Thanks David. This is a very strong and necessary argument.
Asking “viable for whom?” must be one of the most important tests any future-facing pathway must now pass in this metacrisis moment. As you coherently articulate, an emergent pathway may appear viable from the perspective of capital, scale, institutional deliverability or technical efficiency, while quietly displacing burden onto workers, communities, ecosystems or future generations.
The distinction between real viability and displaced burden is especially powerful because it prevents systemic viability from being reduced to the vantage point of the actor who has the power to build, fund or legitimise such a pathway.
Perhaps this also asks us to examine which systemic viability variables are being privileged, and which are being ignored, when a pathway is judged to be viable. In much of the current economic order, capital, scale, efficiency, productivity and institutional deliverability tend to dominate that test. But if trust, agency, legitimacy, ecological renewal and intergenerational responsibility are excluded from that test, then what appears viable may simply be a pathway that has learned how to displace its burden elsewhere.
And this for me is where the deeper shift becomes increasingly visible: from capital optimisation as the dominant test of viability, towards life-coherence as the condition through which viability can become genuinely shared.
But perhaps there is one further condition that critically deepens the argument: dignity.
For me, dignity is the “meta-value” beneath any serious account of viability. It is not simply one value amongst others, but a critical value that makes other life-serving values possible.
If we consider a world without dignity, how could we expect trust, respect, compassion, care, love, belonging, participation or responsibility to take root?
With this perspective, these values should not be regarded simply as a number of abstract moral preferences. They are instead the living conditions of the civic soil from which any meaningful collective and relational existence must grow. They only become possible when people are first recognised as beings of intrinsic worth, before they are made useful, efficient, compliant, productive, measurable or strategically relevant.
This all seems especially relevant in consideration of the examples you highlight: platform work, AI surveillance, climate adaptation, community-led alternatives and under-replenished civic labour. In each case, the displaced burden is not only economic, social or ecological. It may also be dignitary.
People can be made less viable not only by losing income, access or security, but by losing voice, agency, judgement, recognition, relational belonging, and the sense that their lives matter before any system tries to measure or justify their worth.
So perhaps we should regard dignity not just as an ethical addition to the wider viability test, but as a threshold condition. A pathway that scales by degrading dignity may still be effective, innovative, resilient or profitable in a narrow sense, but it is not life-viable in the deeper sense your essay points towards.
And that, for me, is where your argument has real force. Viability should not be treated as a strategic verdict from a dominant vantage point. It should be a shared inquiry into whether a pathway strengthens the wider conditions through which people, places and living systems can endure with agency, legitimacy and dignity.
Thanks for this, Nick. I agree that dignity is a condition for viability, especially in the context of displaced burden. If a pathway erodes voice, agency, recognition, belonging, or the sense that people matter before they are made useful, then the burden being displaced is not only economic, social, or ecological. It is tied to dignity.
Ah, good point. The value of human dignity would come across in the VSM by being part of the System 5 Identity...working to optimize across system participants connects to Ashby's Law: Only variety can absorb variety. At the brass-tacks-level, the system designers would want to set the level of System1 autonomy and System 2 bureaucracy appropriately.
And, thanks for the nudge! Now I'll look up Stafford Beer's Team Syntegrity -- for achieving consensus and coordinating policy without hierarchy. "Including specific mathematically structured protocol for democratic, 3D communication": I'm intrigued Now.
Hey Tibi, I'm applying Beer's VSM work on how organizations and governance systems adapt in changing environments to the futures, regeneration, and systems transition spaces. If Beer asked, "What makes a system viable?", I'm asking, "What makes a future [pathway] viable, and what capacities must be cultivated for preferable futures to become viable and remain viable under pressure?"
Hey, Dave, this is a good, solid wodge of things to think through: feels strong and helpful. My first thought-reactions were that doing things properly Viably sounds Expensive, "Real," and Slow. The way community and government work (in past years) as they aim for legitimacy. We already have individual human speed or slowness, then the network and layers of humans being slower... and ensuring legitimacy and thus viability, properly slow and thoughtful. Do you speak to this part of complexity in your posts? I'll give a look.
Thanks for this comment, Qris. I’ve explored this and similar aspects of governance, and the related perceptions of cost and time, at various points over the last 10-12 years. Much of my work appears at https://medium.com/@davidkish.
I’ve written extensively about the shift from hierarchical organizations to ecosystems. An ecosystem often moves more slowly at first, but once trust, governance, and legitimacy are established, it becomes more adaptive and resilient than centralized structures.
I also looked at how groups coordinate coherently without reverting to either bureaucracy or domination in my exploration of blockchain and the commons.
I've written about the importance of creating infrastructure before systems crises (hinge moments) so that we don't have to build legitimacy, trust, governance, relationships, financing, and coordination in the middle of an emergency.
I might sum up the time and cost issue like this: Many of the systems creating today's pressures result from optimizing for speed, efficiency, and scale while underinvesting in legitimacy, trust, and long-term resilience. Viability is not a rejection of speed. It is an attempt to ensure that what moves quickly can also hold.
Thanks David. This is a very strong and necessary argument.
