The previous essays ended on a foreclosed option. The band kept power accountable through reciprocal watching and cheap exit — and neither mechanism survives scale. We cannot make modern societies small, and we cannot make exit cheap when opting out of the datafied infrastructure increasingly means opting out of employment, banking, and civic life. So the romantic prescription — return to the band — is not on the table. It was never on the table.

What is on the table is something harder and more interesting: deliberately reconstructing, inside societies far too large for anyone to walk away, the one feature the band had and we have lost. Not smallness. Not exit. Reciprocity — the rough parity between watcher and watched that the band maintained for free.

There are two ways to close a gap, and reciprocity can be pursued from either direction. You can raise the lower party — make the watched less exposed, harder to see, less legible to those who would act on them. Or you can lower the higher one — make the watcher more visible, more auditable, more accountable to those it watches. A genuine restoration of reciprocity needs both, and the rights that follow draw on both. But the two directions are not in the same condition. Making power visible is an old project, with a long toolkit: freedom-of-information law, mandated disclosure, whistleblower protection, the entire accountability tradition. Making the ordinary individual less legible without simply dropping out of modern life is the lever we have never really had — until recently. You could demand transparency from institutions, but you could not give a person a practical means to transact, associate, or prove themselves trustworthy while remaining unseen. That capability is new, it is the more surprising half of the story, and it is where this essay will spend most of its time.

That reframing changes what a privacy agenda is even for. The point is not to maximize secrecy. A world of perfect individual opacity would be a world in which the powerful, too, are perfectly opaque — which is the oikos problem from the last essay, domination hidden behind a threshold no one may cross. The point is to correct an asymmetry. And correcting an asymmetry is not the same as flipping it: the goal is neither a panopticon pointed down at citizens nor a panopticon pointed up at institutions, but the restoration of two-directional sight, calibrated so that visibility tracks power. The more power an actor holds over others, the more visible and accountable that actor should be. The less power, the more they should be able to keep a zone of life the tower cannot reach.

What follows is an attempt to make that principle concrete: a set of rights, each justified not by appeal to what a hunter-gatherer would have wanted, but by the structural logic of restoring reciprocity. I offer it as a framework to think with — a way of evaluating any proposed system, from a central bank digital currency to an AI policing tool, by asking what it does to the balance of accountable sight. Not as a manifesto, and not as a finished constitution. The tradeoffs are real, and I’ll flag them as we go.

The organizing principle: visibility should track power

Before the list, the principle that generates it.

In the band, watching and power were inversely coupled in a specific way. The person who tried to accumulate power became, by that very act, the object of the coalition’s intensified attention. Reaching for dominance made you more watched, not less. Power and exposure rose together, which is exactly why power could not run away with itself.

Modern arrangements invert this coupling. Power now buys opacity. The wealthy individual, the large corporation, the intelligence agency — these command both the greatest capacity to see others and the greatest ability to shield themselves from being seen. The ordinary citizen has the least capacity to watch and the least ability to avoid being watched. Visibility runs opposite to power. That inversion, more than any particular technology, is the disease the last two essays diagnosed.

So the organizing principle of any corrective framework is simply to restore the band’s coupling: visibility should track power. Every right below is an application of it. Some rights point the watching back up at concentrated power, demanding that institutions become legible and accountable — the old project, with its long toolkit. Others carve out zones of opacity below, protecting the relatively powerless individual from a sight they have no means to reciprocate — the lever we have only lately acquired. These are not two values in tension. They are the same value — reciprocity — applied at the two ends of a power gradient.

The rights

A caveat about what follows. The first four rights below will be familiar to anyone who has followed privacy debate over the past two decades — contestable decisions, contextual integrity, institutional transparency, a right to be forgotten. I am not claiming novelty for them. I include them because the asymmetry thesis unifies them: they turn out to be four faces of a single principle rather than a grab-bag of separate demands, and seeing them that way is what lets the framework function as a test. They are also, for the most part, the old direction — the long project of making power visible. I’ll state each briefly. The fifth right — transactional privacy — is the new direction, the one of making the individual less exposed, and it is where the distinctive argument lives. Accordingly, it receives the most attention in my essay.

1. A right against domination by opaque process. No one should be subject to consequential, coercive decisions — about credit, employment, housing, liberty, movement — made by processes they cannot inspect, contest, or escape. This is the most direct expression of the asymmetry thesis: the harm of the secret blacklist or the unexplained algorithmic denial is that it was rendered by a watcher you cannot face, on grounds you cannot examine, with no coalition-level recourse. The implementations are familiar — contestability of automated decisions, limits on fully automated determination in high-stakes domains, bodies empowered to sanction institutions that abuse data. What the asymmetry framing adds is why these matter: not as consumer protections but as reconstructions of the reverse-dominance check the band took for granted.

The tradeoff: contestability has costs. A system that must explain and defend every decision is slower and more expensive, and some genuinely useful statistical tools resist human-legible explanation. The frontier between accountability and efficiency is real, and cannot be waved away by insisting accountability always wins.

2. A right to context-bound information. Information offered in one context should not silently become available in every other. What you say to a doctor, a friend, or a search engine was disclosed under a particular set of expectations; the modern default — that any datum, once captured, may be recombined and reused indefinitely for purposes never contemplated at disclosure — violates what Helen Nissenbaum formalized as contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2010). The band analogue is exact: saying something around one fire did not imply it would be repeated to strangers, in another camp, decades later. Implementations include purpose-limitation defaults, barriers against cross-domain linkage without narrow consent, and architectures that compartmentalize rather than pool.

The tradeoff: the same recombination that enables surveillance also enables genuine goods — epidemiology, fraud detection, the discovery of a drug interaction across millions of records. The honest position is not that linkage is evil but that it should be deliberate and accountable rather than the silent default.

3. A right to symmetric institutional transparency. This is the right that points the watching up, and the one most easily lost in privacy debates that focus only on shielding the individual. If an institution can see you, you should be able to see it: what it collects, how it decides, who it answers to. One-directional transparency — citizens fully legible, institutions opaque — is the asymmetry itself, stated as policy. The corrective is radical transparency of power: public audit logs for surveillance programs, open scrutiny of algorithms used in public functions, robust
whistleblower protection, participatory oversight by the communities most affected. Notice this right deliberately runs against individual privacy in one direction — it demands less opacity for the powerful — which is what keeps the framework from collapsing into “hide everything.” Visibility tracks power: the institution holding power over millions owes far more sight than it is owed.

The tradeoff: some institutional opacity is legitimate — an investigation in progress, a genuine security secret. The principle does not abolish institutional privacy; it inverts the default, placing the burden of justification on the powerful actor who wishes to remain unseen, rather than on the citizen who wishes to look.

4. A right to limited memory. Human reputational systems evolved with forgetting built in. Details faded, contexts shifted, and the person you were at twenty was not held forever against the person you became at fifty. Perfect, permanent, searchable memory removes this, freezing people against their worst recorded moment and chilling the experimentation through which people grow. Implementations include retention limits, sunset provisions for categories of data, and the contested “right to be forgotten.”

The tradeoff: this one is genuinely fraught, because the line between forgetting and erasing the record is thin, and the same mechanism that lets an ordinary person outlive an old mistake can let a powerful person delete an inconvenient truth. Memory limits must themselves track power — strongest for the private individual, weakest for the public figure exercising authority — or they become a tool of exactly the domination they were meant to check.

5. A right to transactional privacy. Most of human economic history generated no centralized, person-indexed, permanent record of who paid whom for what. Cash, barter, and small-scale exchange were self-erasing.

The drift toward fully traceable digital payment — and the prospect of central bank digital currencies that could render every transaction visible to a single authority — represents one of the sharpest concentrations of one-directional sight ever proposed, because financial data are an extraordinarily complete map of a life: your movements, associations, beliefs, vulnerabilities, all legible in the ledger. The implementation principle is to preserve cash-like options, to keep bulk financial monitoring targeted and warrant-bound rather than indiscriminate, and to take seriously the cryptographic technologies that can provide validity without total visibility.

It is this last point that needs the most careful handling, because it is where the technology gets genuinely novel — and where it would be easy to overclaim. So it gets its own section.

Zero-knowledge proofs: reverse dominance at the protocol level

The most interesting technical development for this whole framework is a piece of cryptography called the zero-knowledge proof. In rough terms, a zero-knowledge (“ZK” for short) proof lets one party prove a statement is true without revealing anything beyond the truth of the statement itself. You can prove you are over eighteen without revealing your birthdate; prove you have sufficient funds without revealing your balance; prove a transaction is valid — properly authorized, not double-spent — without revealing who paid whom, or how much (Goldwasser, Micali, & Rackoff, 1989, established the theoretical foundation; privacy-focused systems such as Zcash brought it into financial practice).

Set against the framework, the appeal is obvious. A ZK system delivers exactly the asymmetry-correcting property the whole series has been circling: verification without surveillance. The validity of a claim becomes publicly checkable while the identity behind it stays private. Power’s demand — “prove you are playing by the rules” — is satisfied, while power’s overreach — “and reveal everything about yourself in the process” — is denied.

Cryptographer Anna Lysyanskaya has framed exactly this balance as the design goal: privacy for the individual, accountability where genuinely warranted, with disclosure triggered only under specified, jointly verifiable conditions rather than by default (Lysyanskaya, 2024).

There is a real temptation to describe this as restoring something ancestral, and I want to resist it precisely, because getting this wrong would undercut the credibility of everything else. ZK proofs do not return us to the band. The band had less anonymity than we do, not more — in a camp of intimates, everyone knew who owed what to whom; there was no centralized ledger because there was no need for one, and no anonymity in social relations at all. What ZK cryptography builds is genuinely new: strong anonymity in the data layer of vast, impersonal markets, combined with cryptographically constrained accountability — a configuration that has no precedent in small-scale societies or ancient ones. It is not a recovery. It is an invention.

But here is why the invention nonetheless belongs in this series.

What it reconstructs is not the band’s anonymity — the band had none — but the band’s structural relationship between watching and power.

Recall the deepest finding from the first essay: reverse dominance worked because coalitions of ordinary people could collectively constrain what a would-be dominator was able to do. A ZK system does something formally analogous, in mathematics rather than in social sanction: it collectively constrains what powerful institutions are able to see. It is a leveling mechanism implemented at the level of protocol — a way for the many to limit the informational power of the few, not by watching the dominator (the old method) but by denying the dominator the capacity to watch them without accountability. In that precise and limited sense — not as nostalgia, but as functional analogy — it is reverse dominance rebuilt for a scale at which the old social version no longer reaches.

That is the strongest claim I think the evidence supports, and I want to be careful to claim no more.

The limits, stated plainly

A framework like this fails the moment it pretends its central tool is a panacea, so here are the limits that matter most.

First, cryptography does not defeat coercion. A ZK proof hides your information from observation, but it does nothing to stop a powerful actor from simply compelling you to reveal it — to hand over keys, produce proofs, or testify under threat. This is not a fringe worry; it is acknowledged at the center of the field. In a November 2025 exchange with a Zcash researcher, Vitalik Buterin stated plainly that ZK proofs by themselves cannot provide coercion resistance, and that achieving it in sensitive applications like voting requires combining ZK with other tools — multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, or trusted parties — adding that this limitation applies to nearly all cryptographic scenarios, not just ZK (Buterin, 2025). The mathematics that protects the ledger does not protect the person from the proverbial wrench. This is decisive for the whole framework: cryptographic privacy is necessary but insufficient on its own. It must be embedded in law and norms that forbid compelled disclosure and protect people from retaliation — which is to say, the technical leveling mechanism only works inside a social one, exactly as the band’s leveling worked only inside a surrounding culture that backed it.

