The Big Count: Bananafication and The Great Monkey’s Bargain
Tales of Enumeration and The Measurement of Dead Things
If you’re new to this substack, please allow me to briefly introduce myself. I’m Turquoise. In 2021, I was a featured futurist at the Buckminster Fuller Institute. During that time I coined the term “world wise web” in an Art Basel presentation on “The Gaian Mind Connectome,” a concept I had been exploring for a number of years and developed more fully during Habritual’s second cohort of the Design Science Studio. By 2022, I started pitching a vision for the future of “wisdom tech,” on podcasts and in grant applications. By 2024 I was being regarded as “a young elder” and publicly acknowledged as “one of the prophets and godmothers of wise innovation.” Click here for full resume. Now, whether I am any of those things or not, basically here’s the deal…
We Need New Institutions. They Need to Be Incredibly Wise. I’m Searching for Those Prepared to Erect this Wiser World.
If you would like to join this discussion on institutional design and collaborate on the practical application of wise innovation, subscribe to this substack, or join the mailing list here.
The Fault in Our Stars
So, I recently ran an incredibly important experiment. Let me tell you about it!
From November 2023 until now, I put myself through an arduous, fairly miserable, many-many-month long process of filling out a seemingly endless giant digital heap of grants, along with a pile of fellowship applications and research residency submissions. And the results are in…
Rejection.
Lol. I know, right?
The jury is still out on a few. I also have a few more pending submissions — so wish me luck. But, though I made it through a few qualifying rounds and onto a shortlist here and there, so far I’ve ultimately gotten rejected from every single one.
This scenario makes me laugh… for so many reasons. Many that feel a bit too nuanced and insular to unpack with any brevity. Some of it’s me and my own transdisciplinary illegibility that isn’t easily collapsible. I’m still learning the art of linguistic compression — how to tell stories and fold phrases like tiny bundles of chromosomal complexity — little origami fortune-telling flowers that unfold, blooming as their belly is tickled.
Learning to grow a garden of golden flowers is a tricky game of hide and seek. And, in learning to bend air towards the garden, it appears as if I have perhaps become a bit too much like air. Evidently, donning the cloak of invisibility is a manner of high novelty that has yet to engender trust. Still, I persist… sitting in the negative space, straddling the venn, riding the margins in between overlapping worlds.
In short, the whole ordeal feels a little bit like putting a pack of mentos inside a 2 liter.
Good friends and colleagues very kindly and patiently warned me, “You know… you’re just going to get a face full of sugar water, coca leaves, and corn syrup if you do that, right? That experiment is a giant waste of time, energy, and money… and worst of all caffeine. Plus, you’ll be all wet, sticky, and poorer by the end.”
Poverty has never been much of a deterrent for me. I can be incredibly patient. Much more patient than most. So, like a good little semi-ascetic scientist, I thought to myself,
“Okay, well… that could be true. But, lemme go see…
If I end up with a different result — good.
If I end up with the same predicted result — still good.
If I end up poor and destitute I’ll just erect a post-monastic semi-ashram and fill it with a brood of highly-humble, neo-telestai Shaolin Jedi-hermits and heart-centered, servant-leader tech-bodhisattva-monks in training — you know, precisely what any other grant flunkie would do.”
“I guess I’ll just have to go back to corporate,” isn’t exactly in my vocabulary.
And here’s why…
Focusing on Failure
This excruciating experiment was one of my first extended expeditions to sense deeper into the current granting dynamics between public charities and private foundations, as well as wealthy individuals, corporate philanthropy, and government agencies. And, the verdict is in — no replication or reproducibility crisis here.
Looks like we’re all failures!
No, but seriously, there’s incredible value in participatory, experiential knowing. In fact, some might even call that wisdom. So, let me start to whip up this argument in favor of failure. It’s a full 21 course meal, a tale that will take a few tomes to tell…
I hope you’re hungry.
Apéritif
So… let’s begin with a double colon analogy. If philanthropy is coke and mentos, venture capital is the baking soda volcano — a moderate amount of short lived fun for a small amount of people, predictably messy, and at the end of the day, I’m not really sure if anything of social benefit is getting accomplished.
Sure, a few kids might be having fun and “learning science,” but…
There’s got to be a better way, right?
