How Subversive Innovators Will Shape the Future

This is no time to check your Bitcoin wallet. As a subversive innovator, you’ve got to move quickly. The managerial class will only be in retreat for a time.

Too many well-paid functionaries fancy that they—far from being part of what’s metastasized on the backs of the people—are vital to the very functioning of civilization.

• We know they have enormous budgets.
• We know they create little value.
• We know that they operate in secrecy.
• We know they have big, multi-year plans.
• We know they are masters of mendacity.

Still, they have been told for too long that they are important, paid too long from the public trough, and acted with impunity for too many decades.

We know that despite elections and appointments, they are in control.

For a time, they will have to scurry back into the deepest recesses of *civil society* and the national security state, waiting like ticks for the right time to reemerge and drop. They may adapt to the decentralized media milieu and continue to act as chaos agents. One thing is certain: They will use any means to keep power.

We have to be ready.

A clandestine Civil War has already begun. One can only hope that our social media saviors can keep the Deep State engaged for a bit—long enough for the subversive innovators to build new counterpower architectures.

And as the Titans clash, we must rediscover the Promethean fire.

It’s the flame he stole from the gods for us.

Either you possess the flame, or you know how to help someone who possesses the flame get shit done. This is the Visionary and the Implementer duo. Start there, like Jobs and Woz did once. Rare is the one who goes it alone.

Then, get your idea to market as quickly as feasible, innovating through Subversive Innovation’s threefold mandate:

1. Lower cooperation or transaction costs
2. Raise predation or parasitism costs, and
3. Reduce switching costs.

Address market feedback. Always be willing to raise tensions and solve problems. The goal is to form massive popular constituencies around these new counterpower architectures until they’re difficult, if not impossible, to extract.

Counterpower architectures should be like an invasive species in the eyes of authorities.

Marc Andreessen pointed out something about Elon Musk he thought was rare, but I see it in my mentor, Chris Rufer, too. It’s the relentless focus on finding and solving problems through telescoping—that is, zooming in and out. To find a problem, you must first be willing to face some unpleasant reality or cut something (or someone) unnecessary.

Then, you must act.

Rufer owns production facilities, each with unique problems. So, regularly, he travels among the plants, looking for ways to gain new efficiencies. Every time he visits a plant, his goal is to find, say, $250,000 in savings through problem-solving, innovation, or both.

Musk does something similar in his companies. Though thinly stretched, he works with thousands of visionaries and implementers in this process. He sees his role primarily as the Chief Visionary Problem Solver. He starts with the question: Can this be simpler? Is this necessary? (If not, “delete.”) Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Somehow, it works.

To solve 10,000 problems, you must be willing to build a *challenge culture* into your organization. In other words, you can’t solve problems you don’t know about. Encouraging staff and colleagues to speak up about problems is a good rule.

It is unclear whether the D.O.G.E. can do it with the federal bureaucracy. One can hope, but the more likely scenario is that Musk and Vivek will lock in mortal combat with the functionary class long enough for subversive innovators to change the game by providing more entrenched counterpower to the market.

Underthrow readers know that I have long predicted the end of the Republic Empire. Yet I am sanguine. The Empire doesn’t have to fizzle or even end with a bang. Hopefully, It can evolve into something else—a more prosperous and peaceful polycentric order.

This will require subversive innovation.

If the decline of empires is a familiar pattern, then revolutionary advances might reorient us despite that pattern. It would be a revolution in governance, not based on tearing down and building a Utopia but on catalyzing novel forces of punctuated evolution.

But the window is closing. Let’s get building.