Good afternoon, beloved -
As we’ve talked about some, my first ultra is coming up one week from today, and I can feel the anticipation building in the set of my tendons.
We’re not going to talk about that today, though. Instead, I’d like to offer you a little sneak preview of The Tetrad, the forthcoming short book I’m writing for the brand-new Ill Will Editions, on “value in a more-than-human world.” If you’ll forgive me for doing so ass-backwards, what follows is actually the book’s final passage, which means it will allude to a number of things already discussed, but not present here. It also hasn’t seen an editor yet. I hope you enjoy it anyway.
§ Coda: As if we remembered where we came from
The technologist Paul Ford once observed that “most prose born on the internet is highly defensive.” He was wrong only in that he failed to foresee the day that all prose composition effectively became subject to the pressure of network effects, in the very same way a blog post was in 2010. Just as the functioning of the panopticon, as we receive the concept through Bentham and Foucault, depends vitally on our cultivation of an inner cop, we’ve all of us now seemingly installed in our heads an inner chorus of anonymous voices from the net, probing for weaknesses, omissions, hypocrisies and betrayals in the arguments we lay out.
At least, I’ve certainly done so. Here are three things that chorus is saying to me just now:
- Isn’t everything you have to say here merely warmed-over Indigenous thought, repackaged with some cod-technical terminology, and dusted with a dash of theoryspeak?
It’s vital to note that, yes, many elements of the conception I’ve tried to lay out in these pages have always been present in various Indigenous traditions of thought and practice. But I think we need to take the greatest care here.
I once knew an activist who seemed hugely concerned with a quality in people she called “wetiko.” I asked her what she meant, and she explained that it was “a Native American concept” — a kind of ravening, insatiable void that white people specifically carried within them.
I racked my brain. “Are you saying wendigo? Because the Wendigo is definitely a thing, and what you’re talking about sounds like it’s not a million miles away from that.”
“No, no: wetiko.” She was quite insistent. “W-E-T-I-K-O.”
So I looked up the term, just as she had spelled it, and discovered that what she was actually referring to was a vaguely occultick self-help book about the concept…written by a white guy. Less some directly encountered concept from any actual Indigenous tradition, then, and more a secondary abstraction, recirculated through a contemporary discourse of magical-Indigene wisdom. Distressingly often, even among people who should know better, “Indigenous knowledge” circulates in exactly this form: nonspecific, frictionless, a bearer-of-ancestral-depth, available for immediate use by the alienated, guilt-stricken descendants of settlers as a kind of symbolic solvent for modernity’s void.
This is a persistent and damaging mode of abstraction, where “Indigeneity” becomes a reified essence rather than a live set of practices, knowledges, obligations and strategies. The invocation of Indigenous origin for a thought serves not to facilitate engagement with it, but primarily to borrow the legitimacy we accord that origin, in an inscription of what is in other contexts called “stolen valor.” Specific traditions — and they might be O’odham, Sámi, Ainu, Mapuche or Haudenosaunee — are collapsed into a singular, often romanticized figure of the “wise ancestor,” useful mainly for filling the symbolic void in settler cosmology.
This is the Indigene as fetish-object, not interlocutor, and it involves a patent refusal to actually encounter Indigenous political modernity. This fetishization is a counterrevolutionary move in disguise. It evades the hard graft of alliance, translation and responsibility. It short-circuits the specific with the general, and preserves colonial relation in the very moment it appears to subvert it. Worst of all, it does so in the most cloying and self-congratulatory way. And crucially, it does all this work shrouded in a tone of awe and reverence, so as to inoculate itself against critique. The posture is “listening,” but the gesture is ventriloquy.
Along with the fetishizing of a nonspecific, crying-Indian Indigeneity, and closely coupled to it, comes anthropological extractivism: using Indigenous practice as a therapeutic toolkit for alienated Western subjects, without engaging the full political, cosmological or ethical systems from which that wisdom emerges. It’s not enough to admire. One must enter relation, and relation has terms.
