The Failure of Signal: What If Presence Is Not the Right Thing to Reward?

Suppose the measurement works — that we can genuinely detect presence and presencing. A deeper question remains: is presence the right thing to build a coordination currency around at all? We have argued that it is, that the regulated, available, genuinely-encountering human being is the foundation of the coordination capacity civilization needs. But it is possible that we have mistaken a virtue for the virtue — that presence, real and valuable as it is, is not the master capacity we have claimed, and that a civilization organized to reward it would over-select for one human quality at the expense of others equally necessary.

Consider the possibility seriously. A world that rewards presence above all might systematically undervalue the difficult, the abrasive, the dysregulated genius whose gifts arrive wrapped in exactly the physiological turbulence our instruments would penalize. The history of human achievement is full of people who were not, by any measure, models of regulated presence — the tormented artist, the obsessive scientist, the prophet whose very inability to be at ease with the world was the source of their vision. A coordination currency built on presence might quietly exile precisely these people, building a civilization that is calmer, more harmonious, and less capable of the disruptive genius that calm and harmony do not produce.

So here is what we are already doing about it. We are building the currency from the start around the coherence a person evokes in others, not merely the regulation they carry in themselves — precisely so that the difficult, the abrasive, the dysregulated genius who transforms the people around them registers in the system even when their own physiology never settles. We are designing the floor to be unconditional, so that no one is ever denied the basics of life for being difficult, and the height to reward what a person draws out of others rather than the smoothness of their own affect. And we are actively studying the question we cannot yet answer — whether presence is truly the master capacity, or one virtue among several a thriving civilization needs — building the network as an instrument that can watch for the genius it might be exiling and widen what it honors as it learns. We may be wrong that presence is the quality most worth shaping toward. So we are building the capacity to discover that, and to correct it, directly into the thing — because a system that rewards a single human quality must be able to perceive what it is suppressing, and we intend ours to perceive exactly that.