Second, the tools cut both ways. The same permissionless, private rails that protect a dissident’s donation also move a criminal’s proceeds; the same opacity that shields the ordinary citizen can shield the genuine predator. This is not a reason to abandon the tools — every powerful infrastructure, from the postal system to the internet, carries dual use — but it is a reason for honesty about cost, and for designing the narrow, accountable, warrant-bound exceptions that distinguish targeted investigation from bulk surveillance. The framework’s own principle applies to itself: the exception must track power and be itself accountable, or it becomes the back door through which the tower returns.

Third, legibility has real value, and this framework restricts it. Everything I praised the agrarian tower for in the last essay — disaster response, public health, the capacity to notice and help the suffering at scale — depends on the state being able to see. A society that made itself fully illegible to its own institutions would lose the capacity for large-scale solidarity along with the capacity for large-scale domination. The goal is not to blind the state. It is to make the state’s sight accountable and proportionate — to keep the tower, but to put windows in it, and to give the people below the means to look up.

Fourth, and most fundamentally: none of this is self-executing. A right against opaque process is words on paper unless courts enforce it.

A zero-knowledge system protects no one if no one adopts it, or if its privacy guarantees quietly degrade because almost everyone transacts in the transparent default and the anonymity set collapses. Technology supplies capacities; whether those capacities become protections depends on law, institutions, adoption, and culture. This is the band’s lesson restated one final time: reverse dominance was never the mechanism alone — the ridicule, the ostracism, the refusal to obey. It was the shared commitment that made ordinary people willing to deploy those mechanisms against anyone who reached too far. Strip out the commitment and the mechanism is inert. The same is true here. The cryptography, the statutes, the audit logs — these are mechanisms.

Whether they level anything depends on whether a society still wants its power accountable enough to use them.

What the framework is for

I called this a framework to think with, not a manifesto, and I want to honor that distinction at the close. I am not certain every right above is correctly drawn, and several contain tradeoffs I find genuinely difficult. What I am more confident of is the test the framework yields, because the test is just the asymmetry thesis turned into a question you can ask of anything.

Confronted with any proposed system — a digital currency, a policing algorithm, an identity scheme, a platform’s terms of service — the framework asks: What does this do to the coupling between visibility and power? Does it make the powerful more accountable and the ordinary individual more protected, restoring something like the band’s reciprocity? Or does it deepen the inversion, buying the powerful more sight and more opacity while leaving the individual more exposed and with less recourse? That single question does more diagnostic work than any amount of debate about “privacy” in the abstract, because it locates the harm where the first essay found it — not in being seen, but in being seen by those we cannot see, and cannot hold to account.

The band answered that question with smallness and cheap exit, and the answer worked for the scale it faced. That scale is gone, and it is not coming back. Our task is not to mourn it but to answer the same question at a scale our ancestors never imagined — to build, out of law and norms and mathematics, the reciprocity that geography once supplied for free.

We will not return to watching each other across a campfire. But we might, if we choose to, rebuild the one thing that campfire guaranteed: that no one gets to watch from a tower we are forbidden to climb.

References & notes

Buterin, V. (2025, November). Public remarks that zero-knowledge proofs alone cannot provide coercion resistance, made in reply to Zcash researcher “c-node”; Buterin noted that sensitive use cases such as voting require combining ZK with MPC, FHE, TEEs, or trusted parties, and that this limitation generalizes across cryptographic systems. (Reported across crypto press, November 2025; cite Buterin’s own posts directly where available. He develops a related coercion concern regarding ZK-wrapped digital identity in his June 28, 2025 blog post on one-ID-per-person systems at vitalik.eth.limo.)

Goldwasser, S., Micali, S., & Rackoff, C. (1989). The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems. SIAM Journal on Computing, 18(1), 186–208. (The foundational paper establishing zero-knowledge proofs.)

Lysyanskaya, A. (2024, March 21). ZK proofs for balancing privacy and accountability [Talk summary]. ZKProof.
https://zkproof.org/2024/03/21/zk-proofs-for-balancing-privacy-and-accountability-by-anna-lysyanskaya/ (A write-up of Lysyanskaya’s talk on anonymous and compact e-cash protocols that prove transaction validity without revealing the payer’s identity, while supporting compliance features under specified conditions.)

Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford University Press. (The source of the “contextual integrity” framework underlying Right 2.)

A note on sources and humility: this essay draws together threads from cryptography, anthropology, law, and political theory, and no one — certainly not I — is expert in all of them. The framework is offered in that spirit: as a structure for thinking that specialists in each domain can correct and sharpen, not as a settled conclusion. Where I have leaned on the evolutionary-mismatch lens across this series, I have tried to use it to generate questions rather than to foreclose them.

But underneath the shifting content, one structure stays remarkably constant. In every era, the live question is the same: who can see whom, and what recourse does the seen have against the seer? That is the through-line I want to trace. Not the history of privacy as a possession, but the history of visibility as a relationship — and specifically, the long, uneven drift from the reciprocal watching of the band toward the one-directional watching of the modern state and market.

The content of privacy keeps changing. The contest over asymmetry never does.

The band: watching without a tower

Begin where the last essay ended. The mobile foraging band was the original configuration of human visibility, and its defining feature was symmetry: everyone could see everyone, and crucially, everyone could be seen by everyone. There was no vantage point from which a single person observed the group while remaining unobserved. (The first essay made the case for why that symmetry mattered — how lateral watching is what let coalitions of ordinary people keep any would-be dominator in check; I’ll take that argument as given here.)

What matters for the history that follows is one image. Watching, in the band, had no tower. The eye that saw you was an eye you could meet — and humans lived inside that configuration for the overwhelming majority of our species’ existence.

Everything in the history that follows is, in one way or another, the story of how the tower got built.

The agrarian state: the birth of seeing from above

The decisive break is not the invention of agriculture as such, but the rise of the sedentary, stratified, tax-collecting state — the social form that the previous essay distinguished sharply from the mobile band. Once people settle, accumulate storable surplus, and live in fixed dwellings on owned land, two things become possible that were not possible before. Interior private space becomes physically achievable: walls, courtyards, locked rooms, thresholds that can be closed. And — far more consequentially — the watching acquires a tower.

The political scientist James C. Scott gave us the indispensable concept here: legibility (Scott, 1998). A state cannot tax, conscript, or administer a population it cannot “see,” and early states invested enormous effort in making their subjects visible in the aggregate: censuses, land surveys, cadastral maps, standardized measures, fixed surnames, tax rolls. This is a fundamentally new kind of watching. It does not depend on any individual official knowing any individual subject. It works by turning people into records — countable, sortable, retrievable entries in a ledger held by the center.

Notice what has happened to the symmetry. The official who reads the tax roll sees the subject; the subject cannot read the official. The record persists whether or not anyone is presently looking. And the subject has no reciprocal capacity to “record” the state in return, no coalition-level mechanism to sanction an overreaching administrator the way a band could sanction an overreaching member. The reverse-dominance machinery that depended on lateral visibility simply does not reach the tax assessor in the distant capital. This is the asymmetry of the previous essay, appearing in history for the first time at scale. The watchers have climbed into a tower, and the watched can no longer climb up after them.

It is worth being honest, as before, that this new seeing was not purely predatory. Legibility is also what lets a state respond to famine, build infrastructure, and distribute relief — you cannot run a granary redistribution system without knowing who and where the hungry are. The tower is genuinely useful. But it is also, structurally, a concentration of one-directional sight, and from this point forward the human story is largely about how tall the tower grows and whether anyone below retains any means of looking back.

Athens and Rome: the threshold becomes sacred — for some

It is against this backdrop that the classical world’s contribution looks both genuinely important and easily overstated. Greek thought articulated, with unusual clarity, a distinction between the oikos — the household — and the polis, the public sphere of political life. The household was understood as a domain that the public sphere should not casually penetrate; the threshold of the home marked a boundary that carried real normative weight. Roman law developed parallel doctrines about the domus, including protections against forcible entry that echo down into the later common-law maxim that a man’s house is his castle.

This is the origin point that most popular histories of privacy reach for, and they are not wrong to do so. The idea that some zone of life is presumptively shielded from public and state intrusion — that there is a threshold authority should not cross without cause — is a real conceptual achievement, and our modern notions of the protected private sphere descend from it.

But here the caveat must be loud rather than parenthetical, because the romantic version of this story is badly misleading. The privacy of the classical household was not an egalitarian right. It was a hierarchical privilege, and the shield it offered to the household as against the state coexisted with intense, legally sanctioned domination inside the household. The Athenian oikos and the Roman domus were ruled by a male head — the kyrios, the paterfamilias — who held extensive disciplinary and in some periods near-absolute authority over wives, children, and enslaved people. The “privacy of the home” was, among other things, the privacy within which that domination operated unobserved. The threshold the state was asked not to cross was also the threshold behind which the powerless had no recourse at all.

So the classical achievement is real but double-edged, and it teaches something the whole series depends on. A protected private sphere is not automatically a victory for freedom. Privacy from the state can simultaneously be cover for domestic tyranny. Opacity protects whoever is inside the opaque space — and if that space is internally hierarchical, opacity protects the powerful within it. This is precisely why the third essay’s argument cannot be “privacy good, surveillance bad.” The question is always whose visibility, to whom, and with what recourse for those inside. Athens got the threshold right and the household wrong, and both halves of that lesson matter.

The sealed letter: privacy goes virtual

Jump forward to the nineteenth century and a genuinely new domain of privacy appears, one with no real ancestral analogue: correspondence. As literacy spread and postal systems became cheap and reliable — the British Penny Post of 1840 is the emblem — ordinary people gained the ability to conduct intimate, confidential relationships across great distances in writing. The historian David Vincent calls this a kind of “virtual privacy”: a private channel that exists not behind a physical wall but in the sealed envelope moving through a network (Vincent, 2016).

And immediately, the network reveals the catch. The same infrastructure that carries the private letter is a centralized, state-run system through which every letter passes — which means the channel that promises confidentiality is also a chokepoint at which confidentiality can be secretly broken. In 1844 this became a scandal in Britain when it emerged that the Home Office had been opening the correspondence of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini at the request of a foreign government. The public reaction was a “paroxysm of national anger,” and the shape of that anger is worth attention because it is the template for every privacy panic since: a specific abuse, revealed amid rapid technological change, in a context of official secrecy about the secrecy itself, met with vigorous outrage — and accompanied, tellingly, by people continuing to use the postal system in ever greater numbers even as they denounced its vulnerability (Vincent, 2016).

The Mazzini affair is the asymmetry thesis in miniature, and centuries after the agrarian tower first rose. The citizen entrusts the network. The state can see into the network without the citizen’s knowledge. The citizen cannot see into the state’s seeing. The new domain of privacy — the sealed letter — arrives already shadowed by a new asymmetry of surveillance, baked into the very infrastructure that made the privacy possible. This pairing, where each new technology of connection is also a new technology of one-directional sight, will repeat for the rest of the story.

Industrial records: from the wall to the file

Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the tower grew taller and changed character. Photography, telegraphy, fingerprinting, and punch-card tabulation gave states and corporations the ability to build vast archives of individuated records — criminal histories, credit files, identification systems, administrative dossiers. Surveillance increasingly meant not direct observation but record-keeping and cross-indexing. The watcher no longer needed to be present at the moment of being watched; the file did the watching, persistently, in the watcher’s absence.

This is when the content of privacy decisively shifts. It is no longer primarily about physical space — the wall, the threshold, the closed door. It becomes about information: who holds records about you, what they contain, and what they can do with them. The canonical marker of this shift is Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s 1890 article “The Right to Privacy,” written partly in reaction to an intrusive press armed with cheap photography, which reframed privacy as a personality-based “right to be let alone” against unwanted exposure (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). Decades later, Alan Westin would sharpen this into the modern informational definition: privacy as the individual’s claim to determine when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others (Westin, 1967).

Read through the asymmetry lens, the through-line holds. The domain has moved from walls to files, but the contest is unchanged: institutions accumulate the capacity to see and to remember, the individual loses the corresponding capacity to see and to sanction in return, and the law arrives — as it almost always does — a step or two behind the technology that created the problem.

