To Whom Does Imagination Belong?
From the day I was born, the world I've known has been one of constant technological progress. From Windows 95 at home, followed by 98 and 2000, I witnessed the repeated innovations of tech giants, the emergence of touch devices, the rise of iPads and smart mobile internet. We've seen the advent of the "dual innovation" era. As a participant, I've been deeply involved, swept up in the tide of this era.
The age of software entrepreneurship was one where imagination empowered everyone. This was impossible before the era when IBM controlled mainframes. Subsequently, everyone had a chance – as long as you had a personal computer, you could write applications or algorithms with the potential for huge market success. As trends evolved, organizations began to form specific structures, such as the models and architectures built by internet giants. They swept through with almost overwhelming force, gathering the smartest minds with maximum efficiency, occupying the market for all clearly definable engineering problems.
The rise of AGI has brought a whole new imaginative space to the world, but we've clearly found that the threshold for participation has significantly increased. It's no longer easy for just anybody to participate; you need certain skills to stand in this competition. The core issue behind this is whether individuals have the opportunity to create something truly disruptive. Smart people are everywhere, but if they need extensive collaboration, orderly management, or organizational intelligence, it may no longer be an opportunity for individual entrepreneurs. Returning to our theme, to whom does imagination truly belong? In various industries and fields, we can see whether individual imagination can be an effective weapon and leverage. In the AI field, although opportunities still exist, it may no longer be the first choice for many because more conditions are needed to realize ideas fruitfully.
Beyond AI, Crypto is a field that "seemingly" appears more open to the common people, but in reality, it selects for those with exceptional talent due to its demands on financial strategy skills. It's a chaotic market that reveres a different kind of genius.
In any era, we must consider to whom imagination belongs and where ideas are valued. When chatting with many friends working in large companies, I find that many feel their work is stable and decently rewarded, but their imagination is not valued, or rather, most job positions don't offer space to exercise imagination.
To whom does imagination belong? This question essentially asks whether the current society's prominent leverage and ascension channels belong to the common people. For instance, software technology might be inherently democratized, while capital games might inherently have barriers. These change with societal shifts, patterns, and geopolitical changes. Overall – how much space does technology still give to every common person to exercise imagination, those remaining low-hanging fruits that haven't been picked – this is what we need to constantly reassess. Of course, I still believe that in the foreseeable future, technology will remain a huge force, but we need to re-evaluate whether imagination still belongs to the universal individual.
We've always been looking for tools to carry imagination. Besides technology, there have been magic, religion, metaphysics in the past, social networks and knowledge networks in aristocratic times, traffic in the information age – they all play/have played roles and may become prominent leverage again in the future.
A massive change is happening in this era: humanity is rapidly becoming a collectively uniform entity in representation. When chatting with an insightful master, we discussed the evolution of media, from point-to-point information dissemination to surface-to-surface, then to interactive, experiential, and finally to cryptocurrency-like media that brings direct results – your interaction might directly lead to wealth or poverty. Media is no longer just a channel for information dissemination; it has thoroughly embodied McLuhan's concept of "the medium is the message" or more profoundly, "the medium is reality". This friend made an interesting analogy: in the past, the spread and reaction to Copernicus's heliocentric theory varied in different civilizations and took time. But now, the world's reaction to the impact of AI is almost uniform. At least under this new unified medium, human homogeneity has greatly increased, diversity has decreased, or at least is no longer prominent, but brewing in underground, fractured, subcultural circles.
Therefore, humans have been repeatedly excluded from the central position of cosmic truth and protagonists, and this time it's the shaking of the entire civilization's subjectivity. The proportion of people who can truly master imagination may decrease. Then we might see an interesting and likely occurrence: more people will no longer be able to create efficiency-oriented or practically efficient work. We turn instead to pursue individualized experiences, feelings, narratives, shifting from efficiency to craft, to meaningful connection.
Next, we might see consumption become our way of earning income. In the past, we earned income by creating efficient, valuable things through work, then consumed to obtain necessities. Now, we will be educated on how to consume, how to feel and experience, and this feeling and experience also becomes the process by which we obtain money and exchange symbols. Because after content and resources are greatly enriched, more people are needed to consume, feel, and understand, and most of these people are not those who master technological imagination, because the threshold has risen, and most people have been excluded.
Of course, this doesn't mean these people have degenerated or lost value and meaning. At this point, our imagination-carrying tools turn again, the familiar technological means – that technological power given to the common people – is taken back, and what we are given is new power from narrative, connection, feeling, spirituality, religion.
I think there's a high probability we'll see this reality in our lifetime. Throughout this process, the answer to whom imagination belongs keeps changing, but what remains unchanged is – imagination always belongs to the rapidly evolving medium itself.
magipop is our own startup project, an on-chain content co-creation product. We're excited to announce that the second season of our co-created science fiction journal, Bubble Observers, has now begun. Let's co-create together and use our imagination to witness our possible futures!
Join us at: https://forge.magipop.xyz/project-detail/0fbbad34-76a9-4d4a-8c75-78d1471f51c1