THE SUBJECT /

WHAT GOVERNS US IS NOT UNTOUCHABLE. IT WAS BUILT. IT CAN BE CHANGED.

THE SUBJECT is INTO THE POSSIBLE’s media platform.

Much of the order around us appears simply to exist. An administration works a certain way. A platform sets certain conditions. A bank requires a certain procedure. An institution makes decisions at a certain level.

THE SUBJECT starts from a different premise: none of this is natural. These rules were written, these institutions were built, these dependencies developed over time. What has been built can be questioned — and sometimes replaced.

The historic New York Stock Exchange floor

BEHIND THE OBVIOUS

Power is not always hidden. It is often perfectly visible, but so deeply embedded in everyday life that we stop seeing it for what it is.

A financial centre, a bank, a public administration, a digital platform or a large company does more than provide services. It also sets conditions, distributes opportunities and closes certain doors.

Power begins when a system no longer offers one possibility among others, but becomes the necessary passage through which we must live, work, exchange or make decisions.

WHAT EXISTS IS NOT THE ONLY OPTION

We do not only want to understand why certain institutions, technologies or organisations no longer work. We also want to look at what could exist in their place.

Technology can concentrate power or distribute it. Infrastructure can create dependence or increase our autonomy. An institution can move decisions further away or bring them closer to the people they affect.

The political future is not a choice between preserving everything that exists and destroying everything that exists. New forms of organisation are becoming possible. THE SUBJECT wants to explore them too.

A meeting between public officials and technology executives in the Oval Office

POWER IS NOT MAGIC

We give enormous importance to the faces of power: presidents, ministers, executives, billionaires and senior officials. They dominate our screens, headlines and public debates. But changing the people in charge does not always change what they govern. Institutions, procedures, interests, infrastructures and dependencies outlast them.

THE SUBJECT does not want to turn power into a gallery of personalities. We want to understand what remains when the faces change: the structures that make certain decisions possible, others almost impossible, and some rules extraordinarily difficult to move. Demystifying power also means refusing to believe that it is more powerful, more coherent or more inevitable than it really is.

OUR METHOD