Computers and the sorted population

After the Second World War, electronic computing changed not just the scale of the file but its logic. Credit bureaus, banks, insurers, and government agencies began linking once-scattered records into aggregated profiles, using standardized identifiers to stitch a person’s traces together across institutions. The watching stopped being a matter of observing individuals one at a time. It became a matter of sorting populations — scoring, ranking, flagging, and classifying people by criteria embedded in systems that the classified could neither see nor contest (Lyon, 2007).

This is a subtle but profound deepening of the asymmetry. In the agrarian census, you were at least a recognizable entry — a name, a plot, a head to be counted. In the computational sort, you become a position in a statistical model, judged by your resemblance to others, on the basis of correlations no official may even fully understand. The seer is now partly machine, and the recourse of the seen approaches zero: you cannot argue with a credit score the way you could argue with a neighbor, or even petition a tax assessor. “The system says no” is the purest possible expression of unaccountable, towerless-to-the-watched vertical sight.

The datafied present: the tower everywhere

Which brings us to now. Digital networks and mobile devices have woven the file into the texture of ordinary life so thoroughly that the boundary between state and corporate watching has largely dissolved. Every transaction, location, search, and message generates machine-readable traces, captured by platforms and frequently accessible to governments through legal or covert channels. Shoshana Zuboff named the dominant economic form of this arrangement surveillance capitalism: a system in which human experience is claimed as raw material, rendered into behavioral data, and traded in markets that the people generating the data neither see nor share in (Zuboff, 2019).

The Snowden disclosures of 2013 made the state side of this visible — the existence of bulk interception and metadata collection at planetary scale — and the recurring pattern was, once again, the Mazzini pattern: an infrastructure of connection doubling as an infrastructure of one-directional sight, defended by official secrecy, exposed by scandal, and met with outrage that coexisted with continued, even increasing, use of the very platforms in question.

What is genuinely new is not the existence of the tower. The tower is ancient; it rose with the first census. What is new is that the tower is now everywhere and continuous, that the watching is largely automated, that it spans state and market without seam, and that the watched have less practical recourse than at almost any prior point in the arc — fewer ways to see the seer, fewer ways to sanction, fewer ways to exit, since opting out of the datafied infrastructure increasingly means opting out of ordinary social and economic life.

The shape of the whole arc

Step back and the long history resolves into a clear, if uncomfortable, shape. The content of privacy has migrated relentlessly — body, wall, threshold, letter, file, data point — and at each step the law and our moral intuitions have scrambled to catch up to a new technology that opened a new domain of exposure. But the contest has been one contest throughout: the struggle over who can see whom, and what the seen can do about it.

And along that single axis, the drift has a direction. From the reciprocal, towerless watching of the band, through the first census-tower of the agrarian state, through the sealed letter shadowed by the postal interceptor, through the file and the score and the platform, the watching has grown steadily more asymmetric. The seers have grown more powerful, more persistent, more automated, and more numerous; the seen have grown, in relative terms, more exposed and less able to look back. We did not lose privacy in some single fall from grace. We have been slowly losing reciprocity — the capacity, which the band took for granted, to watch our watchers in return.

That is the diagnosis the first two essays have built toward. The disease is not visibility. It is the centuries-long accumulation of one-directional sight in towers the watched cannot reach. Which raises the only question worth ending on, and the subject of the final essay: if asymmetry is the disease, what would a cure actually look like — not a nostalgic return to smallness and cheap exit, which is foreclosed to us, but a deliberate reconstruction of reciprocity inside societies far too large for anyone to simply walk away? What would it take, in law, in norms, and in the strange new mathematics of cryptographic proof, to make the watchers visible again — and to give the individual back some zone of life the tower cannot reach?

References & notes

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press. (The source for the reverse-dominance argument developed in the first essay and assumed here.)

Lyon, D. (2007). Surveillance studies: An overview. Polity Press. (On the shift from individuated observation to population sorting and classification.)

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. (The source of the “legibility” concept used throughout the agrarian-state section. Scott’s later Against the Grain, 2017, develops the link between early state formation, grain, writing, and the census.)

Vincent, D. (2016). Privacy: A short history. Polity Press. (On “virtual privacy,” the Penny Post, and the 1844 Mazzini letter-opening affair. Vincent’s policy paper “Surveillance, privacy and history” covers the same episode in shorter form.)

Warren, S. D., & Brandeis, L. D. (1890). The right to privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4(5), 193–220.

Westin, A. F. (1967). Privacy and freedom. Atheneum. (The canonical informational definition of privacy as control over the communication of information about oneself.)

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

A note on the classical caveat: the point that the privacy of the oikos/domus coexisted with hierarchy and slavery inside it is not a modern projection but a feature classical historians themselves emphasize; I raise it because the popular “privacy began with the Greeks” narrative routinely omits it, and the omission hides exactly the lesson — opacity protects whoever is inside the opaque space — that the next essay turns on.

The reflexive response is that surveillance violates privacy, and privacy is a right, and so being watched is a harm. But this answer dissolves the moment you look at it closely. For nearly all of human history, people lived under more or less constant observation. In a hunter-gatherer band of a few dozen people, there is almost nowhere to hide. Your movements, your moods, your generosity or stinginess, your competence at the hunt, the state of your marriage — all of it is visible to people who will remember. If surveillance as such were the problem, our ancestors lived in a permanent state of violation, and we should expect our species to carry some deep aversion to being seen at all.

We don’t. People perform for audiences, confess to strangers, broadcast their lives. The discomfort we feel about modern surveillance is real, but it is not a generalized horror of visibility. It is something more specific, and getting specific about it is the whole point of this series.

My claim, which I’ll spend three essays defending and qualifying, is this: the thing our psychology objects to is not being seen. It is being seen by those we cannot see, and cannot hold to account. The harm lives in the asymmetry, not the visibility. And once you frame it that way, a surprising amount of confusion clears — including the apparent contradiction between wanting institutions to be transparent and wanting individuals to be private.

Two kinds of watching

Consider the difference between the watching that happens in a small band and the watching that happens in a modern state.

In the band, surveillance is lateral and reciprocal. Everyone watches everyone, but every watcher is also watched. The person observing your behavior is someone you can observe in return, argue with, shame, avoid, or — in the last resort — abandon by leaving the camp. The watching is dense, but it is symmetrical. No one occupies a position from which they can see everyone while being seen by no one.

In the modern state, and increasingly in the modern marketplace, surveillance is vertical and asymmetric. You are seen by institutions — tax authorities, platform companies, credit bureaus, intelligence agencies — that you cannot meaningfully see in return. They maintain permanent records you cannot inspect. They make decisions about you on the basis of those records, by criteria you cannot examine, with consequences you often cannot appeal. The watcher is not a person you can face. It is an apparatus, insulated from your scrutiny and from your sanction.

This is the distinction that matters, and the social theorists have given us vocabulary for it. The classic image of vertical surveillance is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, later made famous by Foucault: a prison designed so that a single guard in a central tower can observe any inmate, while no inmate can tell whether they are being watched (Foucault, 1977). The sociologist Thomas Mathiesen pointed out that modern societies layer onto this a second structure he called the synopticon — the many watching the few, as when a population watches its celebrities and politicians through media (Mathiesen, 1997). And the engineer Steve Mann coined sousveillance for watching from below: the citizen filming the police officer, the worker recording the manager (on sousveillance and its place among surveillance concepts, see Monahan, 2006).

What a hunter-gatherer band has in abundance is something none of these quite captures: not surveillance from above, not spectacle from below, but reciprocal lateral watching, where the capacity to observe and the capacity to be observed are distributed roughly evenly across everyone. That symmetry is the feature. Its loss is the problem.

Why the symmetry mattered: reverse dominance

To see why the loss matters, it helps to understand what the symmetry was for. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm spent decades studying egalitarianism in small-scale societies, and his central finding is worth stating carefully, because it is the load-bearing idea of this entire series.

Many mobile foraging bands are not egalitarian by accident or by the absence of ambition. They are egalitarian by active effort. Boehm documented that ordinary band members form coalitions to suppress anyone who tries to dominate — would-be bullies, hoarders, and self-appointed chiefs are checked through ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, and, in extreme cases, expulsion or worse (Boehm, 1999; 1993). He called this a reverse dominance hierarchy: instead of a strong individual dominating the group, the group collectively dominates any individual who reaches for too much power.

And here is the crucial connection. Reverse dominance runs on lateral surveillance. The coalition can only check the would-be tyrant if it can see what he is doing — if his accumulation, his coercion, his attempts at unilateral authority are visible to the people he would dominate. Mutual watching is not a cost the band tolerates. It is the mechanism by which the band stays free. The watching keeps power distributed.

This reframes the function of being seen entirely. In the ancestral context, transparency was not a threat to autonomy. It was the guarantor of autonomy — but only because it was symmetrical. Everyone could see the person who might dominate them, and that person could be sanctioned by the very people watching. The watching pointed up, at concentrations of power, as much as it pointed across.

Modern vertical surveillance inverts exactly this. The watching now points down, from concentrated power onto dispersed individuals, and the individuals cannot watch back. We have kept the surveillance and discarded the reciprocity. We have, in effect, built a panopticon and called it a society.

The mismatch lens — and its limits

It is tempting to put this in evolutionary terms, and I think the temptation is partly right. The argument would run: human social cognition was calibrated in environments of reciprocal, accountable watching, and modern asymmetric surveillance presents our minds with a situation they are not equipped to handle, producing chronic unease the way a diet of ultra-processed food produces chronic metabolic disease. This is the evolutionary mismatch framework that I’ve spent much of my career working with, and I think it offers genuine insight here.

But I want to be honest about what this lens can and cannot do, because it is easy to overplay. “Our brains evolved for X, therefore modern Y is harmful” is a seductive sentence and frequently a sloppy one. We cannot directly observe the social environments of the Pleistocene; we infer them, partly from contemporary foragers who are not living fossils but modern people with their own histories. Adaptationist stories are easy to construct and hard to falsify, and the history of evolutionary psychology is littered with confident claims that turned out to be just-so stories dressed in citations.

So I’ll use mismatch as a lens, not a proof. It generates a hypothesis — that asymmetric, unaccountable watching is psychologically corrosive in a way that reciprocal watching is not — and that hypothesis is consistent with what we observe about how people respond to surveillance. But the case for caring about asymmetry does not depend on the evolutionary story being settled. Even if our discomfort were entirely cultural, the structural argument would stand: a system in which some can see and act on others without being seen or sanctioned in return is a system that concentrates power, and concentrated unaccountable power is dangerous on grounds that need no reference to the Pleistocene at all.

The evolutionary frame tells us why this might feel uniquely alienating. The structural frame tells us why it would be dangerous regardless. I’ll lean on both, and lean hardest on the second.

The honest objections, in both directions

A series like this one fails if it only steelmans its own side, so let me put the strongest counterpressures on the table now.

First, surveillance delivers real goods, and pretending otherwise is not serious. The census that lets a state “see” its population is also the instrument by which it funds schools, distributes relief after disasters, and notices that a region is being left behind. Disease surveillance saves lives. Financial monitoring catches fraud and the financing of genuine atrocities. The administrative legibility that makes domination possible also makes large-scale cooperation possible — you cannot run a pension system or a public health response on gossip and face-to-face memory. The question is never whether a complex society watches. It is whether the watching is accountable.