So what would it mean to actually be in dialogue not with an abstract, uprooted, deplaced “Indigeneity,” but with actual Indigenous thoughtways? The closest, most grounded way to do this is not to claim equivalence, but to say that a number of specific Indigenous traditions rhyme with the sequence of value I’ve tried to establish in this short book, each doing so in its own vocabulary and with its own political obligations. Let’s name them.
An influential articulation of a chain of being on which all value depends can be found in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (Gano:nyok, or “Words That Come Before All Else”). In the versions widely taught and published, this invocation proceeds by giving thanks to Earth, waters, plants, medicines, animals, birds, winds, thunderers, Sun, Moon, stars, teachers, and Creator, repeatedly returning those listening to a shared human stance (“Now our minds are one”). This, let’s be clear, is not entirely cognate with my own understanding of the universe, but I have always been moved by its insistence that human meaning and labor come after prior gifts and supports — and that human collectivity is healthiest when it begins by acknowledging them.
I have drawn great sustenance from the great Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of Potawatomi thought, especially in the ethics of the Honorable Harvest, and in her reflections on the gift economy of plants. What matters here is not merely that the world gives, but that receiving well imposes on us reciprocal obligations of restraint, gratitude and return:
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Take only what you need and leave some for others.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share. Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.
Kimmerer’s writing deeply informed the distinction I make between a prior, uncontracted generativity on the one hand, and on the other the derivative moral labor of composing ourselves adequately in relation to it.
In recent years, having spent a certain amount of time in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have familiarized myself with te ao Māori, the Māori worldview. This offers two terms that seem especially fruitful for our purposes: whakapapa and mauri. Te Ara — the government’s official Encyclopedia of New Zealand — describes the Māori perspective that “people, birds, fish, trees, [and] weather patterns” are “all members of a cosmic family,” and that this membership is continuously elaborated and reaffirmed through the recitation of whakapapa, or genealogy; mauri, meanwhile, is the life principle or vital spark that pervades all people and things. The idea that all things, animate and inanimate, are connected through their whakapapa and carry their own increment of mauri is, again, not identical to what I have here called “value-in-itself.” But in its treatment of Earth and life not as background stock, but as already-animated conditions prior to market recognition, the resonances are strong.
I’ve similarly been informed by Diné thought around Hózhó and Są’áh Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóó, a complex lifeway that guides thought, action, speech and conduct, with harmony between people and land as one of its central pillars. The traces of my exposure to Diné thought surface most clearly here in ideas I’ve expressed about labor only becoming dignified when it aligns with sustaining flows, rather than violating them.
Moving from the Sun, the Earth and the domain of life toward more specifically human reciprocity and livelihood, I’ve found Andean traditions around ayni and sumak kawsay especially relevant. Scholarly sources describe ayni as a central Quechua-Andean principle of reciprocity that extends beyond narrow economistic ideas of exchange, while recent ecological-economics work on sumak kawsay treats it as an ancestral Andean cosmovision that helps dissolve the nature/society dichotomy and foregrounds community, horizontality, and relationality, often through the sustaining ground of the Earth-mother Pachamama. By locating human labor as derivative of prior gifts but still morally and politically decisive in how it composes with them.
For the moment at which human labor arrives on the scene, I have found encouragement in Oaxacan Indigenous communal traditions around tequio and usos y costumbres. Recent scholarship characterizes tequio as a rotational, communal labor system tied to assemblies, self-government and collective life rather than abstract, atomized and alienated wage labor. This doesn’t have quite the cosmological sweep of the Haudenosaunee or Māori articulations, but it is an excellent grounded example of labor understood as socially-embedded obligation after, and held within, a larger field of communal sustenance.
My reading of these sources is, no doubt, necessarily superficial. But hopefully it is neither fetishized nor extractive, nor flattens “Indigeneity” into a single generalized wisdom tradition. I thank these peoples for their articulation of the full layered ordering of beings and forces, the ontological claim that all things are related and animated, and the transition from prior gifts into reciprocal human obligation.