Well, I guess it’s really not that fair to single out philanthropy and venture capital. Everyone’s got similar challenges around strategy, luck, risk, capital dynamics, decision-making, resource allocation, incentives, scope, speed, scale, and growth in general. In fact, at some point, we probably ought to start asking ourselves, “Why are we chronically attempting to scale everything, everywhere, all of the time — into infinity? Is it even necessary? Is it even possible? Is it even wise? Should we scale anything at all? And if so, what ought we scale — why, where, when, how, and to what size?”
For now, let’s sidestep this wiser inquiry and leave the hard problem (no, not that hard problem) to focus on the measurement problem (no, not that measurement problem). Starting with our first course… hors d'oeuvres.
Goodhard’s Law: It’s in the Ways We Measure.
British economist, Charles Goodhart, is known for the following observation, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” There are many examples of this in organizational behavior. Basically, as soon as we set any specific goal, people tend to optimize for those objectives — regardless of the consequences — which inevitably leads to incoherent understandings and corrosive downstream effects that interfere with our ability to predict outcomes and make wise decisions.
Or as Paul Smaldino and C. Thi Nguyen put it exquisitely in a Sante Fe Institute Complexity podcast episode with Michael Garfield on the Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale:
“C. Thi Nguyen: It’s the way that large scale institutions tend to thin out what they can measure, and the way that thinness is gamed and exploitable, and the way that our vision can be deeply narrowed when we're bound by these very thin institutional outcome measures.
Paul Smaldino: What sometimes is called perverse incentives, but really just the way that gamifying things and metricizing things changes the nature of the game and selects for things that aren't necessarily the outcomes that we want.”
For those of you who read my substack on artificial intelligence and cultural evolution, surprise — the alignment problem doesn’t start or end with technology. When we define any particular outcome as a goal to target for success, we potentially risk losing important unseen processes and invaluable information that occur beyond our narrow optimization metrics — like during the yin cycle, across the spaces and in the gaps, the relationships between things.
Or, to put it in more academic language:
“Paul Smaldino: In social theories and cognitive theories, so often our theories are about relating constructs, and then we have proxy measurements. But the theory isn't about the relationship between the proxy measures. The theory is about the constructs and the relationships between the constructs that are social in nature, that are cognitive in nature, but aren't the things that are being measured. So there's this gap, and I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome.
C. Thi Nguyen: One way of putting it is, you can say math can explain everything, if you've restricted the scope of everything to the kinds of things that math is good at explaining. This is kind of my background worry about the evidence-based outcomes world, which is, if you insist that the only outcomes we're gonna pay attention to are the ones that are amenable to large scale measurement and mathematization, then you're gonna leave out any of the outcomes that aren't the kind of thing that admit of that.”
Now, Douglas Hubbard might argue that nothing is in fact unmeasurable, but I’ll offer that perhaps there’s potentially an even more meaningful post-metric, transrational reclamation of our humanity through a cultural shift in our organizational salience landscape. I’m of the humble opinion that there’s no way through this without centering the sacred, and out from that center a living philosophy, an embodied ethic, the walking of our values through our very feet — the alignment of our feelings with our thoughts, with our words, with our speech, with our actions — as our way.
Until then, we'll be forced to grapple with and be dominated by this mindset of metricization über alles. Steven Jenkins calls this “the trauma of enumeration.” Check this out. He says,
“Following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, [...] the Normans conquered England. The real conquering didn't happen then, it happened in the two or three years later. They were the Taliban of their time, the Normans were, for the English. And they fanned out across the countryside in twos and threes with great ledger books of vellum, and here's what they did [...]
These guys, like actuaries from an insurance company, they came to your little farm, your little hovel– and they measured and counted everything. I mean literally, everything. And this became the basis of the taxation system that sustained the Norman ruling class– then and now. And I'm suggesting to you, that at the level of a kind of civic psyche– there's something fundamentally traumatizing about having your material life and your psychic life subjected to numeracy and accountancy.
And this is precisely what's happened to us now in the form of metrics and google mapping, and google earth, and google, and amazon, and all of that. We've been subjected to a level of scrutiny that nobody should be able to bear, frankly. right? And then it's sold back to us as information [...]
Anyone speaking this language that I'm speaking to you now, we are heirs to this collective trauma of being enumerated. Right? Of being counted. And the amazing thing is, nobody wants to be left out of the big count!
But, what the psychic consequence of having your entire life enumerated, and then being taxed accordingly, is not just a financial reckoning — it's a psychic reckoning. So one of the acts of revolution would be to fail to be enumerated.” – Stephen Jenkins ~ A Generation’s Worth: Spirit work while the crisis reigns | 28 Sep 2021 34:04
So what are organizational organisms measuring and why is it so important?