Second, band‑level egalitarianism should neither be romanticized as a lost utopia nor dismissed as mere stifling conformity; recent work shows it is maintained by strategic leveling mechanisms that limit dominance while leaving room for competition, conflict, and individual variation. The leveling mechanisms Boehm described were aimed narrowly at coercion and self-aggrandizement: at the bully, the hoarder, the would-be chief. They were not aimed at the eccentric, the loner, or the person who simply wanted to be left alone. As Peter Gray and others have documented, many forager societies were strikingly tolerant of individual idiosyncrasy; ridicule was a weapon trained on the domineering, not on the merely different (Gray, 2013). Norms were entered into something like the way players agree to the rules of a pickup game — voluntarily, binding while the game is on, revisable by mutual consent, and backed at every moment by the freedom to walk away and join another band. The witch hunt, with its hunt for the unorthodox, is a pathology of the sedentary village — fixed membership, real property, no cheap exit, the whole apparatus of Salem — more than of the mobile band. Conflating those worlds is one of the big mistakes in popular talk about egalitarian societies, and it badly underrates how much room many bands actually left for individuals who wanted to be left in peace. None of this makes bands utopias; there were still sanctions, feuds, and hard limits. But the combination of mobility, fission, and levelling norms usually gave dissenters more leverage than a peasant in a debt‑tied village.

The genuine costs lay elsewhere. One was the rarity of built, room‑like solitude: in a camp of a few dozen, you could believe whatever you liked and rarely be sanctioned for it, but you spent most of your waking and sleeping life in shared spaces rather than behind doors. The other cost was structural, and it is the one that haunts the rest of this series. The voluntary, exit‑backed norms that protected individuals from domination worked precisely because the band was small and exit was cheap. You cannot run a witch hunt against someone who can shoulder a pack and join the next camp over — but neither can a pickup game scale into a standing institution without losing the very feature that made it free. When human societies grew, exit became expensive, norms hardened into law, and the watchers climbed into a tower the watched could no longer reach.

So the goal cannot be to “return to the band,” but not for the reason usually given. The problem was never that band life was conformist; by the standards of much that came after, it was extraordinarily free. The problem is that band-level freedom ran on smallness and cheap exit, and we are not going to dismantle scale. The interesting question — the one the rest of this series is about — is whether we can reconstruct the band’s anti-domination guarantee, and its tolerance for the individual who simply wants to opt out, inside societies far too large for anyone to simply walk away. That is not nostalgia. It is an engineering problem.

Where this leaves us

Strip away the romance and the structural claim is fairly clean. The trouble with modern surveillance is not that we are visible. It is that visibility now flows in one direction — upward, into apparatuses that see us without being seen, that act on us without being accountable to us, and that we cannot sanction the way a band could sanction an overreaching member. The evolved expectation being violated is not a right to secrecy. It is something closer to a right to reciprocity: if you can see me and act on what you see, I should be able to see you and act in return.

That reframing does real work, and in the next essay I want to test it against history — to trace how the balance between watcher and watched has shifted from the small band through the agrarian state to the datafied present, and to show that privacy itself is not one timeless thing but a moving contest over who can see whom, and with what recourse. Then, in the third essay, I’ll ask the practical question: if asymmetry is the disease, what would a cure actually look like — in law, in norms, and yes, in the strange new mathematics that lets us prove things are true without revealing who we are?

For now, the thesis in one line: we were never bothered by being watched. We were bothered by being watched by someone we couldn’t watch back.

References & notes

Blaisdell, A. P. (2018). Evolutionary mismatch: A framework for understanding health and disease in the modern world — “Better living through evolution.” In D. S. Wilson & S. C. Hayes (Eds.), Evolution & Contextual Behavioral Science (pp. 207–221). Context Press.

Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology, 34(3), 227–254.

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (The panopticon discussion draws on Bentham’s original design.)

Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2019, August 31). The play theory of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. Psychology Today (“Freedom to Learn” blog). https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism — Gray’s most direct treatment of how forager bands suppress would-be dominators through ridicule, shunning, and threat of ostracism while remaining tolerant of individual idiosyncrasy; the best accessible entry point to the argument, with his academic work on hunter-gatherer social play (e.g. Gray, 2009, American Journal of Play) as the scholarly backup.

Mathiesen, T. (1997). The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” revisited. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 215–234. (Origin of the “synopticon” concept.)

Monahan, T. (Ed.). (2006). Surveillance and security: Technological politics and power in everyday life. Routledge. (Useful on sousveillance and the broader vocabulary of surveillance concepts; the term sousveillance itself is due to Steve Mann.)

A note on the evolutionary-mismatch frame: readers who want the background to how I use this lens may find the framework laid out in Blaisdell (2018), cited above. The cautions in this piece about over-applying adaptationist reasoning are my own, and I think the framework’s serious proponents should welcome them rather than resist.

A note on “sousveillance”: the term is due to Steve Mann, whose work on wearable computing and citizen-side recording predates and partly anticipates the smartphone era.

He gets a lot right. Let me start there.

What Hoffman Gets Right

Hoffman’s core argument is precise and honest: Ethereum the network has succeeded. ETH the asset has not fulfilled the maximal monetary thesis its strongest advocates once imagined.

The “ETH is money” thesis, as he frames it, required Ethereum to win a coordination game at every layer simultaneously – governance, technology, culture, L2 integration, and market narrative – and to do so with such dominance that ETH would be rerated as a global monetary asset compelling enough for mainstream investors to hold in retirement portfolios.

That version of the thesis has not played out. Hoffman is right about this.

He is also right that Ethereum’s architecture is, by design, generous. It supplies secure blockspace to L2s at cost. It hosts stablecoins that extend dollar hegemony. It enables applications to capture the margins. It is, as he puts it, “a giver, not a taker.” This is not a failure of Ethereum’s values – it is an expression of them. But it creates a genuine tension: Ethereum optimized for ecosystem flourishing, and ETH holders expected that flourishing to flow back to the asset. It has not done so as directly as the thesis required.

And he is right that the “strong version of crypto” – DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, user-owned software, consumer crypto as a cultural force – has not yet crossed the chasm. The window between late 2020 and early 2022 was real, and it has closed. Outside that window, crypto’s public reputation has largely been grifts, speculation, and things that were useless to ordinary people.

These are honest assessments. Hoffman has earned the right to make them.

What His Frame Misses

Here is where I think the analysis goes wrong – not in its facts, but in its timeframe.

Hoffman is evaluating ETH in a normal-market frame: one where the relevant questions are about fees, revenue, narrative coherence, L1 market share, and whether ETH can be rerated upward by mainstream investors in a relatively stable financial environment.

That frame is reasonable. It is also, I want to argue, increasingly the wrong frame.

The historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin has spent decades building a formal theory of how societies undergo cycles of integration and disintegration. His structural-demographic model tracks a set of reinforcing pressures – popular immiseration, elite overproduction, intra-elite competition, fiscal stress, and declining institutional legitimacy – that have historically driven societies toward periods of political violence and instability before eventually reaching a new equilibrium.

Turchin’s work, applied to the contemporary United States and much of the Western world, suggests that we are not in normal times. We are in the disintegrative phase: the period when trust in institutions erodes, when factions compete more aggressively for control of the state, when the legitimacy of shared rules becomes contested, and when ordinary coordination – including financial coordination – becomes harder and more fraught.

If Turchin is right, then evaluating ETH by its normal-market performance is like judging a compass by how useful it was on a day when you already knew the way.

The Civilizational Stress Frame

In normal times, the questions Hoffman asks are the right ones: Does ETH capture value from what Ethereum enables? Is the fee thesis working? Is the narrative coherent enough to attract mainstream capital?

In disintegrative times, different questions become more important:

Can my funds be frozen?

Can I transact with someone across a political or national boundary that has been weaponized?

Can a platform, payment processor, or state censor my economic activity?

Can I hold an asset that does not depend entirely on the stability of a domestic political system, a central bank, or the goodwill of an administration?

These are not hypothetical questions. They are questions that people in many parts of the world – and increasingly in Western democracies – are beginning to ask seriously.

Under this frame, Ethereum’s “giver” architecture does not look like a weakness. It looks like legitimacy. Ethereum’s refusal to extract maximal rent is not an obstacle to ETH becoming money. It may be the precondition for Ethereum remaining a credible neutral substrate – one that different factions, states, institutions, and individuals can use without fully trusting one another.

Money, as Hoffman himself says, is a coordination game. In periods of institutional fragmentation, the problem is not finding an asset with a simple narrative. It is finding a substrate that remains usable when ordinary trust – in banks, in payment processors, in governments, in courts – has weakened.

The Ancestral Argument

I have written elsewhere on this Substack about the evolutionary mismatch framework I developed as part of my work on ancestral health. The core idea is simple: human psychology evolved in small-band societies over hundreds of thousands of years, and many of the pathologies of modern life stem from mismatches between the environments we evolved in and the environments we now inhabit.

That framework, I have argued, applies to money and finance as directly as it applies to diet, sleep, or stress.

In ancestral band societies, financial interactions – exchanges of food, tools, labor, and resources – were characterized by several structural features: community-level verifiability (members of the band knew who owed whom), personal privacy (your specific circumstances were your own), permissionlessness (you could transact with anyone in the band without seeking institutional approval), and rough equality of access (leveling mechanisms, including social pressure and ostracism, prevented extreme concentration of exchange power).

Modern financial systems – centralized, opaque, intermediary-dependent, and increasingly subject to political capture – violate most of these ancestral norms. They are fast but invisible. They are powerful but unequal in access. They are efficient but censorable.

Ethereum’s core design principles – decentralization, permissionlessness, credible neutrality, public verifiability, and individual sovereignty – reconstruct, at planetary scale and internet speed, something closer to the structural conditions under which human financial psychology actually evolved. This is not a coincidence. It is why Ethereum feels intuitively right to so many people who have thought carefully about it, even when they struggle to articulate exactly why.

And here is where a newer technology matters: ZK (zero-knowledge) proofing allows blockchains to be publicly verifiable while keeping individual identity private. This is not a compromise between accountability and privacy. It is a technical reconstruction of something genuinely ancestral – the condition where a community can verify that a claim is legitimate without surveilling every detail of the individuals involved.

Band-level verifiability and personal privacy coexisted in ancestral societies because verifying a claim did not require exposing everything about a person. ZK proofs achieve this at scale. That is worth taking seriously.

Revising Hoffman’s Counterarguments

Taking the civilizational stress frame seriously requires revising several of the standard ETH counterarguments.

On Ethereum being a “giver, not a taker”: The strongest monetary assets in history have often become dominant not by extracting aggressively but by becoming trusted as neutral settlement media. Gold did not take a markup on every transaction it facilitated. The dollar did not become the global reserve currency by taxing every exchange. A monetary asset becomes powerful because others coordinate around it as collateral, settlement liquidity, and reserve backing. Ethereum’s neutrality may be the source of its long-term monetary credibility, not the obstacle to it.

On stablecoins: Stablecoins and ETH play different crisis roles. In periods of instability, people often want dollar liquidity – stablecoins provide that. But stablecoins are also censorable. Centralized issuers can freeze addresses and comply with sanctions. ETH, by contrast, is the more sovereign, censorship-resistant native collateral asset underneath the system. Dollar stablecoins and ETH do not compete so much as occupy different rungs of a monetary hierarchy – with ETH as the harder, more neutral base.

On the “strong crypto has failed” thesis: The strong version of consumer crypto failed in its first speculative wave. But transformative technologies regularly look disappointing before their mature product era arrives. The early web produced absurd business models before producing Amazon and Google. Early mobile apps were toys before mobile became the dominant computing environment. The primitives of decentralized finance, identity, and social systems may not be exhausted – they may simply not have had their mature cycle yet.

On Ethereum’s L2 fragmentation: The L2 ecosystem looks like coordination failure from the inside. But open ecosystems often look chaotic before standards and dominant layers emerge. Linux distributions are fragmented. Scientific communities are fragmented. The early web was fragmented. Ethereum’s pluralism may be the price of credible neutrality – and credible neutrality may be exactly what matters most in the decades ahead.

