Going, Going, Owned
Failure turned out to be the price of admission
The Janky Time Machine’s probability differential needle started spinning backwards somewhere around Tuesday and dropped me, without ceremony, into someone’s front hallway. Coat hooks on the wall, shoes by the door. The specific gravity of a household that runs on errands and habit. Normal enough.
Except for what’s hanging there.
Woolco. I blinked at it for a while. Then found a boarding pass in the junk drawer and a blister pack of resistors on the kitchen counter. Three brands. Three artifacts. One thought that took me a minute to land on.
At some point, people got tired of getting burned by companies and bought them instead. The brands that went bankrupt, the ones that closed their last location and sent a “thank you for 40 years” email: those are the ones you can own now. You buy units. You get dividends. You vote on decisions. The brand answers to you.
The model runs on failure. That’s the part worth sitting with.
Woolco had to close. Radio Shack had to die twice. Spirit had to cease operation mid-flight1. Corporate bankruptcy was always pitched as a loss: jobs gone, stores dark, logos orphaned. Turns out it was also the unlock condition. The brand becomes available to the public at exactly the moment it stops being valuable to shareholders. Which is probably a sentence that should be on a plaque somewhere.
So the whole system built to save beloved brands runs on beloved brands getting destroyed first. We loved them. They extracted from us. They failed. We bought the husk and called it democracy.
The Janky Time Machine is leaking entropic resonance fluid onto the driveway. The neighbor came out to stare. She’s got a bag on her coat hook, a boarding pass in her junk drawer, and resistors she bought because her kid wanted to learn soldering and the Maker Collective had a member rate. She’s never flown a plane. She has a vote on Spirit’s fuel surcharge policy. She voted yes on the last one because the dividend covered her ticket anyway. She seems genuinely fine with this.
I bought 200 units of something called “Horizon Motors (Dist.)” at a kiosk by the gate. Non-transferable. Governance rights vest in 90 days. Roughly a 60% chance I’ll remember to vote. The gesture felt right regardless.
What I can’t work out: did these companies fail, or did they succeed on a different timeline, one where failure was always the plan?
This weekend Spirit Air ceased operations with zero graceful shutdown. They had planes still in the sky and passengers at airports waiting to travel (stranding some 17,000 people).
It only took a day for https://letsbuyspiritair.com to take flight, and only another for it to takeoff with $132 million in pledges (as of this writing). Consumers owning and controlling a beloved brand is a signal that points to a future where everyday people take the power back from shareholders and hedge funds.
Makes me think of how YouTuber and retro computing enthusiast straight up bought the Commodore 64 trademark and is currently working on bring it back.
This is a trend I can stand behind.