Beginning from the Beginning: A Walk Through the Halls of History
Let’s start with the basics. The articles of incorporation function as the birth certificate of an organization. Just as a human birth certificate assigns ownership and liability to parental signatories, bestows legal personhood, and often establishes citizenship, to a new born baby — corporate law is organized around ownership, governance, liability, and taxation agreements — who owns the company, who makes the decisions, who is legally responsible, and how much money goes back to replenish and benefit society.
When a founder births a new company, they select one of many species, essentially tax code distinctions that legally establish corporate personhood. From then on, the entire existence of the company is purposed inside of one of two basic phyla: for-profit or nonprofit.
I recall, a wise woman once said something to the effect of, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” But, you know… on the other hand, a far less wise and more well known drama queen famously said, “What’s in a name, anyway? If you call a rose a turd, it’ll still smell good. Get over yourself, man.”
So what’s up with profit as the one and only sacred measurement of organizational organisms? If the incorporation code, the DNA of a company, is legally bound to profit maximization, then what about all that fluffy feel-good philosophy, mission, values, vision stuff? Where is that measured in the so-called free market?
The Market and The Measurement of Dead Things: Poisson Mort Braisé et ses Banane Frite Pourrie Sucrée
“Nothing matters to the market but profit. Forests only have value as timber or toilet paper; animals only have value as hot dogs or hamburgers. The precious, unrepeatable moments of our lives only have value as labor hours determined by the imperatives of commerce. The market rewards landlords for evicting families, bosses for exploiting employees, engineers for inventing death machines.
It separates mothers from their children, drives species into extinction, shuts down hospitals to open up privatized prisons. It reduces entire ecosystems to ash, spewing out smog and stock options. Left to itself, it will turn the whole world into a graveyard.
Some things are worth risking our lives for. Perpetuating capitalism is not one of them. If we have to risk our lives, let’s risk them for something worthwhile, like creating a world in which no one has to risk death for a paycheck.
Life for the market means death for us.” - Capitalism is a Death Cult Crimethinc
There’s a pretty entertaining video on this topic called “How much is a whale worth?” It engages in the tragically amusing and insanely absurd task of post hoc justification for the existence of life, inside the lens of neoclassical economics. Yes, we live in a world where, instead of admitting that the global economic model is insufficient, inappropriate, inaccurate, unuseful at times — or dare I say, flat out wrong and we ought change it — we’re forced to bypass our gut instincts and do the mental gymnastics to make an economic case for not killing everything in the name of profit.
This is what I call Argumentum Ad Lucrum.
“Lucrum,” meaning gain or profit, was a term used in the legal system of ancient Rome to address making money and owning land. Argumentum ad lucrum is the phrase I use to reference a certain kind of logical fallacy where the decision to, or not to pursue a course of action, particularly with significant existential or catastrophic risk, is justified through the lens of profit. For example, Sam Altman’s somewhat flippant, off the cuff cost benefit analysis of pursuing artificial intelligence, "AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."
I assume he’s mostly joking, like 80 p(joke) and 20 p(doom). I don’t know Sam, so please don’t infer any accuracy. But, let’s do a quick thought experiment… If I offer you a billion dollars to commit suicide, what is the value of a billion dollars to you after you’re dead? And, how about if I offer you a trillion dollars to Thanos the world, what is the value of a trillion dollars on a dead planet?
This is the, “Will it kill us? Yes? …But will it be lucrative? Yes? Let’s do it!” decision tree.
Argumentum ad lucrum is a finite game framing trap that is set within the money, power, reputation incentive triad. It’s a conversation that demands the following: a) use numbers to convince me that living things have more value alive than dead, b) pay me not to kill everything, c) make new anti-killing stuff rules, d) punish anyone who breaks the don’t kill everything rules, and e) globalize the rule set across governing bodies to universalize game play so that others don’t gain unfair advantage.
Now, this is obviously a great simplification.
Look, I get it — we’re in a very tricky situation with globalization, geopolitical conflict, multi-polar traps, tragedies of the commons, growth distributions that present challenges for scaling coherent institutions, and all manner of complications and complex civilizational uncertainty. And for clarity, I’m in no way anti-profit.
Let’s try not to flatten the discourse.
Absurdly, I feel the need to say that before the residual red scare cultural residue and the Ghost of Karl Marx appears in our imagination and starts shrieking “Communism!” while spitting that viscous red ectoplasm all over logic and rationality, empathy and compassion.
