Yancey Strickler

A future of art without artists.

Now, I'm not an expert on AI, but I have spent the last 25 years working as a creative person and making tools for creative people.

I'm the son of a musician, and my career began writing about music for Pitchfork and The Village Voice.

I started a tiny record label, and I'm one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, which gave creative people a way to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the public with their projects.

Before Kickstarter, so many amazing projects had no chance to exist because they didn't fit some preexisting business model.

After Kickstarter, millions of people have exchanged billions of dollars in support of new ideas.

Where there was a wall, we built a door.

But despite what you hear about the creator economy, the reality for most creative people is stark.

It's estimated that 85 percent of visual artists make less than $25,000 a year, and that just 13 percent of creative people earn a full-time living from their work.

So we're not talking about aristocrats and rock stars.

We're talking about people working hard, trying to make a living by doing what comes natural to them.

a musician, a craftsperson, a community theater director, a potter.

Millions of people who are our friends, our family, our neighbors, who inspire us, and millions more people, too.

But despite being so central to how we experience life, we don't make things easy for these folks.

There's no automatic health care, there's no retirement benefits, there's no path to collective wealth at all.

They're entirely on their own.

In a world of global capitalism, creative people operate like 18th-century traveling peddlers, moving from village to village and project to project, trying to piece together a living.

So there's something missing here, a way for creative people to get access to the basics and be a part of something bigger than just them on their own.

And I personally really struggled with this a few years ago.

I was grinding away in the creator economy and getting lonelier by the second.