Ikka
Ikka
Berkeley, CA
Ikka, what’s your take on America at this time?
“As a young person, I feel I haven’t gone through as many eras of political and social changes as many of the older people in my life, so it’s interesting to me to see what the difference in generations is. From talking to my aunts and uncles and my parents who were baby boomers - they were coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies - they felt like there was a sort of hope and optimism when they were young that has sort of withered away; and people my age, and I’m in my mid-thirties, I think they didn’t ever have that sort of idealistic America kind of story in their head, and it seems like younger people now are kinda like ‘What future?’ Even somewhat more desolate than people my age are.
“I’ve worked in tech for ten years - I work in marketing and what I do is build communities. I do that professionally around products, but I’ve also done a number of side projects building community spaces and artists’ collectives because I think that a lot of young people especially are isolated in using their electronic devices and software and they’re sort of driven to work 500 hours a week and commute two hours a day. Young peoples’ lives are really scheduled, everyone’s trying to make the most of their opportunity, whatever that is, however small that is, and for a lot of working class young people that means working an extra hour a day, walking an extra mile a day, and as I get older I’m realizing that there was sort of idea that you would come to this level of achievement wherein you would not have to walk the extra mile, or commute two and a half hours a day, and people my age are not reaching that level before they’re just sort of exhausted. That’s definitely particular to the Bay Area, but it’s happening in other cities too, an acceleration that’s driving this isolation.”
You talk about creating communities, but is that only online? Some people say that being online only tends to isolate people.
“I do it both ways. I grew up on the East Coast in a big Italian family, we had multiple generations of people together all the time and I think that is beneficial. I think older people really benefit from interacting with younger people. Younger people having older mentors around that are there because they love them and not because they’re paid to be there, I think is very supportive and helps people to develop skills so that they don’t feel alone and isolated in the world. I use online tools, and I think there is a space for online tools that allow marginalized communities and distributed communities to communicate with one another in a way that’s never been possible before, so if you are somebody that is living in a town and you don’t feel anybody’s like you or into the things that you’re into, you can probably find a community of people online that are into those same things. That can be the thing that gets you through a particularly lonely period. But I think that especially in the Bay Area, people have tried to supplant real life interactions, like meaningful relationships, with these online communities, and there’s sort of a level of superficiality, or a level of depth, that the online communities don’t offer. I think sometimes young people can try to use the online communities in place of real relationships and they end up actually feeling more alone and isolated.”
If you had a great vision of America, what would it look like?
“I’m a pretty active political leftist, so I would really like to see the government be designed around people thriving, and not corporations thriving. I think a lot of decisions that are made, especially on a federal level, directly undermine the individual thriving in society. The structures are beneficial to certain members of society and directly work against bringing the potential of every person to its greatest level. In my sort of ideal neighborhood, I would like to see many generations of people living in walkable neighborhoods so they know their neighbors and having real life interactions and conversations that are local. Then I think that what the government could do is serve those communities by creating structures that help people to thrive. At this point we have a lot of research, we have a lot of data, we’ve done a lot of research, we know what makes people healthy, wealthy and wise, and we also know that a lot of things that we’re doing every day are doing quite the opposite. And why? Fundamentally the motivation of the political structures and people that we have in power are motivated towards a profit end instead of towards a people end.
“I’ve been working in tech, and I’m pro-business, I like businesses, but I feel that businesses should serve the people instead of the people serving the businesses. I think that a lot of concessions were made early on in the twentieth century to bring more influence to capitalist power and give incentives toward businesses to be creative, but now I think those balances of power are so out of scope, in favor of businesses. Even from the perspective within large corporations, they talk about people as resources to be exploited . I think there could be a different way of looking at it, that corporations and the businesses were ultimately there to serve human thriving.”