Like fruit of the vine and work of human hands, the surplus is a bounty bound by sacred stewardship. Profit has a right place, a right size, a right scale, and a right flow. Just like blood in the body, currency has to move through a system in a manner that sustains its longevity and vitality. Think of it as associated with a type of large-system civilizational Qi — when the energy flow stagnates, and pools, it causes a systemic cascade — a complete collapse of the societal body.
So, this suggestion that more deregulation, more unbridled innovation, more “free market” capitalism, more technofeudalism will save us from full systems collapse is about as delusional as suggesting, “I think fentanyl will cure my heroin addiction. Actually, maybe even better to accelerate the healing by jumping straight to carfentanil!”
This is the delusional thinking of deep addiction, a planetary resource abuse disorder that can’t compassionately and maturely say “Okay, I surrender. Enough is enough. Our lives have become unmanageable and only a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Sure, MORE will “solve” the problem, but through an exercise in host killing — not taking a sober look at the gravity of the situation at hand and finally getting clean. So, instead we’re on this fatalistic path to self destruction — the road to rock bottom.
And, while I believe that I understand many of the deep evolutionary drives, the market incentives, and some modest portion of the well-informed and well-intentioned policy dimensions that necessitate these backwards ways of being — and that they also tend to be the most strategically viable path forward at present — there’s still something incredibly psychotic and just plain off about this whole setup. Whenever anyone asks for the profitable argument for why we ought to make an effort to avoid extinction, there’s often a part of me that thinks, “Wow, there’s no math great enough to fix the brokenness of that question. This can’t be about logic, it must be a sickness of spirit.” I call this scenario The Monkey’s Bargain.
Bananafication and The Great Monkey’s Bargain
Imagine two desperate chimps being chased by a poacher. They stop running, and in an attempt to strategically bargain with the poacher, start to ask each other how much the universe is worth.
To whom? In exchange for what? Another universe? From where? Who could sell a whole universe? And, who would even buy that? The poacher?
This doesn’t even make any sense — is the universe not an end unto itself? If you’re asking me to convert the value of an entire universe into a simple unit of account, the paperclip maximizer has already won.
But really… “How much would that be in bananas, good sir?”
For most organizational organisms, economic value is the only value — measured in profit and revenue — sales of goods and services, as well as grants and donations. The branding and marketing may say otherwise, but if an organization doesn’t make money, it eventually dies. Every organization should do the “what’s our values” exercise at a company retreat and then go outside, throw it into a giant trash heap and burn it right into oblivion. I call this practice the Honor Thy Fiends ritual, a sacred offering to the gods of radical corporate insincerity.
Seriously though, what are the actual incentives?
Let me see that cap table and a list of your suppliers. I don’t care if you meditate before every single meeting, your values don’t mean jack if nothing actually holds you to them. Are private equity, venture capital, and philanthropy “living their values” in the term sheets of their investment portfolios? What about their supply chains? Are they engaging in anti-competitive practices, or lobbying for special privileges that cause systemic rot, like legalizing various forms of corruption? What about the bylaws of their governance? How are their values expressed and incentivized in law? Is any of this being measured or is it all just vibes and marketing? If so, how? And what does this look like across industries, in the macroeconomic aggregate?
Greed is Good and the God of the Gaps
How do we bridge this gap between economic value and our ethical values — our virtues and principles, that which we hold existentially sacred, that which offers us the deepest meaning in life. We can’t keep pretending that these can ever be one and the same — this is the economic god of the gaps — where abstract mythologies go to be reified, where altars to baal and moloch are erected, where free market ideologies are deified and mammon is worshiped.
When we speak about values alignment, this is the gap we mean. When we speak about integrity, this is the gap we mean. When we speak about corruption, this is the gap — that dark infinite void, that chasm large enough to swallow up entire planets, the infinitely insatiable home of hungry ghosts — where desire is such a gnawing ache that greed feels like need, because competition is king and hoarding wealth is the grand prosperity gospel of “we enlightened few.”
This gap between ethical value and economic value is where whales go to die, where everything from living fish to our very own brains get filled with plastic, and drinking water is poisoned for a thousand years. It’s the cracks in the concrete across which the social safety net is supposed to stretch. It’s the slice between the floorboards and the cellar door where manufactured wars are conjured to capture the nations of sheep and deplorables. Like loose change disappearing into the darkness of a deep capitalist couch cushion — we have trickle down values — things we pretend to care about that have never been measured and continue to go unaccounted for.