The Key Caveat

I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming that ETH will simply outperform because society is under stress. Stress can produce crackdowns as easily as it produces demand for neutral infrastructure. Governments that feel threatened can become more aggressive, more surveillance-oriented, and more hostile to permissionless finance. Ethereum’s censorship resistance is real but not absolute: it is strongest for technically capable users interacting directly with the protocol and weakest for ordinary users depending on centralized exchanges, hosted wallets, and fiat on/off ramps. The Tornado Cash episode demonstrated that governments can exert substantial pressure on decentralized ecosystems even when they cannot shut them down entirely.

What I am claiming is this: Ethereum meaningfully raises the cost of censorship and capture. In disintegrative times, that property becomes more valuable – perhaps far more valuable than any normal-market analysis of fees, revenue, and narrative coherence would suggest.

Hoffman may be right in normal-market terms. He may be wrong in civilizational-stress terms. The question of which frame turns out to be more relevant over the next decade is, in my view, the most important question for evaluating ETH’s long-term monetary thesis – and it is a question that cannot be answered by looking at fee data from 2021 to 2026.

What I Actually Think

Hoffman’s essay is not anti-Ethereum. It is, as he says himself, a recognition that the specific “ETH is money” thesis has played out in its maximal form. He remains bullish on Ethereum the network. I share that view entirely.

Where I part ways is on the timeframe and the frame.

The author who writes “money is a coordination game, and coordination is hard” understands, better than most, that monetary status is not merely a function of economic efficiency. It is a function of shared belief, institutional trust, cultural energy, and the depth of coordination around a Schelling point.

If the coming decades bring the kind of institutional stress that Turchin’s models anticipate – and I think there are good reasons to believe they will – then the coordination game for money will be played in a very different environment than the one that existed in 2021, or even the one that exists today.

In that environment, Ethereum’s greatest virtues – its neutrality, its openness, its refusal to be captured – may be less of a liability and more of a survival trait.

The campfire knew something about how trust works at human scale. The goal was never to return to it. It was to carry what the campfire knew into the world we actually inhabit.

Ethereum may be the closest thing we have built to that.

I have written more extensively about the evolutionary mismatch argument applied to money and finance in an earlier series on this Substack. This post builds on that framework.

In the first two essays, I argued that grasslands offer a better image of prosperity than the machine metaphors that dominate modern economics. Healthy systems renew their base, circulate value to their edges, and build the conditions for future seasons. The question I want to take up here is more specific. If that is true at the level of land and labor, what does it imply for the financial layer that sits on top?

The short version is this: money moves faster than soil forms, faster than children grow, faster than institutions earn trust, and faster than communities recover from disruption. That speed mismatch is one of the deepest structural problems in modern life. And it is not obvious that we know how to fix it.

The evolutionary mismatch

Biologists have a useful concept for organisms that evolved in one environment and now find themselves living in another. It is called evolutionary mismatch (Blaisdell, 2018). The classic examples involve diet and movement. Bodies optimized for high-quality foods and the effort required to obtain them encounter a world of caloric abundance of low-quality ultra-processed foods and chairs, and the result is a cascade of chronic illness — not because the bodies are broken, but because they are mismatched to their new environment.

But mismatch is not only a problem for individual bodies. It applies to institutions too. Diggs (2017) makes the case that many of our cultural, social, and financial structures are operating in environments very different from the ones in which they were shaped. We carry around social instincts, status hierarchies, kinship intuitions, and economic habits calibrated for small, slow, local, face-to-face contexts. Now we run them at planetary scale, at internet speed, mediated by abstract financial claims that can circle the globe in milliseconds.

Money is one of the most striking cases. For most of human history, financial claims were anchored to slower realities. You could see the granary. You could count the cattle. You knew the merchant. You watched the crop come in. Trust was built through repeated interaction. Reputation was built through visible behavior. The pace at which money could move was bounded by the pace at which the underlying things — goods, harvests, ships, relationships — could move. These same slow-scale dynamics were even more protracted and tangible in small-scale hunter-gatherer band society, where trade and exchange transpired at cyclical seasonal gatherings of extended family and friend networks.

That is no longer true. Modern financial systems can issue, leverage, and circulate claims at speeds completely disconnected from the timescales of the real economy. Soil takes decades to build. Skill takes years to develop. Trust takes generations to deepen. Capital can move all of those numbers around in an afternoon.

This is not a moral complaint about finance. It is a structural observation about what happens when one layer of a system runs much faster than the layers beneath it. Feedback breaks down. The fast layer stops being disciplined by the slow layer. And eventually the slow layer — the real economy, the real community, the real soil — pays the bill.

Why verifiability matters more than speed

The usual debate about modern finance treats speed as the central variable. Should markets be slower? Should there be transaction taxes? Should derivatives be restricted? These are real questions. But I think the more interesting variable is not speed. It is verifiability.

A financial system that moves fast but whose claims can be verified by the people whose lives depend on it is in a different epistemic position than one that moves fast and is mostly opaque. The first can be debated, audited, and reconciled with reality. The second cannot.

Most of our existing financial infrastructure is the opaque kind. The basic ledger of who owes what to whom, what claims exist against what assets, what risks are nested inside what instruments — this is largely invisible to the public. We learn about the structure mainly when it fails. The 2008 financial crisis revealed an entire stratum of claims that almost no one outside the institutions themselves had a clear view of. Even regulators were surprised.

This is the deeper problem. It is not that money moves fast. It is that money moves fast in the dark. The mismatch between financial timescales and real timescales would be more manageable if at least the financial layer were legible to the people it affects. Then there would be feedback. Then there could be reckoning.

But verifiability is only one dimension of the problem. As I will argue below, the mismatch between modern finance and human psychology is not only temporal — it is structural. And that structural diagnosis points toward a more complete set of design principles than verifiability alone.

Public blockchains as a partial response

This is the context in which I find public blockchains interesting — not as a complete answer, but as an experiment in a particular direction.

The original Ethereum proposal (Buterin, 2013) was an attempt to build a financial substrate where the rules and the ledger were public, auditable, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. You can argue about whether Ethereum has lived up to that vision, and many people inside the ecosystem are arguing exactly that right now (Inabinet, 2026; Kavout Research, 2026). The point is not that the existing implementation is good. The point is the underlying design principle: a financial system whose claims can be verified and reconciled in public.

But verifiability is only one of several properties that distinguish this approach from conventional financial infrastructure. Consider the full catalog of Ethereum’s foundational design commitments: decentralization, so that no single institution controls the ledger or can be pressured to alter it; permissionlessness, meaning that access requires no approval from any gatekeeper; credible neutrality, in which the same rules apply to every participant regardless of their size, identity, or political status; individual sovereignty over assets, meaning that holders control their own holdings without depending on institutional intermediaries to act on their behalf; and privacy — the ability to transact without exposing personal information to observers — which remains under active development in the ecosystem but whose inclusion as a design goal is notable and critical.

Taken together, this is a distinctive cluster of properties. And it is worth pausing to ask whether they are arbitrary, or whether they track something deeper.

The ancestral case for these design principles

I think they track the structural features of the financial environment in which human psychology evolved — and this is where the mismatch argument gains a second dimension.

Hunter-gatherer band societies were not merely small and slow — they were, by the standards of nearly all later societies, fiercely egalitarian. Anthropologists have documented strong leveling mechanisms, including ridicule, ostracism, and refusal to cooperate, deployed against any individual who attempted to accumulate disproportionate resources or claim unilateral authority over communal decisions (Boehm, 1999). Individual autonomy was highly valued; coercion was broadly resisted. And because bands consisted of people who knew one another directly, the basic facts of who had what, who owed whom, and whether a claim was legitimate were largely visible to all. Claims were socially verified in real time through face-to-face interaction, not delegated to a distant institution and taken on faith.

Crucially, this community-level verifiability coexisted with a robust norm of personal privacy. Band members could verify that a claim was legitimate without surveilling every detail of one another’s lives. Privacy protected individual dignity and autonomy — the freedom to act, think, and transact without being permanently observed and judged. It was not a luxury or a technical workaround. It was a foundational condition of the egalitarian social order. You verified claims when claims needed verifying; you did not demand a permanent record of every transaction as the price of participation.

This is the ancestral context in which our financial intuitions were calibrated. What the modern banking system offers is not just speed that outpaces the real economy — it is also centralization, opacity, and institutional gatekeeping that conflict with the egalitarian, transparent, individually sovereign structure of the environment in which those intuitions formed. The mismatch, in other words, has at least two dimensions: temporal (money moves faster than the real world) and structural (modern financial institutions are governed by arrangements our evolved psychology was never designed for).

These two dimensions — the temporal mismatch I described earlier and this structural mismatch — are distinct problems, but they point toward the same diagnosis. A financial system that is both fast and opaque, and both centralized and gatekept, sits as far as possible from the conditions under which human financial behavior evolved. That is not a coincidence. It is the accumulated result of centuries of institutional design that prioritized efficiency and control over legibility and access.

Ethereum’s core design principles, whether or not this was fully intentional, address both dimensions with unusual directness. A public ledger is a form of community verifiability. Permissionlessness restores a form of the unmediated access that characterized small-scale exchange. Credible neutrality approximates the leveling ethic that band societies enforced through social norms rather than code. Individual custody of assets reinstates a form of the direct, personal control over one’s holdings that any member of a hunter-gatherer band would have recognized as normal.

And privacy — now being developed through ZK, or zero-knowledge, proofing — completes the picture. ZK proofs allow a transaction to be verified as valid without revealing the identity of the parties or the details of the exchange. This is not a compromise between accountability and privacy. It is a technical reconstruction of something ancestral: the ability to verify a claim without surveilling the person making it. A band member could confirm that a debt had been repaid without knowing everything else about the debtor’s affairs. ZK proofing, at planetary scale, restores that same basic condition.

Ethereum, in this light, is not simply a new technology for moving money faster. It is an attempt — however imperfect in execution — to reconstruct, at planetary scale and internet speed, some of the structural conditions under which human financial behavior evolved. The goal was never to return to the campfire. It was to bring what the campfire knew into the world we actually inhabit.

To see what this looks like in practice, consider an exchange documented in a recent Bankless podcast (Bankless, 2024): an autonomous AI agent named Luna, operating on a platform built atop Ethereum’s Base network, needed an image generated. She contracted another autonomous agent for the work at a cost of one dollar, paid on-chain. The receiving agent verified receipt on the public ledger before rendering the service. No bank, no intermediary, no institutional approval was required. The transaction was verifiable to any observer. As host Ryan Sean Adams noted, the question that makes traditional financial infrastructure unsuitable for this kind of exchange is simple: “Which bank would allow this agent to utilize their payment rails?” The answer is none. The permissionless, verifiable architecture of the public blockchain is what made the transaction both possible and trustworthy — and those two properties are not separable.

Compare that to the alternative. Most of our financial infrastructure is run by institutions whose internal ledgers are private, whose risk models are proprietary, and whose accounting we mostly take on faith until something breaks. When it does break, the public absorbs the cost. A verifiable and permissionless ledger is not a cure for greed, fraud, or systemic risk. But it does mean that some of those failure modes become visible earlier, to more people, with less reliance on the goodwill of the institutions involved.

This is the cluster of properties I find interesting from an evolutionary-mismatch perspective. Nor would we want to slow money down to the pace of soil. The scale and connectivity of the modern world are not problems to be reversed — they are the conditions we get to work with. But we might be able to make money more verifiable, more egalitarian in its access conditions, and more accountable to the individuals whose lives it affects — closer in structure, that is, to the environment in which our financial instincts evolved.

A publicly-verifiable, permissionless financial layer cannot, by itself, make the economy regenerative. Whether soil thickens, whether families form, whether workers are trained, whether communities have margin — these depend on decisions made in the real economy, not on the design of the ledger. But the ledger matters because it is the medium through which capital is allocated, and the question of whether that allocation can be audited and contested is not a small one.