- Why have you said so little about “AI”?
Accounting in this way for what has come before feels like it opens up the possibility of speculating about what comes now, with similar care and rigor. In part, this means confronting a new, derivative possibility for the generation of value: that of computational labor.
I want to emphasize the “derivative” here: nothing in this book is more dependent on the infolded value of everything that preceded it. Far from arriving from nowhere, as though bestowed on us by mathic gods from outside history, computation is no way a sovereign new principle, and we blunder permanently and fatally if we take it for that. Computation — as we know and grasp it, anyway — is late. It is composed. It is folded out of the four prior sources this book has tried to name. Out of solar energy, because data centers, networks, chips and terminals all run on captured throughput, whether fossilized or contemporary. Out of the Earth, because every processor is geophysical time briefly made diagrammatic: rare earths, copper, silicon, lithium, water, heat sinks, mines, grids, logistics corridors. Out of life, because computation parasitizes living metabolisms at every turn: our habit of language first of all, but also, in the not-really-a-metaphor of the neural network, the nervous system’s very pattern and structure, or really all the vast array of biotic conditions under which cognition and communication became possible. And above all, out of labor, because every computational system bears the traces of human effort at every layer of its being, which is to say in its engineering, coding, labeling, cleaning, moderation, maintenance, training and repair. Human labor is there in the writing of corpora, the building of standards and the often invisible carework of keeping systems from becoming unusable or monstrous, and most of all in the effaced and denied suffering inflicted on the bodies and minds of those we rely upon to keep the whole teetering edifice plowing along.
Computational labor is therefore not outside the argument of this book. It is one of its most belated and revealing instances. It is also, plainly, a danger. Under extant conditions, computation intensifies many of the pathologies already described here. It abstracts from its substrates, while burning through them. It presents itself as frictionless while consuming electricity, water, minerals, landscapes and human attention at extraordinary scale. It threatens to sever action from consequence even more radically than earlier forms of bureaucratic and financial abstraction did. And in its current ideological packaging, it flatters one of the oldest delusions of all: that intelligence can float free of dependence — that command can become total, because pattern recognition has become cheap.
Much of what now passes for “AI” is simply extraction in a newer key: scraped language, appropriated art, captured labor, intensified surveillance, enclosure of collective intelligence, energy gluttony wrapped in the rhetoric of inevitability. In that form, computational labor is neither humane nor comradely. It is the last and greatest raid on the common.
For all this, it feels lazy to me, and perhaps dishonest, to leave the matter there. Though this is perhaps the most vexed assertion in this entire set of ideas, I think we need to grant that something else may also be struggling to come into being. Computation, precisely because it is a derivative labor-form, may under some conditions yet become augmentive rather than usurpatory. It may become a fifth layer not of value’s origin, but of value’s articulation: a way of sensing, remembering, coordinating, simulating, translating and composing more capably with the prior flows from which it emerges. There is nothing in principle ridiculous about this: our finest tools have always been extensions of embodied and collective capacity. The question is not whether computation exists. The question is what kinds of assemblages it enters, what capacities it thickens, and at whose expense.
The conditions under which computational labor might become humane are, I think, fairly severe, and I tend to doubt whether they could be established in the time we have available to us. But it nevertheless feels like a worthwhile project to articulate some of them. First, we would have to render computational labor truthful about its preconditions and substrates, unimpeachably and at all times. No more cloud-mysticism. No more fantasies of immaterial intelligence. Systems would have to reveal their energy cost, water cost, mineral cost, labor cost, maintenance burden. They would have to enter the economy of visible dependence.
Second, it would have to be augmentive rather than substitutive in the domains where human relation is itself part of the value being produced. There are, no doubt, forms of care, teaching, witness, deliberation, mourning and companionship in which we might discover that computational labor is not merely informational throughput but co-presence, vulnerability and mutual transformation. In such domains, it’s at least possible to imagine a computation that assists, scaffolds or coordinates, but when it pretends to replace relation, it destroys the very thing it claims to optimize.