So why don’t we measure this? We could probably list a million reasons why we don’t always prioritize the things we say we care about — hypocrisy, shadow, competition, complex trade offs, we’ll lose money, it’s complicated, power, consciousness, free will doesn’t exist — take your pick. However, for me, there’s a slightly more interesting consideration I’ve been reflecting on for many years…
Sure, maybe we could change to measure and prioritize better things. But, might it be the actual process of converting the world into bananas that causes all the difficulty in the first place? In an attempt to make visible the invisible, the actual process of measuring the immeasurable, it seems we both gain and lose something incredibly important. Making a theoretical framework of value and doing the math to bananify every atom may empower us with a universal unit of exchange.
But, we’re kidding ourselves to think that delocalized information can easily flourish independent of its embedded structures and ripped from its evolutionary trajectory. That is to say, all things are essentially non-fungible in truth; they are meaningfully and necessarily place-based, but when we make up a currency game and turn real things into numbers, they become falsely interchangeable abstractions.
For example, our bodies are instruments of the land, of the people and culture in which we’re rooted. Historically speaking, a human’s gut microbiome was attuned to the local flora and fauna, to the edible game and vegetation of their bioregion. Like stem cells that differentiate and specialize, humans are meaningfully situated and particularly primed to make the best decisions within the localized complexity of the ecological context in which they’re grown. This is how holistic information systems become intelligent.
Can we eat foods from other regions and make decisions upon other lands? Sure, of course, but we’re perfectly suited and supremely optimized to navigate the nuances of the most familiar cultures and territories upon which we walk — the land that has grown in us and that we’ve grown into, the people who know us and who we’ve come to know. There’s an informational decoherence that occurs when we shake everything up and move everything around like a snowglobe.
Go ahead, swap your heart cells with your liver cells and see what happens.
A community is a metabolic process. The microbes in the soil are in conversation with our gut microbiome and that’s part of our whole decision making intelligence. Our cognition is a distributed network of relationships. The rivers and your blood are one thing. The soil and your stomach are one thing. The trees and your lungs are one thing. This is what we’ve forgotten.
We pretend to live inside ontologically coherent data maps, but we are infinite fractal territories of experience. And it’s just one big thing made of many smaller things — none of them separate. Attempt to separate the inseparable at your own risk.
In the place where one thing stands, we can’t insert a different thing and expect it to offer the exact same outcome. We can’t attempt to replace one twin with another and expect that it won’t change the causal chain of existence, even if it looks identical and appears to function as such. Living breathing beings do not become interchangeable until they are dead. Only dead things are fungible. Now there’s a both-and here, so put your “nuance bro” cap on.
Moral Imaginations of The Wood Wide Web of Life
Okay, so think of a deeply rooted, 600 year old white oak tree connecting far and wide beneath the soil, transporting resources throughout a living ecology, the sourcing center of a forest with thousands of offspring. When a living being is so branched and rooted — so deeply woven such that it has spent centuries living into and becoming one with every other local living thing at every scale — how do you just rip this out and replace it?
An oak tree does not become fungible until it’s seen through a necrotic worldview and dies on the altar of the market. It stops being a bronchial branch of our lungs that connects us to the capillaries of the soil, and becomes exotic wood for floors and tables and dresser drawers and cabinets and bed frames. Like carved stone, it becomes the masonic building blocks of civilization. The magic of written language, law, and double entry bookkeeping is that it enables civilization to scale.
Conceptually, everything is now a banana that can presumably be moved about in space-time without any serious repercussions. When we attempt to codify natural law into contract law and financialize interaction, it seems there’s a race to commodify every last drop of energy, every last bit of vitality, and a tendency to lose track in accounting for what’s actually meaningful.
Now, it’s not that counting dead things is bad and collecting living things is good. That’s far too simple. It’s a dynamic tension, like the yin and yang of the wuji– it’s a dance, a type of harmony, the counterpoint of existence. Chopping down trees to build a home is not the problem, not even trade and bartering of lumber — it’s the pace, the scope, the scale, and the duration in aggregate that causes such harm and poses such risk. And, not even risk to so-called nature, it’s literally a type of collective self harm, this uncoordinated, unaccountable, first-come-first-serve, winner-take-all, every-person-for-themselves free-for-all consumption fest or bust.
We need to chop down some trees. This is fine, and even good, but there’s a tipping point when chopping down some trees shifts from tending to the balance of nature in the bioregion and meeting our needs, to everyone looting the commons in an attempt to win some paper money on a board game, or gamble digital tokens at the futures casino, like a bunch of rabid squirrels hoarding fake electronic nuts.
