The Cardinal Scale as Design Fiction

One image to carry from the start, because it is easier to build toward something you can see. Imagine a watershed somewhere in the temperate uplands where, a few years on from the moment this writing imagines, eighty-seven people are learning to live by coherence rather than extraction. It is the first community to form fully under this architecture, and so it carries a name in these pages: the Cardinal Scale. It is not a utopia. It has hard winters and harder disagreements, software that does not always work, and people who arrive skeptical and stay that way for a while. What it has that the world outside it has largely lost is a way of keeping faith: with one another, with the land that holds them, with the generations not yet arrived.

We will return to the Cardinal Scale through the book, a little at a time, until you can see the proposal whole: how it might be funded, how it might govern itself, how it might resist capture, how it might survive its own success. We do this because the Cardinal Scale scenario is what the whole argument looks like when tested in thought, an imagined place with composite people where the turn out of extraction can be examined under pressure. It is what we are building toward. Everything that follows asks how.

The Cardinal Scale in this volume is a composite scenario, and every scene in it is design fiction. These scenes test a design in thought. They do not establish that a Cardinal Scale exists, that the named mechanisms have worked, or that the proposed outcomes have occurred.