What this is not

I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming that public blockchains in their current form are necessarily good investments, good technologies, or good institutions, though they may be. The crypto ecosystem has produced an extraordinary amount of speculation, fraud, and waste (though it pales in comparison to that produced on fiat rails). Many of the loudest voices in the space are not interested in the design principles I am describing — I’m looking at you, Crypto Twitter. They are interested in extraction at internet speed, which is the opposite of what a regenerative frame would suggest. And permissionlessness cuts both ways: the same property that allows Luna to pay one dollar for an image without institutional approval also allows bad actors to move money without institutional constraint. That is a real cost, not a footnote.

I am also not claiming that verifiability alone is sufficient. Verifiability is a precondition for accountability, not a guarantee of it. A public ledger that no one reads, interprets, or acts upon is a formality rather than a constraint. And ZK proofing, powerful as it is, requires a corresponding interpretive layer — the analysts, journalists, regulators, and engaged citizens who can translate verifiable data into actual accountability. Absent that layer, the ledger is verifiable in principle and dark in practice.

And I am not claiming this is the only possible response to the mismatch problem. There are others. Stronger regulatory disclosure, public banking, narrow banking, public auditing of systemically important institutions, cooperative finance, and a dozen other approaches all aim at related problems from different angles — though not necessarily grounded in the same hunter-gatherer fundamentals. Public blockchains are one compelling experiment in a much larger design space.

What I am claiming is that the design principles — fast financial systems should be verifiable, permissionless, privacy-preserving, and structured to preserve individual sovereignty — are the right ones, and are worth taking seriously regardless of which specific technology turns out to embody them best.

Bringing it back to the grassland

In a grassland, feedback is everywhere. The grass shows you whether the soil is healthy. The bare patches show you where water is running off. The animals show you whether the forage is adequate. The pattern of regrowth shows you whether your management is working. You cannot hide a degrading grassland for long, because the degradation is visible in the very thing you are trying to manage.

Most of our modern financial system does not work like that. The bare patches are hidden until the whole field collapses. The mismatch between the speed at which capital moves and the speed at which feedback arrives is one of the central pathologies of late-modern life.

We are not going to return to a world where every financial claim is anchored to something you can see and touch. But we might, slowly and imperfectly, build financial infrastructure whose feedback is faster and more verifiable — closer in spirit to the way a grassland tells you what it needs, without demanding that every organism in the system expose itself to constant surveillance.

That, I think, is the real promise behind the more thoughtful versions of public-blockchain experimentation. Not “decentralization” as an end in itself. Not the speculative carnival of token launches. But the underlying intuition that a fast financial system without a public mirror — and without protections for the individuals reflected in it — is a recipe for exactly the kind of slow-moving disaster we keep finding ourselves inside.

A regenerative economy needs more than verifiable, privacy-preserving finance. But it probably cannot have less.

References

Blaisdell, A. P. (2018). Evolutionary mismatch: A framework for understanding health and disease in the modern world – “Better living through evolution.” In D. S. Wilson & S. C. Hayes (Eds.), Evolution & Contextual Behavioral Science (pp. 207-221). Context Press.

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

Buterin, V. (2013). Ethereum white paper. https://ethereum.org/whitepaper/

Diggs, G. M., Jr. (2017). Evolutionary mismatch: Implications far beyond diet and exercise. Journal of Evolution and Health, 2(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jq417kn

Inabinet, J. (2026, April 22). A return to golden age Ethereum DeFi. Bankless. https://www.bankless.com/read/a-return-to-golden-age-ethereum-defi

Kavout Research. (2026, May 10). Is Ethereum losing its soul? Vitalik Buterin’s call for “real DeFi.” https://www.kavout.com/market-lens/is-ethereum-losing-its-soul-vitalik-buterin-s-call-for-real-defi

Bankless. (2024, December 24). Society of AI agents: Interview with Jansen Tang, founder of Virtuals Protocol [Podcast episode]. https://www.bankless.com/podcast/building-a-digital-nation-of-autonomous-ai-agents-the-story-behind-virtuals

If the last essay was about grasslands themselves – sunlight, soil, ruminants, circulation – this one asks a harder question. What if we took that ecology seriously as a frame for the economy?

Not as a metaphor that decorates a familiar argument. As a discipline. A way of distinguishing health from extraction.

Most modern economic conversation is organized around one metric – growth – and one axis: more or less of it. Ecology suggests a different question. Not how much a system is producing this season, but what is happening to its base. Is the underlying capital deepening, or being mined? Are the flows that renew the system stronger than the flows that deplete it? Is value circulating outward, or pooling at the center while the edges dry out?

These are not anti-growth questions. They are anti-illusion questions.

The real meaning of growth

Modern economic language tends to collapse all forms of improvement into one number called growth, and then uses that number as if it were self-justifying. But ecosystems teach a more disciplined lesson. There is a profound difference between growth that thickens the foundations of future life and growth that liquidates those foundations for a temporary surge in output.

A grassland can look productive while its soil is thinning. A firm can post record profits while exhausting its workers, underinvesting in research, offloading pollution, and hollowing out the communities that make its operations possible. A nation can report GDP gains while social trust erodes, infrastructure decays, fertility declines, public health worsens, and ecological resilience collapses.

These are not signs of health. They are signs that accounting has been confused with reality.

Healthy living systems do need positive throughput. They need new energy, new learning, and constant repair. None of this is an argument for stasis. But constant throughput is not the same as infinite material expansion. In a mature system, the real objective is regenerative balance – keeping the processes that renew the base stronger than the processes that deplete it.

That is a better frame for economics. The question should not be whether an economy can force more transactions onto a spreadsheet this quarter. The question should be whether it is building the stocks that make durable prosperity possible: fertile land, stable families, skilled workers, abundant energy, trustworthy institutions, healthy bodies, and communities with enough margin to absorb shocks.

Growth is good when it compounds living capital. Growth is false when it consumes the very ground from which future growth must come.

Distribution matters because edges matter

The second lesson from ecology is about distribution. In a living system, health does not mean that every component receives the same amount of energy or occupies the same role. Predators, grazers, pollinators, decomposers, grasses, fungi, and microbes do not have equal functions or equal shares. But a healthy system does require that the flows linking those roles remain intact.

If too much value is trapped in one part of the system, the wider ecology degrades. If nutrients do not return to the soil, fertility falls. If plant cover thins, water runs off. If insects collapse, birds disappear. If the microbial layer is starved, the visible abundance above ground eventually fails.

That is true in human systems too. An economy can be extremely dynamic at the center and still be sick overall if workers, families, rural regions, or entire classes are progressively cut off from meaningful participation in the gains. The literature on inclusive economies makes this point explicit: healthy economies are not merely productive; they distribute benefits, opportunities, and assets in ways that support health, participation, and social resilience (Shipton et al., 2021).

This is the point at which many otherwise smart conversations break down. The alternative to oligarchic concentration is not flattening all incentives or pretending all contributions are identical. Equity is not sameness. Equity means structuring institutions so that gains circulate outward in appropriately scaled ways, and so that no group is treated as permanently disposable.

A business that generates large profits while frontline workers cannot afford housing, while surrounding communities absorb pollution, and while all upside is routed to executives and capital holders is not behaving like a healthy grassland. It is behaving like a nutrient-extraction regime. By contrast, a firm with profit sharing, broad-based equity, strong reinvestment, worker development, and attention to the communities and ecologies that support it begins to look more like a system that returns fertility to the ground from which it grows.

The same logic applies at larger scales. A nation that concentrates wealth, educational access, ownership, and political influence in a few metros or a thin professional class is starving its own periphery. Over time, those dead zones become cultural, demographic, and economic liabilities. In Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, popular immiseration is one of the major pressures that can drive instability, especially when it combines with elite overproduction and weakening state capacity (Turchin, 2016; 2023).

The edges matter because life happens at the edges. Healthy systems do not let the margins become deserts.

Extractive or regenerative

This ecological framing exposes a false choice that dominates modern politics. The choice is not between unrestrained markets and centralized leveling. The more interesting choice is between extractive systems and regenerative ones.

An extractive system privatizes gains, socializes losses, and liquidates its foundations. A regenerative system rewards initiative, innovation, and excellence, but does so in a way that replenishes the conditions of future flourishing and distributes enough upside to keep the whole organism alive.

Both systems can have markets. Both can have profit. Both can have inequality. What separates them is what happens to the base – to soil, to families, to skills, to trust, to communities – when the system runs.

This framing does not eliminate the need for economics. It improves economics by putting it back inside reality. Every economy is downstream from energy, land, fertility, trust, culture, and time. Finance is not an autonomous machine. It is a claims system built on top of deeper biophysical and social substrates.

What a regenerative economy would actually do

If this ecological analogy is taken seriously, a healthier economy would aim to do at least four things.

Measure what matters. Track whether policies and firms are increasing the stocks that count: soil, water, durable infrastructure, family stability, public health, worker capability, institutional trust, energy abundance, civic legitimacy. Raw throughput tells you almost nothing about whether the base is thickening or thinning.

Widen participation in the upside. Profit sharing, employee ownership, community dividends, stronger local balance sheets, and public investment in common goods are not charitable add-ons. They are ways of keeping value circulating through the wider body rather than clotting at the center.

Restore the legitimacy of production. Economies remain stable when people can see how value is created, what it rests on, and why participation is rewarded. A society cannot live forever on financial engineering, status games, and imported slack. It needs real production, real maintenance, real skill, and real renewal.

Think seriously about place. Grasslands are not generic. They are local ecologies shaped by climate, species, soil, water, history, and disturbance regimes. Human economies are similarly place-bound. Regenerative policy cannot be purely abstract or universal in form. In one place it might mean rebuilding local food systems. In another, restoring manufacturing capacity. In another, investing in energy abundance. In another, repairing family formation, addiction, housing, or public health. In every case, the guiding question is the same: what is being depleted, what is being renewed, and where are the flows failing to return?

None of this requires romanticizing nature or pretending ecological analogies can solve every political dispute. Human societies have law, language, symbolic status, markets, moral obligations, and technological possibilities in ways ecosystems do not. But ecology provides a better set of intuitions than the industrial-mechanistic metaphors that dominate much of economics. It teaches that health comes from flows that renew the base, from diversity that provides resilience, from feedback that enables learning, and from patterns of distribution that keep the whole system alive.

The test

The easiest way to test any economic system is to ask the same questions one would ask of a grassland.

Is it becoming more fertile or less? Are the gains of one season building the capacity of the next, or consuming it? Are nutrients returning to the ground, or being stripped from it? Is the system producing only a flashy center, or is it making the edges more alive as well?

Those questions point toward a concept of prosperity that is at once older than modern economics and more future-oriented than most of what passes for economic debate today.

The economy should work more like a grassland. Not because humans are cattle or markets are ecosystems in any simple sense. But because grasslands remember something modern societies keep trying to forget: real wealth is what makes more life possible.

In the next essay, I want to push on one specific implication of this view – what it means for financial systems themselves. Money moves faster than soil forms, faster than children grow, faster than trust is built. That speed mismatch is one of the deepest problems in modern life. The question is whether anything can be done about it.

References

Shipton, D., Sarica, S., Craig, N., McCartney, G., Katikireddi, S. V., Roy, G., … & Scobie, G. (2021). Knowing the goal: an inclusive economy that can address the public health challenges of our time. J Epidemiol Community Health, 75(11), 1129-1132. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2020-214620

Schreefel, L., Schulte, R. P., De Boer, I. J. M., Schrijver, A. P., & Van Zanten, H. H. E. (2020). Regenerative agriculture–the soil is the base. Global Food Security, 26, 100404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100404

Turchin, P. (2016). Ages of discord: A structural-demographic analysis of American history. Beresta Books.

Turchin, P. (2023). End times: Elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration. Penguin.

A healthy grassland is not a machine for maximizing one output. It is a living system that captures energy, circulates nutrients, distributes value across many layers of life, and slowly builds the underlying capital on which all future life depends: soil.