And we do this with almost everything — everything becomes a barcode, an RFID, a QR code, a number in a spreadsheet tracking those giant jarfuls of paperclips, and the quick-rotting bananas in the kitchen, the bundles of dead wood, and those towering Babylonian slabs struggling to Jenga humanity back to heaven. We’ve forgotten that Eden is within.
We’ve gotten so caught up in the monopoly game that now we only think in this market logic, this machine language of cogs and sprockets where stocks and humans are just capital with equal ease of reallocation.
Oeuf Poche Florentine: Another Food for Thought Experiment
Alright.
Take a breath.
Imagination Time.
Let’s pretend we’re all first time parents-to-be. We’re having a child we’ve yearned for, for decades. We’re happy, scared, overwhelmed — excited with anticipation and everything in between. Now, close your eyes and imagine the exact moment of your child’s birth. See them emerge into the world through your mind's eye. Feel the overwhelming flood of emotions associated with seeing their first breath upon delicate lips, their tiny wrinkly fingers grasping at air as the world stops and leans in to hear their first coo, their first wail. And, in that rushing space where everything is moving, and time somehow manages to stand impossibly still — a doctor hands you a freshly tended, warmly swaddled newborn and says, “Congratulations, human capital is your greatest asset!”
Diagnostic Criteria for Cluster B: Bad Vibes and Other Associated Features
No, I’m not a Marxist. Late stage Capitalism just has really bad vibes. Now, some may argue that approaching a parent during the birth of their first child to calculate the economic value of their newborn baby upon first breath is hyperbole, but what do you think that birth certificate is for? It’s the sign up form. It’s enrollment into the game of civilization. It’s the big count. And remember, no one wants to be left out of the big count!
Sigh…
Unfortunately, this is also how I often feel about the state of organizational praxis — a guttural rejection, my stomach coils with dull rage and barks, “How dare you desecrate the sacredness of life?” My spirit dry heaves a full-throated gag at a sour putrid stench, like I’m standing in a room with a corpse and everyone’s pretending it’s alive… This is the David Icke fever dream where the world is secretly run by a cabal of reptilian overlords who eat humans like chicken, and have normalized psychically sucking the divine life force energy out of the human soul.
My body outright rejects it all.
It feels like that moment when you’ve gone through the proving ground of academia, finally collected all the medals and awards, passed through the gatekeeping credential gauntlet and climbed the institutional ladder only to find that all the achievements and recognition have brought no lasting joy, no deep sense of fulfillment, and worse yet — it’s torn your spirit’s sinew to shreds and ground your soul’s bones into dust, leaving only that rare, bitter-tasting elite-level caviar of anhedonic melancholy — diabolically served on a silver platter, soaking in a black, tarry, nefarious hustle culture goo that sticks to absolutely everything.
And that’s only what happens when you “win!”
It’s that subtle coercive fear of walking the institutional tightrope — that feeling of spending your whole life working hard, chasing accolades and getting cred, building influence, and gaining enough power to so-called make a difference, beautify the world, “do good,” and fix the obviously failing system — only to realize that if you so much as point to the root of the problem, the incentives of the embedded growth imperative will red scare you right into oblivion and you’ll lose absolutely everything you worked for, everything you once valued, and still hold dear.
Like a cosmic joke that’s all on you.
It’s that nebulous sense of exhaustion, that feeling of being trapped on a treadmill inside a rat race to civilizational collapse, and hating the catch 22 that this thing you’ve come to despise also provides for the things you care about the most — it’s building a retirement fund to hopefully escape the madness, while paying the mortgage on the house that keeps your family safe and provides for the children that actually make life worth living.
It’s the rolodex of reasons to give in, reasons to give up.
It’s that sneaking suspicion that you’ve been deceived, swindled, sold a bad bill of goods and a big fat stack of lies atop a fragile house of cards — manipulated into loading up on school loans as older generations ran away with your future to go live high on the hog, somehow tricked by societal norms into marrying someone before your brain finished baking. It’s that feeling of grief and resentment, a betrayal by your own parents who left you out in the cold holding the bag… and having created such conditions, those same proverbial parents take no responsibility — chiding your perpetual precarity and insurmountable debt as a personal moral failing. It’s the tender gaping wound of societal abandonment that eventually grows so big as to engulf the entire cosmos.
As if god went to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes one day and never came home.
