Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy (dialogue with Michael Garfield)

This was a really rich conversation. Michael just recently launched his new podcast Humans on the Loop. You can find more episodes and the show notes for this episode on his Substack: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-12.

Some brief reflections on the themes we explored:

We began with the premise that money is a form of communication, a means of encoding and transmitting value. Yet the market, in itself, cannot determine what we should value—only culture can do that. And so, if economic life depends upon cultural creativity, we must rethink our assumptions about how markets function and the role they play in shaping our collective future.

Rather than assuming that material production is the foundation of all human activity, with culture as a mere byproduct—the exhaust fumes of industry and capital—we might invert this logic. Culture, with its roots in human consciousness and creativity, is the true source of economic vitality.

Weaving through this conversation was the deeper metaphysical question of emergence. Where does novelty come from? Is it something we create, or is it something we uncover? Drawing from Whitehead’s process philosophy, I argue that emergence is an ongoing negotiation between inherited patterns and spontaneous improvisation. Innovation, in this sense, is never entirely ex nihilo but an act of recombination and reinterpretation. We are participants in an unfolding cosmic learning process, a dynamic interplay between past and future.

If technology is fundamentally an extension of our own cognitive and sensory apparatus—a sort of prosthesis—it is misleading to speak of it as alien or autonomous. The real concern is not whether machines will become conscious but whether we, in the process of externalizing and automating more of our intelligence, will lose sight of ourselves as conscious agents.

While I do not oppose markets per se, I argue that they must be reframed within a larger cosmological and ecological logic. If we acknowledge that markets exist within culture and that culture is, in essence, ludic—driven by play and experimentation—then the question is not whether markets should exist but how they can be redesigned to reward long-term imaginative flourishing rather than short-term extractive gains. The ideal economy would not merely optimize for profit but for the ongoing discovery and refinement of shared meaning.

The conversation also took us into the question of responsibility toward our technologies. In an era when most people are users rather than creators of the tools they depend upon, we risk losing the sense that technology is something we shape rather than something that merely happens to us. Just as parents are responsible for the moral and emotional development of their children, we must take responsibility for the ethical trajectory of our technological environment. Technology is not just a tool—it is an evolving ecology, one that includes and transforms us in ways we often fail to recognize.

The larger stakes of this discussion revolve around the possibility of a truly participatory metaphysics—one in which we neither succumb to the illusion of total control nor abandon ourselves to technological determinism. If we are to live in integrity with our values, we must cultivate an ethos of co-creation, a recognition that the future is not something we passively await but something we are always already shaping. This requires a new relationship to uncertainty, one that embraces the improvisational nature of existence and the profound unpredictability of emergence.