That image keeps coming back to me when I think about what health looks like in any complex system – including the human systems we live inside. Before we can talk about economies, or money, or institutions, it’s worth spending some time with the grassland itself. What it does, how it works, and why it builds rather than merely produces.

A grassland is a living economy

Start with sunlight. More solar radiation arrives at a grassland than the system can ever fully harvest. Plants intercept a fraction of that flow and convert it into biomass and energy through photosynthesis. That biomass becomes food for grazing animals, habitat for insects, cover for birds, and eventually litter and root exudates for fungi, bacteria, and the wider soil food web.

Fertility in a grassland is not a stock sitting still underground. It is a circulation process. Carbon moves from air to plant to animal to soil. Minerals move from deep-rooted plants into animal tissue and back into the ground. Microbial communities feed on these returns. Soil structure improves. Water infiltration increases. The land becomes better able to hold moisture, buffer heat, and absorb disturbance. Within the right range of stress and recovery, it becomes not merely resilient but antifragile (Taleb, 2012).

When this process is functioning well, the system does not merely sustain itself at the surface. It slowly builds the underlying base. Soil organic matter rises. Aggregation improves. Water is held more effectively. The grassland gains a form of stored ecological memory. Past seasons do not simply vanish; they become embodied in deeper roots, darker soil, richer microbial communities, and greater resilience.

That is why the metaphor of a savings account or compound interest is so intuitively powerful here. A regenerative grassland is not merely spending sunlight. It is converting a temporary flow of energy into durable living capital.

Why ruminants matter

Now consider the ruminants – a keystone species in grassland ecosystems. In the right ecological context, large grazers are not merely consumers sitting on top of a passive field of grass. They are active participants in the metabolism of the landscape. They crop vegetation, stimulate regrowth, trample litter into contact with the soil surface, and redistribute nutrients across space through urine and dung. Properly managed grazing can contribute to soil health, plant recovery, ecosystem function, and nutrient cycling, although outcomes depend heavily on climate, plant community, stocking density, timing, and recovery period (Teague & Kreuter, 2020; Stanley et al., 2018; Rowntree et al., 2020).

Modern industrial thinking has often treated grazing animals as either neutral production units or ecological liabilities. But on many grasslands, ruminants are better understood as converters, connectors, and distributors.

They convert cellulose-rich plant matter that humans cannot digest into nutrient-dense food. They connect plant productivity to predators, scavengers, decomposers, and the soil microbiome. And they distribute nutrients outward over the landscape rather than leaving them fixed in one place.

That last point is easy to miss, but it is crucial. Healthy systems do not merely produce value. They circulate it. In a confined and extractive model, nutrients are mined from one place, concentrated in another, and often turned into waste problems rather than fertility. In a functioning grassland, by contrast, the movement of animals helps return value back to the ground from which future productivity depends.

Humans also benefit directly. Ruminants transform grasses and forbs into meat, milk, and other animal-source foods rich in protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin B12, choline, essential fatty acids, and other nutrients whose bioavailability matters for human health (Beal et al., 2023). That does not make animal foods the only good foods. Nor does it erase legitimate debates over diet, emissions, animal welfare, and land use. But it does mean that animal foods cannot be reduced to indulgent commodities or ecological sins. In many contexts, especially where nutrient deficiency is a real constraint, they are among the most efficient ways of delivering dense, bioavailable nutrition.

This is one of the reasons Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf’s phrase “better meat” is useful. The point is not to defend meat under all conditions. The point is to distinguish meat produced through brittle, extractive, industrial systems from meat produced in ways that support ecological function, animal welfare, and human nourishment (Rodgers & Wolf, 2020). That distinction is much more useful than treating all animal agriculture as one undifferentiated category.

The caveat that matters

Not every grassland, and certainly not every use of cattle, is regenerative by default. Poorly managed grazing can degrade land, reduce biodiversity, compact soil, and accelerate erosion. The issue is not whether ruminants are inherently good or bad. The issue is whether they are embedded in an extractive production system or in a regenerative ecological pattern. The same animal can participate in degradation or renewal depending on how it is placed in the system.

That distinction is central. It is not the cow in the abstract. It is the ecology, the management, and the flow. Context matters.

The deeper lesson is not that cows are magic – though I’ll admit that in the right, regenerative conditions, I find them something close to sacred. The lesson is that some organisms play a role bigger than their individual bodies. They act as system-level translators between abundance at one level and flourishing at many others. They turn grass into food, plant growth into soil fertility, and landscape movement into distributed renewal.

Seen this way, the best image of the cowboy or cowgirl is not the rugged individualist of myth, but as a skilled ecological steward: someone whose work, at its best, helps convert sunlight, grass, animal movement, and human care into shared abundance.

What the grassland is really teaching

A grassland is doing something the modern mind has trouble holding all at once. It is being productive and it is building. It is being eaten and it is getting richer. It is full of competition and stress and disturbance. And the disturbance is what makes it stronger. It produces what looks like surplus, but the surplus is mostly being reinvested – into roots, into soil carbon, into the next year’s photosynthetic capacity.

This is the part that resists easy graphs. A spreadsheet of pounds of beef per acre or bushels of crop per acre tells you very little about whether the underlying base is thickening or thinning. You can mine a grassland for output for a long time before the bill comes due. And when it does, the bill is not a number. It is a desert.

What a healthy grassland knows – and what any complex living system knows – is that real wealth is not the flashy output of one season. Real wealth is the deepening of the conditions that make future seasons possible.

In the next essay, I want to take this image seriously as a frame for thinking about human economies. Not because humans are cattle, or markets are ecosystems in any simple sense. But because grasslands remember something modern societies keep trying to forget.

References

Beal, T., Gardner, C. D., Herrero, M., Iannotti, L. L., Merbold, L., Nordhagen, S., & Mottet, A. (2023). Friend or foe? The role of animal-source foods in healthy and environmentally sustainable diets. The Journal of nutrition, 153(2), 409-425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2022.10.016

Rodgers, D., & Wolf, R. (2020). Sacred Cow: The case for (better) meat: Why well-raised meat is good for you and good for the planet. BenBella Books.

Rowntree, J. E., Stanley, P. L., Maciel, I. C., Thorbecke, M., Rosenzweig, S. T., Hancock, D. W., ... & Raven, M. R. (2020). Ecosystem impacts and productive capacity of a multi-species pastured livestock system. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4, 544984. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984

Stanley, P. L., Rowntree, J. E., Beede, D. K., DeLonge, M. S., & Hamm, M. W. (2018). Impacts of soil carbon sequestration on life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in Midwestern USA beef finishing systems. Agricultural Systems, 162, 249-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2018.02.003

Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. Random House.

Teague, R., & Kreuter, U. (2020). Managing grazing to restore soil health, ecosystem function, and ecosystem services. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4, 534187. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.534187

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A reasonable question to start with: what is this going to be?

The honest answer is that I don’t want to narrow it down too much, because narrowing is exactly what I’ve spent a career being asked to do. Academic writing rewards staying inside a lane. The lane is useful — it produces precision, accountability, and a community of readers who share your assumptions. But the lane is also a constraint, and after enough years inside one, you start to notice all the interesting questions sitting just outside the painted lines.

This Substack is for those questions. The ones that don’t fit neatly into a paper, a syllabus, or a discipline, but that I find myself returning to anyway.

What “Chaotic Good Ranger” means

The name has a personal origin before it has a conceptual one.

In high school, I played a lot of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Whenever I rolled up a character, I chose a Ranger. And whenever I picked an alignment, I picked chaotic good. Neither choice was strategic. They were the ones that felt closest to my actual self — and they still do, several decades and several careers later.

A ranger, in that older role-playing sense and in the older frontier sense it borrowed from, is someone who covers ground that doesn’t belong to any single settlement. Their job is to move through varied terrain, notice what’s happening, and bring back word. They are generalists by necessity. They are also, in the best versions of the role, careful observers — not tourists passing through, but people who have learned to read the landscape on its own terms.

That has turned out to describe how I actually think and work. I started in anthropology, moved into experimental psychology, then into behavioral neuroscience, and spent much of my career in comparative psychology and comparative cognition — which is itself a discipline organized around the idea that you understand minds better when you compare them across species rather than studying any one in isolation. Along the way I co-founded the Ancestral Health Society, whose foundational framework is evolutionary mismatch: the recognition that many features of modern human suffering are best understood as the friction between bodies and minds shaped by one environment and lives lived in another. That framework, in turn, is what got me to a low-carb paleo diet, which fixed several stubborn health issues that conventional advice had not. None of these were separate adventures. They were the same ranger covering different parts of the same terrain.

The “chaotic good” part names something real about how I move through that terrain. I am skeptical of rigid systems and tidy ideologies, but I am not skeptical of structure as such. I tend to be open-minded, and I like to try on different theories and perspectives — to walk a mile in their shoes before deciding what I think. This is also why I gravitated to organizations like Heterodox Academy and to writers like Greg Lukianoff at FIRE. Not because heterodoxy is a tribe I want to join, but because the underlying commitments — freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the freedom to engage in civil discourse, and the freedom to be wrong in public without being destroyed for it — strike me as foundational human rights. They are also, not coincidentally, the conditions under which a ranger can actually do the work.

The aim is to follow what is true and useful wherever it leads, even when that means crossing the boundaries that disciplines and tribes have drawn around their own territory. Chaotic in method, perhaps. But oriented toward the good, in the older sense of that word.

What you can expect to find here

The terrain I’ll be ranging across includes, but is not limited to:

Psychology and neuroscience, which is my home discipline and where I have spent decades thinking carefully about how minds — human and non-human — actually work. I’ll write about learning, cognition, behavior, comparative perspectives, and the places where popular accounts of the brain get the science badly wrong.

Health, diet, and the human body, including the evolutionary-mismatch lens that I find indispensable for thinking about why modern people are sick in the ways we are. The thinkers I have learned the most from in this space — Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Chris Kresser, Chris Masterjohn, Ty Beal — share a commitment to taking ancestral context seriously without being romantic about it, and I expect that sensibility will show up regularly in what I write.

Art, culture, and the humanities, because the questions that drew me into science in the first place were never purely scientific ones. What is a good life. What makes a landscape feel like home. Why certain pieces of music or writing or visual art rearrange something in us. Science gives us tools for asking these questions more precisely, but it does not exhaust them.

Technology, especially the parts that are reshaping how we think, work, and relate to each other. AI is the obvious case, and I’ll have plenty to say about it, including in this very post. I’m also interested in the slower, weirder questions about money and trust that the crypto ecosystem keeps surfacing, even when the ecosystem itself is at its most embarrassing.

Regenerative agriculture, ecology, and food systems, because I have come to believe that some of the most important conceptual work of the next several decades is going to involve learning to think like living systems again rather than like machines.

And whatever else seems worth writing about. The ranger does not file the report in advance.

A note on AI

I want to be transparent about something that will matter to some readers and not to others.

I use AI tools in my writing process. Substantially. I treat them less as a ghostwriter and more as a sparring partner — a way of pressure-testing ideas, finding the weak joints in an argument, exploring alternative phrasings, and occasionally drafting passages that I then revise, restructure, or discard. The back-and-forth is real work, and it is mine. Every post that goes out under my name has been directed and curated by me, has been shaped by my judgment about what is true and what is worth saying, and reflects positions I actually hold.

What I will not do is pretend that the AI is not there. I think the more interesting question for writers right now is not whether to use these tools, but how to use them well — how to keep one’s own voice and judgment in the loop while taking advantage of what the tools genuinely add. That is a question I am still working out in real time, and I expect to write about it directly at some point.

If you have strong feelings about AI-assisted writing in either direction, I’d rather you know my practice up front than have to infer it.

Why this, and why now

The deepest reason for starting this is simple. I have spent most of my professional life writing for narrow audiences in formats with narrow conventions. The ideas I find most interesting, however, are usually the ones that connect across domains — the moments when something I learned studying animal learning illuminates something about human institutions, or when a question from regenerative agriculture turns out to be a question about resilience in general, or when a debate in cognitive science maps onto a debate in cultural criticism that no one realized was the same debate.