It’s that feeling of being gaslit by the triple bottom line — where profit sticks out like a sore thumb amongst people and planet, and everyone has to pretend it wasn’t shoehorned in between the sanctity of all living beings just to keep the failing game going. And no one is allowed to say the quiet part out loud, but any child who’s watched Sesame Street can see that one of these things is not like the others.
It’s that feeling of standing on the wage slave auctioning block and being assessed by people who have absolutely no business assessing living things — people bidding to buy labor and those in the high business of counting dead things. And worse yet, they move like sleepwalkers and zombies, absolutely oblivious to the dance of the dead, the waltz of formality where we pretend it’s not dehumanizing, as humans are literally called resources. We pretend there’s no coercion as inequality rises with the cost of living and homelessness. In fact, I’m afraid it’s even worse — we call it agency and choice, we call it freedom and liberty, we call it the pursuit of happiness and congratulate ourselves as we pretend to be changing the world for the better!
In Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, author Christopher Ryan PhD diagnoses the origination of such bad vibes as follows,
“Institutions, particularly corporations, are the example that strikes me most strongly today. We’ve given them not only agency — we’ve given them religious freedom; we’ve given them voting rights; we’ve given them control of our government; we’ve given them control of the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us — from them!
And I feel like, there’s some kinda parallel between the fascination with zombies, and the walking dead, and ufos, and all that kinda stuff. I want to say to people, don’t you see that there is already an alien intelligence? Here present? On the planet? Controlling us? Directly and indirectly? And it’s called institutions?
There’s something happening where… You know, we see an ad on tv that says, Exxon believes that a green future is the best future… How does Exxon believe anything?! What the fuck is Exxon? Exxon doesn’t have a brain! Exxon doesn’t have a moral structure! Exxon is a psychopath like all corporations are psychopaths.
They have no emotional presence what-so-ever. A corporation doesn’t have a mother! A corporation doesn’t have blood. It doesn’t live and die the way we do, but it is a living thing. And it’s a very strange life form that I feel like people have trouble recognizing. And so, they’re kind of helpless against them.” — Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions Humans on the Loop | 02 Dec 2021 7:49
So how can we get better at recognizing, seeing these paranormal beings right in front of us? If whistleblowers are like spirit boxes speaking for the hungry corporate ghosts, and industry informants the EMF meters measuring paranormal activity, how does one grow this systemic sixth sense, this organizational clairvoyance, the exteroceptive… interoceptive… proprioceptive experience of invisible structures?
Poor Unfortunate Souls and The Walking Dead
In her book “Who Do We Choose To Be?” Margret Wheatley quotes cybernetic philosophers and neuroscientific biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in saying, ”you can disturb a living system, but you can never direct it.” She goes on to say, “you can’t boss life around unless you force it to become lifeless.” So who’s the boss of the lifeless?
Have you ever felt the push, the squeeze, the forcefulness when an organization attempts to shove you through the intake of their talent pipeline or recruitment funnel, and process you on their human resources conveyor belt? I call it measuring down to measure up. And, I often find it to be a special type of cold, banal bureaucratic violence — the homogenization of humans, the commonplace pasteurization of people, a best practices brutality where everything sacred goes to die.
Before getting into the perplexity of measuring our values at the organizational level, just notice the ontological reworlding, the reshaping of meaning as we move from inherent intrinsic value and known interdependent web of life to the extrinsic externalization of value, the many methodologies of the so-called independent:
Flattening: a human is uniformly standardized and flattened in complexity by way of documentation and record to reduce friction, increase legibility, clarity, and ease of tracking (e.g. resume, curriculum vitae, personal statements, statements of purpose, cover letters).
Disassociation and Decontexualization: a human is disassociated with and removed from ecological context and situated relationality (e.g. commute, remote work, job relocation, going into the office, video conference).
Disidentification and Recontexualization: the identity is redefined from human being – who you are in relationship with others – to human doing, what you do or produce for the organization (e.g. uniforms, and business casual costume, rank, designation, positions, titles, roles, responsibilities).
Depersonalization and Reclassification: a human being from a family and belonging to a community is newly codified as a legal person inside a corporation and becomes an employee subject to liability. (e.g. employee id, worker badge, productivity tracking software, human resources paper trail, ORKs, KPIs, PIPs)
This is how the magic works; this is the part you can’t see. Like livestock in the lairage of an abattoir— the death machine is literally right in front of you — it’s staring you dead in the eye.