Third, it would have to be comradely in ownership and governance. That means common or publicly accountable infrastructures, transparent standards, inspectable models, labor protections for everyone in the chain, and institutional forms that prevent the enclosure of collectively generated intelligence by a few firms or states. Computational landlordism is the existing norm, but a computational commons is imaginable.
Fourth, it would have to be ecologically bounded. A humane computational labor could not take endless scaling as its horizon. It would have to submit to the same discipline urged throughout this book: enoughness, timing, selective use, fit to purpose, refusal of stupid force. Some computational tasks are worth the burn. Many are not. The machine, too, must learn wu wei.
Fifth, it would have to be oriented toward the increase of shared capacity in the Spinozan sense. Not merely profitable automation, not merely convenience, but the thickening of collective powers of acting: better memory, better translation across difference, better coordination under constraint, better access to knowledge, better repair of infrastructures, better modeling of consequences, better space for human attention to be spent on what only humans, together, can do. Where computation makes more room for care, craft, thought, maintenance and democratic intelligence, it may — may — become fruitful. Where it merely intensifies throughput, casualizes labor and hollows out judgment, it becomes another name for mutilation.
In that sense, the arisal of computational labor is a test. It shows, with peculiar sharpness, whether we have learned anything from the preceding chapters. If we still think value begins with price, computation becomes a speculative asset class. If we think value begins with labor narrowly conceived, computation becomes a threat to wages alone. If we think in terms of groundation, however, then computation appears as a late assemblage whose legitimacy depends on whether it composes well with Sun, Earth, life and labor — whether it renders those dependencies more intelligible and more shareable, or merely obscures them behind another layer of abstraction.
I’m acutely aware that this passage may indict me as improbably hopeful, or simply naïve. Let me be clear: I do not trust the present arc of things. Most actually-existing computational systems are being built in exactly the wrong way, by exactly the wrong institutions, for exactly the wrong reasons, under exactly the wrong incentives. Still, though, after so many years of beating my head against the question, I’m frankly not yet certain that this is a master’s house/master’s tools situation. Does the fact that a tool is presently embedded in extraction mean it can only ever be so embedded? The history of technique is stranger than that. The question is political, not magical. Under what ownership? Under what energy regime? Under what protocols? In service of what? Answer those badly, and computation becomes an accelerant of ruin. Answer them well enough, and it may yet become part of a more distributed intelligence of care.
- Isn’t it far too late for your declaration of lateness?
Finally, there are many days of the week I wake up, glance at the news, and feel the looming approach of the end of all things, before the caffeine in the first few sips of coffee has even had time to settle in the blood. And I know I’m not alone in this heartbreak. As I’ve already said time and again in this short piece, we are late.
But we are also early. In fact, we can use the old Carl Sagan trick to see just how early: if the entire untrigintillion-year history of the universe as we currently understand it, from the Big Bang to the final guttering-out of the last black holes, were to be compressed into a single calendar year, if the Big Bang detonated precisely at midnight, January 1st, we currently stand not in February, not even on January 2nd, but at about 00:00:00.0000000004 on New Year’s Day. The fireworks at midnight haven’t even fully ignited yet.
Because human intuition is tuned to biological lifetimes, at most, and quails at geological time or stellar lifetimes, we’re still less equipped to reason about exponential decay, entropy plateaus, long asymptotic futures. But the math is unforgiving. If we already find ourselves deep into the emergence and unfolding of complexity, we are nevertheless early in absolute time.
We’re not near the beginning in terms of structure, chemistry, life, arguably even intelligence, depending on how anthropocentric you are or are not in defining it, no. But we are living very close to the beginning of time, in a universe whose meaningful processes unfold almost immediately, and then linger unimaginably long afterward.
