Technological oligarchies, social innovation called upon to imagine alternatives

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Mark Fisher wrote this in 2009 and today, almost twenty years later, despite the evidence that the capitalism of the technological oligarchies is seriously threatening ecological, social and democratic systems, we still find ourselves totally unable to imagine an alternative. We live in a time when it is much easier to imagine dystopian scenarios than desirable futures: the crisis of imagination is the original matrix of all emergencies and, for this reason, the most fearsome.

As Amitav Ghosh and Geoff Mulgan have taught us, climate and social crises are nothing more than the direct product of the imagination, of society's inability to prefigure possible alternatives and the choice to settle for small incremental solutions. The idea of sustainability conceived in the last two decades responds exactly to this logic.

Innovation and technology risk becoming the detonators of the imagination crisis. The advent of artificial intelligence makes Gunther Anders' prophecy about the Promethean divide tragically relevant: our ability to design machines is outstripping our capacity for imagination. As a result, we find ourselves frantically pursuing a technological trajectory without knowing how to imagine either the utility or the consequences. The result is an innovation disconnected from physical and social reality, pregnant with unexpected consequences, fuelled by the very limits of capitalism, its greed for energy, data, finance, autocracy. In essence, an innovation in search of purpose and meaning.

We really need Mulgan's collective imagination, but who is responsible for rekindling it? Unfortunately, the crisis of imagination is also the great failure of social innovation, both in its ability to conceive alternative economic models and in reconnecting innovation and technology with people and society. The institutionalisation of social innovation, in the typical forms of the third sector, has perimeterised the latter's space for imagination within the horizon of people's immediate needs. Commendably, of course, but at the price of sacrificing its generative power towards better futures. That kind of power generated the cooperative movement, perhaps the last true example of radical social innovation as an alternative to the traditional market model.

Just as the social economy or the so-called impact economy and, more generally, the sustainability movement are doomed to failure if they continue to grow, unimaginatively, in the cracks of the market and feed on capitalist imaginaries.