The job listing is often the public face of the portal, the beginning of this ontological phase shift from community to the market, from reciprocity to transactionality, from intrinsic internal value to the extrinsic externalization of value — this is where we are transformed from divine sacred life force energy, a unique soul with a spirit, into a human, then to a person, into an employee, which becomes a resource to extract and human capital in the market aggregate, a productivity metric to be abstractly managed with spreadsheet macros and machine learning algorithms — it’s a crushing, crushing, crushing smaller and smaller into fully-fungible digital casino tokens.
It’s a slight of hand, a normalized legal magic, the secret engine atop which societies perch and civilizations expand.
It’s the bananafication meets the big count. The fancier word is commodification. According to Gøsta Esping-Andersen, people are commodified or 'turned into objects' when selling their labor on the market to an employer. If some of us sell our time for wages, or in essence our labor as active income — what is this time we are trading? Is it not life? Is it not soul and spirit and creativity?
Is it not our very essence and energy? And how is it that this life force energy can be transferred from one’s active effort into another’s passive income? And in a meritocracy, how does one “earn” such passive income with no effort? Is that not a very strange type of alchemy? And is it not equally curious that those who receive such transferrals, those with high passive income, live much longer lives? What dark magic is this?! Where does this extra life come from? Or perhaps I should say, who does this extra life come from?
Here is your chupacabra’s mouth.
The soul eater sits in our midst. And this is not just at work, this institutional worldview is a persuasive narrative device that re-costumes the whole world in its likeness, but when threatened or provoked, will deceptively deploy a more humane overlay without hesitation, recharacterizing its value set using the same linguistic sleight of hand. And, this cloak of invisibility is almost always insincere.
To make this a little more concrete, let’s see how this ontological illusion is performed in the real world, using an example from Alexander Beiner’s article on accountability, where he highlights the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson to illustrate the philosophical distinction between a metaphysics of quantity and quality. In it he writes,
“The metaphysical foundations of the secular Western world are based on the idea that quantity (matter) is the only thing that’s real, a philosophical position known as ‘physicalism’. The conscious experience of being alive (your experiential value) is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter, and as such less real and less valuable. Not only is this position philosophically and empirically untenable, but it creates an inhuman world and lies at the heart of the metacrisis.
So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband.
This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being. They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not.
Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity. That is, unless we want to make the claim that Thompson is more valuable as a CEO than as a father. It puts the whole of corporate America in an impossible double-bind.
If Mangione had destroyed the data centres that house United Healthcare’s patient records, it wouldn’t be a powerful breach event. But he killed a human being, a father and husband. He removed an experience from the world, as revenge against a machine that doesn’t care about experience. The assassination is a koan that brings to light the paradox at the heart of civilization: what’s real is our experience of being alive, not how we can be quantified, but we pretend the opposite is true.“ — Best Served Cold: Luigi Mangione and The Age of Breach Technofeudalism, accountability porn and the new counterculture – Alexander Beiner 14 Dec 2024
And so, in this way, Luigi Mangione has this institutional second sight that can peer into the paranormal, but in the process of attaining these special abilities, he has become Blade the Vampire Hunter, “His violent methods and his anti-establishment attitude place him firmly in the anti-hero category. As a human-vampire hybrid, Blade means well — he's become a fierce vampire hunter — but at the same time, he can't say no to human blood. While he fights against vampires to protect humanity, his methods are brutal and he struggles with his own vampire nature, which includes the urge to drink human blood, creating a moral conflict within him despite his good intentions.” And so Mangione’s blade slices right through the illusion, into the heart of this double bind, this tension between economic value and ethical values that sits inside of us.
And so for over a year and a half I’ve been staring at these “upload resume” and “attach cv” buttons, and I can’t help but wonder…
When a relationship starts with a request to collapse, flatten and squeeze yourself through an extraction assessment pipeline, how does one then feel safe and supported, when encouraged to bring their so-called whole self to work? This statement is not necessarily a value judgment, just an observation. The workplace is full of these contradictions, where an organization speaks out of both sides of its mouth and the task of navigating a path towards truth can feel like an M.C. Escher painting — a topsy-turvy maze full of dynamic, ever-shifting tensions that never resolve.
At some point, we’re going to have to admit to the measurement problem: no math can save us from ourselves. But! There is another way. We’re building new institutions. Come with us, if you truly want to live.
The Institute of Wise Innovation: There’s a Mission Afoot and You’re Invited. 🤫
This article includes pre-edited excerpts from The Book of Wise Innovation.
Powerful and well written my friend. Thank you.
Excellent!