Contextualization
Contextualization means situating resources, production, value flows and economic behavior in the broadest relevant systemic contexts. This is the opposite of the reductionism inherent in extraction and abstraction, which isolates resources and value from their diverse interconnections.
Some examples of contextualization:
- Agriculture systems working with local ecology and replenishing soils, rather than maximizing extraction through monocrops, fertilizers and pesticides that damage and deplete. This recognizes the complex value of topsoil ecology and nutrient cycles.
- Production facilities and supply chains structured around local materials flows and cycling waste locally, rather than global chains offshoring harms. This sees production as part of regional industrial ecologies.
- Full cost accounting of economic activities - including impacts on community, society, ecology - not just narrowly defined financial costs. This reveals the true footprint in wider systems.
- Protecting the complex value of ecosystems like forests, wetlands and coral reefs for climate regulation, biodiversity, and human physical/cultural needs, rather than only seeing potential extraction value.
In general, contextualization means perceiving and designing systems to maximize the synergistic, emergent properties that arise from diverse agents interconnected in broader systems like societies and ecologies. It values systemic coherence. The opposite view sees resources as isolable, fungible commodities defined by narrow utility for human consumption or production.
Philosophically, extensive contextualization depends on a cognitive capacity for complex systems thinking, as well as empathetic concern about impacts on wider human and ecological communities. Current economics conditions people against both - simplifying complex systemic interdependencies down to prices and financialized cost-benefit calculations. It also frames production and consumption as an impersonal game, obscuring real needs and impacts.
However, emerging data science capabilities can help map and visualize complex interconnections computationally. And global interconnectivity enables broader human concern and responsibility across space and time. So the capability for contextualization is growing, if we cultivate the intention.
Instantiation
Instantiation means focusing economics on directly improving real, tangible goods and quality of life. It counters the tendency towards abstracted monetary wealth in the current system. Some examples:
- Orienting policy and investment towards providing universal nutritious food, clean water, shelter, education, healthcare, etc directly.
- Incentivizing production of higher-quality, longer-lasting, fully recyclable goods - rather than planned obsolescent commodities that maximize consumption.
- Measuring value generation and impact in terms of improvements to real metrics like lifespan, knowledge, ecological regeneration, access to culture, etc. Not just monetary returns.
- Open collaboration and open-source approaches to ideas, IP, and knowledge creation, aiming to freely improve quality of life for all rather than extract rents.
- Democratic processes for determining allocation of resources towards what should be instantiated based on actual, contextualized communal needs and shared values. Not aggregate market demand abstracted from real needs.
Essentially, instantiation prioritizes improving the tangible, experiential fundamentals of human life and ecology, rather than increasing financial wealth as an end itself. It reconnects abstracted concepts of value back to real wellbeing. This is both a policy direction and an ethos for organizations and individuals.
Philosophically, instantiation reflects humanistic rather than instrumentalist approaches. It sees economic activity as meaningful to the degree it directly enhances life and health, not only facilitates trade of commodities.
Distribution
Distribution means utilizing the potential abundance enabled by technology to circulate resources in equitable, efficient flows - rather than accumulating for private gain. Some examples:
- Policies and technologies ensuring universal access to foundational goods and services - food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, transportation etc.
- Cooperative platforms enabling effective circulation of surplus time, space, products, skills, ideas etc where needed. Preventing unused excess in some places, scarcity in others.
- Shared open knowledge, IP, and digital commons, recognizing the non-rivalrous nature of information. Avoiding artificial paywalls or secrecy that stifles progress.
- Socio-economic systems that gather and distribute resources bottom-up through distributed sensemaking, collective intelligence, and participatory processes. Rather than top-down control.
- Optimization of systems to maximize usable value from finite resources via effective sharing, recycling, upcycling etc. Rather than maximizing financial accumulation or consumption throughput.
- Cybernetic systems balancing dynamic equilibrium of needs, rather than profit maximization and unequal accumulation. Preventing imbalances.
Essentially, distribution aligns with the closed-loop, cyclic networked flow dynamics of nature and ecosystems. It obsoletes the ideological basis of scarcity economics by utilizing technology’s abundance potential.
Philosophically, distribution reflects collective solidarity values as opposed to individualist, competitive ones. It sees equal access as a right, not chance allocation based on private capital ownership.
Dive Deeper
Topic relates to:
Accumulation, Extraction & Abstraction
New Economics Series
Reforge The Ring 2- Distribution, Contextualization & Instantiation