Conjecture

The unit a dominant system of production contracts with becomes the unit of social life: machine-age firms hired individuals, not clans, and within a few generations the extended-kin constellation, with its entitlements owed for who you are rather than what you produce, nearly vanished, leaving people obliged to assemble a self and choose their affiliations. Ansary, ch. 24: "Companies didn't hire clans, they hired individuals"; "kinship often made claims on people unrelated to the purposes of the company"; feudal and tribal narratives granted "entitlements that derived from a person's social ties, not from his or her productivity"; "As machines proliferated, these social constellations pretty much vanished"; people were "not just free to construct their own unique personalities, but obliged to." That an economy which contracts with a person-plus-agent will reshape the person in turn, and that a contribution-credit system pays only for productivity and so drops the great-aunt's place at the table, is Leo's step and a caution on P6.

How groups think together