We used to look to the centre: Silicon Valley, global capitals, top-tier universities, billion-dollar brands. These were the nodes where the future got decided. You followed the money, the media, the might.
Not anymore.
Today, the real imagination economy is happening in border towns, Discord servers, Lagos basements, and browser tabs. It’s decentralised — not just technologically, but culturally. The edges are where new worlds are being drafted, tested, and made real. The question isn’t “What’s next?” but “Who gets to imagine it?”
There’s a reason why legacy systems feel stuck: they’re still operating on centralised assumptions. Centralised capital. Centralised narratives. Centralised identity.
But across the globe, small, networked communities are rewriting the script. Artists launching DAOs to fund climate protests. Teenagers using AI to build modular tools for their towns. Refugees using Web3 to create portable, proof-of-self documentation. These aren't “startups” — they’re acts of imagination in infrastructure form.
And they’re happening where institutions aren’t watching.
Whether it’s a maker space in Medellín or a speculative fiction writers’ room in Mumbai, the people shaping the future don’t look like yesterday’s CEOs. They’re not asking for permission. They’re not even asking for capital. They’re building with what they have, where they are.
Let’s be clear — decentralisation isn’t just about crypto. It's a mindset. A posture.
What blockchain and generative AI reveal is this: tools are neutral. But in the hands of outsiders, they become weapons. Not of destruction — of creation.
Take Zora, a protocol that lets communities mint culture on their own terms. Or the rise of AI tools that let artists from São Paulo or Karachi bypass gatekeepers and ship world-class work on Day One. We’re seeing the rise of creative infrastructure that doesn’t just decentralise money or IP, but possibility.
And that’s the shift. From tools for productivity to tools for permissionless self-expression — where everyone is both user and builder.
We need new maps. The idea that “innovation” belongs to Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, or Berlin is not only dated — it's dangerous. It blinds us to the hotspots emerging in Accra, Amman, or Surabaya.
The new geography isn’t defined by GDP, but by imagination density — how many new things are being tried, shared, iterated, and remixed in a given node. And that metric looks very different when you measure activity on Arweave, Figma, or Farcaster instead of FT headlines.
This future isn’t post-geographic. It’s poly-geographic. And if we’re smart, we’ll pay attention to where it’s flowering fastest — even if it’s not in English.
We’ve spent decades treating people as audiences. Even in tech, the dominant question has been: “How do we scale users?”
But that era’s closing.
The future belongs to authors — people who don’t just adopt tools but adapt them. Remixers. Coders. Poets who deploy. Builders who sketch. And for brands, platforms, and institutions that want to stay relevant, the only path forward is co-authorship.
That means building systems that reward contribution, not just consumption. That means embracing weird, localised, rough-edged communities before they go mainstream. That means redistributing not just profits, but authorship itself.
The decentralised imagination isn’t a trend. It’s a recalibration of where and how futures are made.
If we want to participate in what’s next, we need to stop waiting for the centre to move. It won’t.
We move to the edge.