Asking “viable for whom?” must be one of the most important tests any future-facing pathway must now pass in this metacrisis moment. As you coherently articulate, an emergent pathway may appear viable from the perspective of capital, scale, institutional deliverability or technical efficiency, while quietly displacing burden onto workers, communities, ecosystems or future generations.
The distinction between real viability and displaced burden is especially powerful because it prevents systemic viability from being reduced to the vantage point of the actor who has the power to build, fund or legitimise such a pathway.
Perhaps this also asks us to examine which systemic viability variables are being privileged, and which are being ignored, when a pathway is judged to be viable. In much of the current economic order, capital, scale, efficiency, productivity and institutional deliverability tend to dominate that test. But if trust, agency, legitimacy, ecological renewal and intergenerational responsibility are excluded from that test, then what appears viable may simply be a pathway that has learned how to displace its burden elsewhere.
And this for me is where the deeper shift becomes increasingly visible: from capital optimisation as the dominant test of viability, towards life-coherence as the condition through which viability can become genuinely shared.
But perhaps there is one further condition that critically deepens the argument: dignity.
For me, dignity is the “meta-value” beneath any serious account of viability. It is not simply one value amongst others, but a critical value that makes other life-serving values possible.
If we consider a world without dignity, how could we expect trust, respect, compassion, care, love, belonging, participation or responsibility to take root?
With this perspective, these values should not be regarded simply as a number of abstract moral preferences. They are instead the living conditions of the civic soil from which any meaningful collective and relational existence must grow. They only become possible when people are first recognised as beings of intrinsic worth, before they are made useful, efficient, compliant, productive, measurable or strategically relevant.
This all seems especially relevant in consideration of the examples you highlight: platform work, AI surveillance, climate adaptation, community-led alternatives and under-replenished civic labour. In each case, the displaced burden is not only economic, social or ecological. It may also be dignitary.
People can be made less viable not only by losing income, access or security, but by losing voice, agency, judgement, recognition, relational belonging, and the sense that their lives matter before any system tries to measure or justify their worth.
So perhaps we should regard dignity not just as an ethical addition to the wider viability test, but as a threshold condition. A pathway that scales by degrading dignity may still be effective, innovative, resilient or profitable in a narrow sense, but it is not life-viable in the deeper sense your essay points towards.
And that, for me, is where your argument has real force. Viability should not be treated as a strategic verdict from a dominant vantage point. It should be a shared inquiry into whether a pathway strengthens the wider conditions through which people, places and living systems can endure with agency, legitimacy and dignity.
Thanks for this, Nick. I agree that dignity is a condition for viability, especially in the context of displaced burden. If a pathway erodes voice, agency, recognition, belonging, or the sense that people matter before they are made useful, then the burden being displaced is not only economic, social, or ecological. It is tied to dignity.
I was looking for the connection to VSM (viable system model) - Stafford Beer...
Ah, good point. The value of human dignity would come across in the VSM by being part of the System 5 Identity...working to optimize across system participants connects to Ashby's Law: Only variety can absorb variety. At the brass-tacks-level, the system designers would want to set the level of System1 autonomy and System 2 bureaucracy appropriately.
And, thanks for the nudge! Now I'll look up Stafford Beer's Team Syntegrity -- for achieving consensus and coordinating policy without hierarchy. "Including specific mathematically structured protocol for democratic, 3D communication": I'm intrigued Now.
Hey Tibi, I'm applying Beer's VSM work on how organizations and governance systems adapt in changing environments to the futures, regeneration, and systems transition spaces. If Beer asked, "What makes a system viable?", I'm asking, "What makes a future [pathway] viable, and what capacities must be cultivated for preferable futures to become viable and remain viable under pressure?"
I also updated Article 4 in the series to acknowledge Beer's work.
Hey, Dave, this is a good, solid wodge of things to think through: feels strong and helpful. My first thought-reactions were that doing things properly Viably sounds Expensive, "Real," and Slow. The way community and government work (in past years) as they aim for legitimacy. We already have individual human speed or slowness, then the network and layers of humans being slower... and ensuring legitimacy and thus viability, properly slow and thoughtful. Do you speak to this part of complexity in your posts? I'll give a look.
Thanks for this comment, Qris. I’ve explored this and similar aspects of governance, and the related perceptions of cost and time, at various points over the last 10-12 years. Much of my work appears at https://medium.com/@davidkish.
I’ve written extensively about the shift from hierarchical organizations to ecosystems. An ecosystem often moves more slowly at first, but once trust, governance, and legitimacy are established, it becomes more adaptive and resilient than centralized structures.
I also looked at how groups coordinate coherently without reverting to either bureaucracy or domination in my exploration of blockchain and the commons.
I've written about the importance of creating infrastructure before systems crises (hinge moments) so that we don't have to build legitimacy, trust, governance, relationships, financing, and coordination in the middle of an emergency.
I might sum up the time and cost issue like this: Many of the systems creating today's pressures result from optimizing for speed, efficiency, and scale while underinvesting in legitimacy, trust, and long-term resilience. Viability is not a rejection of speed. It is an attempt to ensure that what moves quickly can also hold.