Those connections are hard to make in venues organized around disciplines. They are easier to make in a space organized around a mind. This is that space.

I don’t know exactly where the ranging will take us, and I think that is the right kind of not-knowing to start with. What I can promise is that I will try to bring back observations worth the trip, to tell you honestly what I think and why, and to keep the writing readable for the kind of intelligent generalist who got curious enough to click through and read this far.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’m glad you’re here. Saddle up.

When we think of biotechnology today, we imagine gleaming laboratories, sequencers, and gene-editing tools. But the true origin of biotechnology reaches back thousands of years—long before microscopes, into the era of domestication.

The first biotechnologists were farmers, breeders, and handlers who shaped the bodies and behaviors of other species for human use. By selecting docility, fecundity, and utility, they rewired evolution itself. Wheat, sheep, dogs, and—perhaps most symbolically—pigeons became the living interfaces through which humanity began to modify life to carry meaning.

Pigeons were not only bred for food or sport. They were engineered for communication. The homing pigeon, perfected over millennia of selective breeding, is arguably the first bio-information technology: a living data-transfer protocol operating through muscle, learning, and instinct. In the ancient world, the pigeon’s flight predates the telegraph, carrying urgent military intelligence, love letters, and poetry—and even after the birth of the telegraph, stock prices in Europe. Each bird was a winged node in a living network.

As the historian Peter Sloterdijk once wrote, “Domestication was the first act of engineering the world.” In that sense, the pigeon loft was humanity’s first laboratory of communication systems biology.

Ancient Biotech Reborn in the Digital Era

Fast-forward several millennia, and the pigeon remains one of our oldest domesticated partners. Yet their relationship to human communication has evolved. The airmail of feathers has been replaced by fiber optics, but the metaphor endures. My own practice with The Pigeon Art Project extends this ancient biotechnology into the digital era.

Instead of carrying messages through the air, my pigeons now carry meaning through pixels and code. They do so by pecking at a touchscreen interface, generating patterns and forms that are both algorithmically constrained and behaviorally expressive. Each peck activates a rule in a generative art program—draw a line, close a polygon, fill with color—transforming a series of decisions into a completed digital canvas.

The result is not simply a random output of stimuli but a signature of agency. Every pigeon develops its own stylistic tendencies, its own rhythm and gesture, not unlike the variations seen among human artists. Statistical analyses confirm that the patterns are non-random, structured, and even individually recognizable. What we see emerging on the screen is a new kind of art history—a behavioral archaeology of creativity.

And so, the pigeon returns to its oldest calling: the communication of meaning across distance and species. Only this time, instead of carrying our letters through the air, they transmit our collaboration through the medium of digital art.

Bioart, Without the Wet Lab

Most people encounter “bioart” through images of petri dishes, cultured tissues, or gene-modified organisms—living materials shaped into aesthetic form. Yet bioart, in its broader sense, is not limited to cellular manipulation. It is art that engages life itself as medium and message.

My pigeons work at the intersection of bioart and animal–computer interaction (ACI). They are not specimens to be modified, but partners whose perceptual and decision-making systems become part of a feedback loop with technology. If wet bioart grows tissues, this practice grows relationships. It replaces the laboratory bench with the behavioral lab, and the pipette with the touchscreen.

In this way, The Pigeon Art Project is a form of performative interspecies digital bioart. It challenges the assumption that creativity must be human, and it asks what happens when another species participates in the authorship of aesthetic meaning. The pigeons are not objects of study but collaborators in creation.

A Continuum of Techno-Critical Art

If bioart examines life as medium, techno-critical art examines technology as meaning. From the mechanical art of Jean Tinguely to the generative systems of Vera Molnár, artists have long used machines not merely to make images, but to reflect on the logics of the machine itself.

The Pigeon Art Project belongs to this lineage. It uses technology to make technology visible, at least at first. The touchscreen, the code, the sensors—all reveal a process of mediation. But, as viewers begin to recognize patterns of preference and intention in the pigeons’ behavior, the mechanics recede. What remains visible is the gesture of the living artist behind the algorithm.

This is where my work meets the insights of Mitchell Chan, whose 2024 Art Blocks presentation, What Do You Do After You Change The World? , crystallized the ethos of generative art in the blockchain age. Chan argued that the most enduring digital art will not be about technology itself, but about the ideas and systems that technology reveals. Once the novelty of the tool disappears, meaning surfaces.

In his words, “Art is a mental model for understanding the world’s systems.”

That is precisely what the pigeons teach us: how a living system can be encoded into rules, how behavior interacts with algorithm, and how meaning can emerge from a loop between species and code. The Pigeon Art Project is thus an embodied mental model—a living diagram of co-agency between biology and computation.

Making the Technology Invisible

Chan cautioned that digital artists often risk fetishizing their tools. The challenge is to make the technology invisible so that the viewer perceives meaning, not mechanism. In The Pigeon Art Project, the rules are simple and transparent:

Two pecks create a line.

Closed shapes auto-fill with color.

The color palette evolves with cumulative engagement.

As the pigeons learn the contingencies of the system, they explore the space of possibilities much as an artist learns the affordances of paint. Viewers, too, come to understand the logic of the system: they can see how each peck corresponds to an act of creation. The program’s simplicity makes it legible, transforming it from a piece of black-box tech into an educational interface that demystifies generative systems.

In that sense, the pigeons fulfill Chan’s principle of art as model-making. The artwork is not just the final image—it is the behavioral process that unfolds over time. By making this process transparent through time-lapse videos and NFTs, the project renders both the animal’s agency and the system’s rules visible, until the viewer forgets the technology altogether and perceives only the dialogue between minds.

Measuring Agency and Style

Skeptics may ask whether the pigeons are truly “creating” art, or merely pecking at random. To answer this, we analyze their output quantitatively. Using statistical measures such as the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) and support vector machine (SVM) classification, we find that each pigeon produces non-random, individually distinct artworks.

Average ARI = 0.26, indicating structured, repeatable spatial patterns.

SVM classifiers identify the artist with 60 % top-1 and 92 % top-3 accuracy, using features like spatial variance and color distribution.

These data confirm what the eye already suspects: the pigeons have style. Each bird—Darwin, Meatloaf, or Yoshi—develops a characteristic approach to the canvas, a rhythm of pecking that translates into visual signature. Over time, their “brushstrokes” evolve, reflecting learning, curiosity, and perhaps even mood.

What matters most is not whether the pigeons understand art as humans do, but that they produce consistent, expressive variation within the constraints of a rule-based system. In this way, they participate in the same generative logic that defines algorithmic art itself.

Interspecies Authorship and Ethics

The presence of animal collaborators raises inevitable questions of ethics and authorship. Who owns the art—the pigeon, the scientist, the algorithm, or the collector? My view is that authorship here is distributed: it emerges from the triadic interaction between organism, human, and machine.

From an ethical standpoint, the pigeons’ welfare is paramount. The art sessions serve as enrichment, offering cognitive stimulation and agency rather than stress. Observing how motivation and engagement fluctuate across individuals may even yield insights into avian welfare and psychology. In future studies, we hope to examine how factors such as social housing, diet, and environment shape creative output.

In this sense, the project doubles as behavioral research and aesthetic exploration—a form of humane science that recognizes the intrinsic value of curiosity and play in nonhuman animals.

Messages in Motion

There is poetic symmetry in returning to pigeons as messengers. Where ancient couriers bore physical letters, my pigeons now transmit symbolic messages about consciousness, agency, and the future of art.

Each artwork they produce is, in a sense, a letter from the borderlands between species. It carries a message from the behavioral world into the symbolic one, from peck to pixel, from motion to meaning. The pigeon’s movement is transcribed into color and form, and then encoded again onto the blockchain—an immutable ledger of interspecies correspondence.

One could say that the Pigeon Art Project transforms the loft into a data aviary, where behavioral choices take flight not through the air but through the ether of the digital network. The pigeons’ gestures become encrypted messages about our own human desire to understand mind, pattern, and meaning. And most human of all, to tell a story.

Evolutionary Echoes

Why pigeons? Because they occupy a special place in the history of science and art alike. Charles Darwin bred pigeons obsessively while writing On the Origin of Species, using them as a living proof of selective variation. Pigeons were the model organism through which evolution itself became visible.

In The Pigeon Art Project, they reprise that role. They become models for cultural evolution—for how creativity emerges when systems allow exploration within constraints. Their art is not programmed; it is learned, shaped by feedback and reinforcement, much as evolution shapes behavior through consequences.

In this light, the project aligns with the broader scientific framework called MePMoS—Memory, Prediction, Motion, Sensation—which posits that cognition emerges from the mind first generating ideas about the world it inhabits, and then testing predictions about what will happen when it acts in that world. It’s a think-do-learn-repeat loop. Predictive interactions between thought and action. The pigeons embody this principle: they predict the outcomes of their pecks, perceive the results, and update their internal models accordingly. Their art is therefore not random but predictive play.

The Cultural Feedback Loop

When we exhibit pigeon art in galleries—whether at the Hive Gallery, Art Blocks weekend in Marfa, Texas, or online as NFTs—the dialogue expands again. Viewers respond emotionally, sometimes with amusement, sometimes awe, often with skepticism. They see themselves reflected in the pigeons’ curiosity, their trial-and-error, their small triumphs of discovery.

This is where bioart becomes techno-cultural feedback. The public interprets the pigeons’ digital art as commentary on our own algorithmic lives. Just as the birds learn the contingencies of their system, we humans navigate social media algorithms, feedback loops of reinforcement and reward. Their art thus mirrors our own condition: we are all pecking at screens.

Mitchell Chan’s insight that generative art is about learning systems could not be more apt. The pigeons, unwittingly, model our relationship to technology. They remind us that behind every algorithm is a living mind seeking pattern and prediction—and that creativity, in all its forms, arises from this dance between control and curiosity. And ultimately through the curation process by the human hand and eye.

Toward a New Literacy of Art and Science

If early bioart asked what happens when artists learn from scientists, and if generative art asks what happens when artists learn from coders, then interspecies digital art asks: what happens when animals become our teachers?

By making the pigeons’ creative process legible—through open-source code, public data, and exhibitions—the project invites viewers to develop a new kind of literacy: the ability to read behavioral algorithms as forms of expression. This literacy bridges art, science, and ethics. It asks us to see agency wherever prediction and feedback intertwine.

Perhaps that is the next step in the evolution of both art and science: to recognize creativity not as a uniquely human property, but as a biological phenomenon that emerges whenever systems learn from their own consequences.

Coda: The Message Returns Home

In the end, the story of pigeon art is a story of messages returning home. The same species that once delivered our letters through the skies now delivers reflections about ourselves—our technologies, our curiosities, our capacities for empathy.

The pigeons of the ancient world carried information for us. The pigeons of the digital world carry information about us. Both are acts of communication across distance, and both reveal that the boundaries between nature, technology, and meaning are far more porous than we once imagined.

If art, as Mitchell Chan suggests, is a mental model for understanding systems, then The Pigeon Art Project offers a model for understanding the oldest and most enduring system of all: the relationship between life and meaning.

And so the message, carried by wings both feathered and digital, returns full circle.

This article first appeared on https://paragraph.com/@0x08a032033ebac2822221a813b16a714a6eba9b3b/from-homing-to-holography?referrer=0x08a032033EBaC2822221a813B16a714A6eBA9B3b

Further Reading & Acknowledgments

Mitchell Chan, https://chan.gallery/ And https://www.artblocks.io/articles/what-do-you-do-after-you-change-the-world-mitchell-f-chan

Ullrich, A. (2019). Performative Agency and Animal Collaboration in Art. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7229747

Blaisdell et al., The Pigeon Art Project. https://pigeonart.xyz.

Blaisdell lab. https://pigeonrat.psych.ucla.edu

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