Our Crisis of Imagination
"We are in an imagination battle." - adrienne marie brown
We aren't competing against Bandcamp or another company. We are competing against cynicism.
For anyone paying attention to the fate of Bandcamp, it's tempting to resign ourselves to the apparent inevitability of corporate stewardship and enshittified platforms. Cynicism becomes a natural response. The idea of creating a collectively owned Bandcamp successor might sound impossible to many. But what if our greatest barrier to creating viable structural alternatives is the artificial boundary we've placed on our collective imagination?
In Silicon Valley, imagination runs wild. Start-ups promise to disrupt everything from how we hail a cab to how we brush our teeth — yet creativity stops when it comes to reimagining the fundamental structure of those businesses themselves.
Democratize decision-making? Impractical. Put users on the board of directors? Never. A platform collectively owned by its community? Are you out of your mind?
We're trapped in an era of fatalism, unable to envision alternatives to the models of ownership and funding beyond current extractive defaults. We've agreed that innovation can touch every aspect of our lives — except the structures that shape them. This isn't just a failure of imagination — it's a feature of those very structures.
The beneficiaries of the status quo are unlikely to dream up its replacement.
The solution? We need to rewild our imaginations. We need to challenge the boundaries of what's possible, touching the nerves of the system: ownership, value, and control.
Here's our vision: A platform owned not by a handful of investors, but by hundreds of thousands — even millions — of users; A replicable model for creating collectively owned and controlled enterprises; An economy where value flows to those who create it — not just those who invest in it.
In start-up parlance, imagination is the ultimate disrupter. We're accustomed to thinking that disruption comes from technological innovation, but the next wave will stem from organizational innovation.
For decades, the start-up world has shown an incredible ability to re-envision nearly every facet of our lives. It's time to reorient this creativity. Let's rethink ownership models. Let's reimagine value distribution. Let's redefine success beyond profit. In the start-up world, the most successful ventures often seemed impossible at first glance. Subvert is applying that same audacious thinking to the systems at the foundation of our economy.
The next great disruption might not be an app — it could be a new way of doing business, together.