The unsettling corollary is that, if intelligent observers should come to exist at all across cosmic history, then almost all of them would exist far later than us, in a universe that’s far dimmer, quieter and poorer in available energy. That has deep implications on every level, cosmological, philosophical and ethical. Relatively speaking, we are standing right near the lip of the beginning, looking out over an absurdly long future whose contours we can barely imagine. There is plenty of time for things to happen. By any scale of reckoning that signifies, it will never be too late to intervene.
§ What, then, is this thing “value,” once the dust of argument has settled a little?
I don’t, in the end, think it comes down to price. Not exchange. Not the flattering reflection or echo in which a civilization addicted to abstraction mistakes its own leaking signals for reality. If the chapters preceding have done any useful work, it is only to have worried loose a more difficult understanding: that value names something layered, and that our failures begin whenever we collapse those layers into one another, or permit one to tyrannize the rest.
What are those layers? Following Eugene Thacker here, I want to say that value is, first, value-for-us. It’s the fragile web of meaning(s) by which we render our lives inhabitable. It is care given and received, reciprocity remembered, the felt importance of acts, relations, promises and forms of attention. It is what David Graeber, with characteristic generosity, saw so clearly: that human beings are forever representing to themselves the significance of what they do, and that no serious account of value can afford to sneer at this. A loaf of bread is not only calories. A home is not only shelter. A gift is not only transfer. A burial is not only disposal. We live in symbolic thickness, in moral weather, in worlds made and remade by the meanings we are able to sustain together.
This fragility matters, because it means value in the human register can be injured by humiliation, alienation and bullshit. In the forced severing of action from consequence, the destruction of trust or the reduction of every relation to transaction, we see it written down to zero. This means a society can be materially affluent and existentially gutted at the same time, and that care, ritual, dignity, comradeship, beauty and the right to meaningful action are not luxuries to be appended after the economy is settled. They are among the things any economy worthy of the name exists to make possible.
At the same time, though, value is also, irreducibly, value-in-itself. By this I don’t mean to evoke some mystical essence hiding inside things, but the enduring flows that obtain whether we honor them or not: energy crossing space, matter cycling and sedimenting, water moving through phase and stratum, soils forming, microbes fixing nitrogen, fungi threading exchange, species elaborating the conditions of other species, geological time concentrating and weathering, sunlight arriving without contract or consent. These flows are not meaningful in any specifically human sense. They don’t require our recognition in order to operate. But they are generative. They are what make possible the world in which meaning can arise.
To forget this is to submit to an unhelpful derangement. One begins to suffer from the hallucinations that value appears when markets notice it, or when cultures symbolize it, or when labor seizes it into form. In other words: one starts too late. One treats the prior gifts as background, the substrates as scenery, the conditions of possibility as externalities. Then, inevitably, one builds systems that devour their own ground. Climate destabilizes. Aquifers fail. Topsoil thins. Pollinators vanish. Attention is strip-mined. The economy goes on speaking in its old language, even as the world that made that language possible begins to erode away everywhere around it.
And beyond both of these, there is also the register of value-without-us — or, really, something we can’t really name or hang a tag on, other than to note that “value” is not even the right word here. Perhaps even trying to articulate such a thing already bends too much toward our scale, our need for terms of esteem. But something must be said of the abyssal remainder: the world not only before us and beneath us, but after us. The impersonal, implacable real. The cold continuance of processes that did not begin with our appearance, and will long survive our departure from the scene. Tectonics will not mourn us. Ocean currents will not wake our extinction. Microbes, storms, radiative balances, mineral cycles, the long attrition of rock into dust and dust into strata: these proceed in a register no humanism can even remotely domesticate, however we may try.
