Conjecture

Value is unstable twice over, and the second instability is the interesting one. The value of products depends on the pools of knowledge and knowhow that make them possible and on what a society needs, so it cannot be stable while either is changing. But knowledge and knowhow have no inherent value either: the value of each chunk is affected by and dependent upon the other chunks present in the social network, so the worth of a technology cannot be assessed in a vacuum because its utility depends on the presence or absence of other technologies. Part I reads the whole system as interdependent and identifies that as a hallmark of self-organised criticality. The printing press is the case: invented more than once, and only transformative where the surrounding pools existed.

Capital mechanisms