Value creation is nearly exclusively human.

Very few species take raw materials from their environment and transform them into something better. In its earliest forms, value was a prepared meal or a rudimentary tool. A rock as hammer. It was personal—most things of value in your life were made by you or someone close to you. And it was general. Everyone could make what they needed.

Now consider one of the most valuable creations in the modern world: a perimeter around air, built from the ground to the sky. A tower extracts value from a prime urban location by stacking access points to that locale. The higher up you get—further from the valuable ground—the more value you incur, because of the view. Where the tool is direct and personal, the tower is abstract and specialized. No single person creates it. No single person fully understands it.

Social & General →

Isolated & Specialized

Value creation has always been social. Even the earliest tools were shared, taught, traded. What changed is the distance. Over time, the relationship between the person who creates value and the person who receives it has stretched from intimate to invisible. People have become specialists. The value itself has become a commodity. And somewhere in that distance, something was lost.

In a direct exchange, if there is something you can’t make, you trade. But trade requires alignment. Two people need to agree on the worth of what’s being exchanged, which means they need some shared sense of what matters. A successful trade implies shared values—a mutual definition of what is and isn’t important in the world.

Currency changed this.

Money made it possible to exchange value without ever agreeing on values. You no longer needed to find someone who wanted what you made and had what you wanted. You just needed a price. The effect has not only been an abstraction of value but an abstraction of values. We’re no longer required to articulate what we stand for in the countless transactions we make with each other. We infer meaning through products and product marketing. Or we forget to think about it at all.

The result has distanced us from community and surrounded us by products. Companies that are good at making things people like have grown to unprecedented sizes without valuing much of anything beyond that. When a company’s growth is untethered by a set of values, it drifts toward whatever it measures itself against. Most of our technology measures impressions and interactions, because that’s how advertising works. These services have become echo chambers. Empty vessels that respond to whatever you put in with more of the same. They are biased toward you.

Our values are how we articulate who we are. We express them in how we dress, the language we use, the things we do. They are also how we navigate—how we decide what to pursue and what to leave alone, who to trust and who to question. In a direct economy, values were embedded in every exchange. In a capital economy, they’re optional. Something you have to actively choose. The default is convenience.

Communities used to form around shared values because they had to. Trade demanded it. Proximity demanded it. Now communities form around shared consumption. A community built on values can weather disagreement because the foundation runs deeper than preference. A community built on consumption dissolves the moment the product changes. One is infrastructure. The other is weather.

When we stop examining our values, the question becomes what kind of future we’re building.

How do you optimize for surprise instead of confirmation? For empathy between people who are nothing alike? For effort that doesn’t make sense on a spreadsheet? These are harder to measure. But the things worth building usually are.