Though despair is absolutely among the possible responses available to us, in contemplation of this state of affairs, I don’t think it is actually what’s warranted. We should receive this knowledge, rather, as a welcome limit on our narcissism. We are not the measure and compass of all things. We are a late and local intensity within a much older field — and yet, looked at from the far side of cosmological time, still unimaginably nearer the beginning than the end. However ancient Earth may feel beneath our feet, however patient the long labor of stone, oceans, forests and microbes, the cosmos itself is still in one of its first bright seasons. The great thinning-out, the terminal dark, lies so far ahead that our histories unfold not at the dusk of things, but in an early flare of their possibility; the long drawn-out cooling and the final silence remain at distances almost too immense for thought. The world can continue without our categories, without our rituals, without our economies, without our exquisite and terrible arguments about justice. To know this is painful, because it strips us of metaphysical centrality. It is also clarifying, because it returns dignity to a saner scale. We matter enormously to one another. We matter morally because we can suffer, care, remember, build, destroy and choose. But the cosmos is under no obligation to ratify that importance.
The wager of this book has been that we need all three truths at once. Not one substituted for the others. Not the in-itself used to crush the for-us under a dead scientism — the “vulgar materialist positivism” Abdullah Öcalan decried. Not the for-us inflated until it imagines that meaning exhausts reality. Not the without-us romanticized into a sneering cult of indifference. All three, held in difficult simultaneity: value-for-us, as fragile webs of meaning, care and reciprocity. Value-in-itself, as attention to the enduring flows of energy, matter, time. And finally value-without-us: the abyssal outside that puts all these things in their ultimate context and perspective. A mature account of value wouldn’t force us to choose among these, but would learn instead to inhabit and derive power from the tension between them.
We need the register of value-for-us because that’s where politics, ethics and collective life happen. We need the register of value-in-itself because any politics severed from material reality lapses into fantasy, or outright fraud. And we need the register of value-without-us, too, because anything that allows itself to forget the abyss becomes swollen, sentimental and untrue.
To live as if we remembered all three at once would be no small achievement. It would mean designing not for frictionless extraction, but for visible dependence and durable care. It would mean building systems that reveal their substrates rather than hiding them. It would mean reckoning economically in ways that honor the generative flows we did not create and cannot replace. It would mean treating labor not as the sovereign source of all value, but as one vital, compromised, consequential mode of participation in a world already underway. It would mean grieving losses that accounting cannot capture. It would mean making room for awe without surrendering rigor. It would mean comradeship rooted not only in shared interest, but in shared heldness.
And it would mean, perhaps above all, relinquishing the old childish dream that we somehow stand above and outside the conditions of our own existence. We don’t, and never did. We are fed by sunlight we did not kindle, held upright by soils we did not make, sustained by labors we scarcely know how to honor, and enclosed, always, by a reality vast enough to go on without us. It’s between those truths that we improvise our moral worlds. We exchange gifts. We bury our dead. We build workshops and assemblies and gardens and grids. We comfort each other. We exploit each other. We chant the Heart Sutra. We write books. We fail. We begin again.
The question before us is not whether we can become innocent within this condition. I don’t think we can, or even want to. The question is whether we can become lucid: lucid enough to value what is generative before it is exhausted, to defend what sustains before it withers and dies, to build forms of life that do not require permanent forgetting in order to function; lucid enough to refuse both the old extractive brutalities and the newer computational ones when they present themselves as destiny; lucid enough to compose with one another, with our tools, and with the more-than-human world in ways that increase shared capacity without pretending to stand above it.
Lucid enough, finally, to live, design and reckon value as if we remembered where we came from, where we remain and now dwell, and what will remain without us.
§ There it is. Anyway: right now I'm reading You Glow In The Dark, an exceptional collection of short stories from the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, as well as the recently-late Dan Simmons’s novel Hyperion, god knows why; listening to Philly’s own Bardo Pond, as well as the mid-1970s Japanese psychedelic band Les Rallizes Dénudés; I didn’t actually watch anything this week. Also! Lifepod stickers have just come in — I’ll be tucking them into copies of Lifehouse I come across here and there, or you can ask for yours at any of the talks or other gatherings I’ll be doing over the next few months.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 159 of Saturday, 14 March 2026, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