The Larger Argument

Underneath all of this is a claim that the book is making and that the reader should be free to evaluate on its own terms, separate from any specific project’s success or failure.

Civilization has spent several centuries refining its capacity to measure what extracts value from life. It has not yet developed comparable capacity to measure what sustains life. This asymmetry is not a side effect of modernity. It is one of modernity’s defining features, and it is one of the central reasons the present civilizational moment has the shape it has. A more humane future depends, among other things, on developing coordination signals that can perceive what current ones cannot—presence, regulation, relational integrity, ecological reciprocity, the conditions under which trust forms and intelligence remains in right relationship with life.

This will not be done quickly. It will not be done by any single project. It may not be done well on the first several attempts. But it has to be attempted, because the alternative is continuing to coordinate exponentially powerful technological civilization through accounting systems that cannot perceive their own substrate. The fishery in Chapter Four is the parable. The fishery had no instrument for measuring the regenerative capacity of the ecosystem it depended on. The boats could see the catch. They could not see the soil of the sea. And what could not be seen could not be protected.

Civilization is currently in the same position with respect to nearly every condition that sustains it. Developing instruments that can see what current instruments cannot is one of the foundational design tasks of the next century. It will require humility, iteration, and the willingness to fail visibly. It will require contemplative traditions and engineers in conversation. It will require people who understand surveillance harms and people who understand coordination problems working together rather than in opposition. It will require, more than anything, the discipline to refuse premature certainty.

This chapter has named the design space. The next chapter turns to what happens when value learns to move along the lines of legibility this chapter has begun to describe—and to the actual experiments in regenerative economics that have begun, imperfectly and at small scale, to demonstrate that alternative pathways are real.