Conjecture

Specialisation severs effort from visible result, and this is the mechanism that connects the economic argument to the meaning crisis. In a tribal setting effort produced tangible outcomes that motivated and sustained it: a hunter who tracked prey for days got a kill and a feast, a gatherer watched the results accumulate. Larger cooperative networks produce far more per person and in doing so have distanced the individual from the fruits of his labour, so it is subjectively unclear how one worker at a Ford plant or inside the Apple supply chain contributes to output or affects anything around them. Part I attributes part of the rise in meaninglessness and depression to that severed feedback loop. The same specialisation that removes material scarcity removes the legibility of one's own contribution.

Coordination architecture