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With a new era comes new thinking

Every era claims to champion new thinking, yet most institutional structures reward what is comfortably known. Artists, founders, leaders, and directors engaged in creative solution-based thinking encounter friction not due to resistance to quality, but from structural designs that prioritize repetition over originality. The narrative of an economy built for innovation lacks honesty—a closer look reveals that so-called disruption thrives only when it protects existing concentrations of power. The usual playbook secures continuity for those who authored it. True paradigm shifts threaten these arrangements and so are read as risk, not value.

Benefits of innovation

Consider who benefits when innovation calls become parades of familiar patterns. Power does not seek progress—it seeks predictability, often camouflaged as open-mindedness. Institutions command innovation while prescribing format, tone, and even the politics of acceptability, reinforcing a cycle where only approved forms of creativity receive sanction. This is not random—it is design. Decision-makers expand their influence by shaping the criteria for what solutions should look like and who is allowed to deliver them. Creative solution-based thinking that troubles the boundaries of these frameworks becomes a liability rather than an asset. Leaders invested in change recognize that requesting permission upholds the illusion that existing structures simply need more or better input, not fundamental overhaul.

Economic systems and its rewards in the cultural sector.

When people say the economy is failing artists, they obscure a more precise truth: economic systems reward the maintenance of boundaries, not their crossing. Capital flows toward safety, not toward contribution or relevance. Founders and directors who question commodity logic, or who challenge the metrics used to assess value, encounter barriers dressed as advice and opportunity—explicitly and implicitly. Labor that aligns with dominant expectations earns support; labor that unsettles pattern or profit is isolated. The myth is malfunction; the reality is intent.

For those intent on paradigm shifts, a new mindset is not optional. Artists, founders, directors, and leaders must treat systemic rejection not as evidence of unworthiness, but as a function of what these systems are designed to defend. Permission has symbolic power only if it is believed in—most constraints placed on creative labor serve the interests of those already secure, rather than clarifying what is possible.

The practical prompt: In meetings or negotiations this week, isolate one unexamined assumption about who should be empowered to decide value or allocate resources in your environment. Study how this assumption shapes your options, and design one experiment that operates outside its logic—no matter how minor.

What patterns do you accept as inevitabilities—about economics, power, or success—that deserve to be treated instead as the starting point for your next act of creative solution-based thinking?

The Generative Overflow and the Value of Mindset

I know that plenty of people rush to denounce gatekeepers. The word itself carries suspicion, evoking images of rigid hierarchies hoarding opportunity. But here, I’m making an intervention: gatekeep that business advantage. Our era of generative AI creates spectacle and surplus. It feeds on data—on what we call learning—but it also outputs volumes that saturate and numb.

When every click, utterance, and digital gesture morphs into raw material for someone’s training module, founders, leaders, and directors with creative solution based thinking owe themselves a provocation: Who owns what leaves your mind?

What sputters out of industrial creative engines is not the same as the critical, artistic, and cognitive labor artists and cultural leaders enact. Mindset matters. Intellect is not a static asset to be mined like ore—it’s formation, experimentation, revision. AI might scrape surfaces, but it can’t replicate the internal architectures that produce meaning or revolution. The dynamic, iterative way you arrive at decisions—what you decide never to show, who you refuse to teach, what you keep unfinished—is exactly what needs gatekeeping. Not to fortify against all others, but to defend against the self-styled platforms and agents lying in wait, scrambling for the next extractable input.

Decoupling Resources from Method

Let’s cut through the confusion. This is not a suggestion to police access to essential resources: funds, residencies, or public infrastructure. To gatekeep those things is to maintain unjust scarcity—a move that props up old power.

What’s under threat: the methods of making, the inside track, the frameworks hard-won through generational or community labor. Let’s say it plain: You do not owe the full download of your thought process, your aesthetic instincts, or the conditions by which you arrive at creative breakthroughs. The expectation to always share removes the necessary distinction between communal resource and personal method. Artistry, entrepreneurship, and leadership at this level demand a paradigm shift—one that critically defines what’s shared, who benefits, and who risks erasure.

Paywalls, Platforms, and the Economics of Power

People groan at paywalls. Yet every major platform—Spotify, Netflix, newspapers—already sits behind one. The initial insistence that “art should be for free” performs as ideology, not reality. Artists need to eat. Directors and founders build institutions; institutions require time, labor, and the messy circuits of money. What passes as democratization too often means devaluation: platforms profit while creators battle wage theft by API. Platforms that appear inclusive have been corrupted by models and modules indifferent to equity or ethics—it isn’t about technology itself, but about who deploys it and toward what ends.

Museum shows, agency catalogs, and keynotes are not open-access simply because a user craves consumption. Every creative act you release equals risk: of dilution, theft, co-optation. These aren’t philosophical hypotheticals; they are economic realities. To build sustainable creative infrastructure requires not only open hands, but deliberate barriers. Sometimes, the more you give away, the less your community owns. Ownership must be strategic, sometimes slow, often quiet, and occasionally locked behind walls you design, not those inherited or dictated by outside interests.

Gatekeeping as Method for the Next Paradigm

We are overdue for new signals and new protocols. It’s not gatekeeping for its own sake; it’s about sovereignty over process, intention, and outcome. Artists and leaders are confronting contaminated distribution channels—distorted not by tech itself, but by the mindsets and motives running it. We are not obliged to make ourselves transparent to algorithms or actors who flatten nuance and weaponize openness against its originators. Transparency is not a universal virtue; discretion is its counterforce. To gatekeep is not to hoard, but to choose connection—a curated transmission, not indiscriminate exposure.

This calls for founders, leaders, and artists to discard naïve assumptions about access and rethink the ethics of visibility. Circulate the art, sure, but choose which code, strategy, or thought-pattern never leaves the room. If everything is a product, then discernment becomes the method of resistance.

Practice: The Selective Transmission Framework

For founders, leaders, and directors seeking a practical tool: develop a Selective Transmission Framework. Before releasing any resource, consider these steps:

• Define the core of your creative value: What is irrevocably yours?
• Map your modes of sharing (public, private, paywalled, invitation-only).
• Name stakeholders: Who benefits from disclosure? Who loses?
• Set boundaries for each channel, choosing at least one method or process you never disclose publicly.
• Regularly reassess what stays private as conditions change.

This is not a wall—this is an infrastructure of intention. By embedding discretion into your praxis, you engage a mindset that honors both economic justice and creative longevity.

Reflection

What false bargain about “openness” or “free culture” are you being asked to accept—and who benefits or suffers when invisible labor is redistributed under the guise of access?