The imagination crisis

Why Silicon Valley can dream up artificial general intelligence but not universal healthcare?

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I was reading Geoff Mulgan's paper “The Imaginary Crisis” and it hit the nail on something profound. While we can imagine endless technological futures filled with AI, VR, and space colonies to Mars, we seem pathologically unable to imagine better ways of organizing society itself, down here, on The Last Earth. The sheer ubiquity of technological dreaming has flooded the space required for imagining social alternatives.

Of course, the critical thinker in me thinks this is not an accident. As Mulgan notes, "vastly more money and brainpower is devoted to innovation in the military and business than in society”. What is not fully articulated in the paper is how thoroughly this type of innovation has been monopolized by a small cadre of tech oligarchs whose definition of "progress" is suspiciously aligned with their own accumulation of wealth and power.

Is it any surprise that their imagined futures look like space colonies for the few and surveillance capitalism for the rest of us? This explains how their companies are capable of imagining artificial general intelligence “transforming our lives for the better” but somehow unable to conceive of housing as a human right. Their imagination extends precisely to the boundaries of their capital interests and not one step beyond.

The very technologies being developed - surveillance capitalism, algorithmic systems, AI that potentially threatens to automate away millions of jobs, are actively making it harder to imagine and implement alternative social arrangements. We're building the infrastructure of technofeudalism while losing our capacity to envision anything different.

Mulgan suggests various ways to revive social imagination - new institutions, methods, spaces for speculation. But he perhaps understates how much the deck is stacked against these alternative futures. The same interests destroying our climate are destroying our imaginative capacities. Venture capital isn't interested in funding experiments in democratic ownership or universal basic services. The military-industrial complex isn't eager to explore post-scarcity economics.

Uber but for private jets, blockchain will fix it, AI, Agents, AGI, everywhere. But real social imagination requires asking deeper questions…

• What if care work was valued more than market speculation?

• What if technology served democratic deliberation rather than surveillance and manipulation?

• What if we optimized business for human thriving rather than shareholder value?

It’s not like we just cannot imagine better futures. it's that the machinery of contemporary capitalism actively works to suppress alternative imaginaries. Breaking free requires more than just new methods of imagination. It requires confronting the power structures that benefit from our collective failure to imagine differently.

The paper is right that we need "imagination assemblies" and new institutions. But we also need movements willing to challenge the systems strangling our social imagination. Because unless we can imagine beyond capitalism's limited horizons, we'll keep building sophisticated tools that will outsource us.

If you know me you’ve seen me quoting this a million times, but here is a quote from David Graeber as prescient as ever:

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.