How to Build a 21st Century Economy
The Wealth of Networks
What if I told you that our economy can be fundamentally transformed, and that it would mostly take bringing one class of markets into the 21st century — a class we already rely on every day, but barely see?
What does ‘fundamentally transformed’ actually mean in practice?
It means that we can have an economy where individual self-interest aligns with the common interest.
It means that we can solve the problem of public goods (and the free rider problem) and make taxation voluntary in the economy — without expecting everyone to suddenly become saints.
It means that we’ll have a “trust layer” for the economy, so that research and journalism can be done credibly and in the public interest.
It means that we can eliminate the need for artificial scarcity, as goods can be directly produced for society’s benefit.
It means that all knowledge can be made publicly accessible, while contributors get compensated based on impact.
It means that joblessness will no longer be a problem, and that the economy will have effective ways to deal with businesses who create societal harm of any kind.
It means that people will finally get rewarded for the impact they create in society, so they can do meaningful and fulfilling work.
And it means that communities and nations will have a stronger incentive to cooperate, rather than fight over resources — not because human nature changes, but because the structure of the game does.
Many of these outcomes sound too good to be true, sure, but it’s really not because they are so fantastical — it’s because our current system is so outdated that it’s hard for us to imagine a well-functioning economy that actually works in people’s interests. To see why that is, and why the ‘impossible’ might not be impossible at all, we need to look at how the global economy is really put together.
So before we can talk about transforming our markets, we need to first understand why our system is outdated, and where it is failing. For that we need a crash course in how the global economy is structured — and in particular, in the one layer almost nobody talks about directly, even though everything rests on it.
The Global Economy
The global economy works as a network of interconnected national economies, where each national economy is made up of three economic layers.
These layers consist of a Base Layer, which includes information and public goods markets and serves the entire economy; a Commercial Layer, which serves businesses through commercial markets; and a Consumer Layer, which serves individuals and households through consumer markets.
The purpose of the Base Layer is to provide the basic infrastructure and knowledge that makes markets possible in the first place, and to ensure even-handed treatment of all economic actors. As this layer is meant to serve the economy as a whole, it is commonly operated by government. This is where the rules of the game are written — and where things start to go wrong.
The Base Layer supplies a sovereign currency, laws and courts, property rights, regulation, and public services. It generates knowledge, standards, and shared infrastructure. Without this foundation, economic activity can’t really get off the ground, much less grow. But what happens when the foundation itself stops being trustworthy?
Above the Base Layer sits the Commercial Layer, where commercial markets combine inputs from the Base Layer with labor and capital to produce the goods and services that businesses use.
At the outermost layer are consumer markets. This is where production meets everyday life — where goods and services finally reach people and economic value becomes tangible in the form of consumption.
Running through all of these layers are capital and financial markets. They move money, manage risk, and allocate investment, linking activities within countries and across the globe.
At the same time, national economies are connected through trade, treaties, and payment systems, allowing goods, services, and capital to flow internationally while still operating under domestic rules.
The result is a global economy that is both layered and networked: layered within each country, where each market depends on upstream inputs, and networked because national economies are deeply interdependent rather than self-contained. Which means that if something is broken at the very bottom — at the Base Layer — the damage doesn’t stay contained for long.
The Broken Trust Layer
So what’s broken with this system? Why does it feel like so many different crises are all happening at once?
Why do we have a crisis of trust in institutions and media? Why do we have a fear of AI and automation leaving much of the workforce unemployed? Why is our information ecology so broken that it’s hard to make sense of the world (and AI is likely to make it exponentially worse)? Why is the next generation in developed countries expected to be poorer than the previous? And why do mega corporations seem to be in a race to the bottom, where they try to extract greater profits at the expense of everyone else?
All these are not unrelated. They point to problems with the foundation itself — the Base Layer of the economy. Because when the foundation is shaky, the rest of the economy shows cracks.
And what’s the problem at the Base Layer?
The problem with the Base Layer is that it is supposed to function as the “trust layer” of the economy. It only works if people can rely on the data, assumptions, and judgments that guide decisions at this level, and believe that those decisions are genuinely made in the public interest.
For the Base Layer to serve the common interest of the entire economy, it must not only act in that interest, it must be visibly and credibly doing so. If people can’t see or verify that, suspicion fills the gap.
That, in turn, requires that its decisions be grounded in reliable data. The way this data is produced has to be transparent, robust, and clearly oriented toward the common good, and not toward any particular faction or interest group. Otherwise, even good decisions start to look like power plays.
If people doubt the integrity of the information that underpins the Base Layer, trust in the entire structure built on top of it begins to erode. And once trust erodes, something much more dangerous starts to form.
But here is the trouble: the Base Layer is operated by government, and the political process — whether in democracies or autocracies — inevitably creates a conflict between the common interest and the incentives politicians face to gain and maintain power.
Even when a government genuinely acts in the public interest, there is no systematic, credible way in the current system for it to demonstrate that it is not favoring its allies, donors, or key voting blocs at the expense of everyone else. There’s always a plausible story that what looks like “public interest” is in reality “special interest” with a more convincing narrative.
Because government cannot prove that it is acting solely in the common interest, yet must use public funds to operate the Base Layer, it is forced into a bad binary choice: act despite public suspicion about its motives, or fail to act at all.
When it chooses not to act, some of the responsibilities that properly belong in the Base Layer are pushed up into the Commercial or Consumer Layers. But firms in those layers also cannot credibly show that they act in the common interest rather than simply pursuing profit and shareholder value. So if neither governments nor corporations can be trusted to run the trust layer, who — or what — can?
This creates a vicious cycle. As information becomes less trusted, the public cannot tell whether government actions are truly in the public interest.
Because government cannot be trusted to run media or social media platforms, these functions are shifted to the Commercial Layer. But there the dominant incentives are to maximize attention, views, and clicks rather than to seek truth or serve the common interest. The incentive structure itself begins to corrode the information base everyone depends on.
Opportunists then exploit this distrust — and the attention-driven incentives of commercial media and social platforms — to further undermine confidence in institutions and in any notion of shared reality.
That makes it even harder for the Base Layer to function, because its legitimacy erodes every time people can’t agree on basic facts. And when you can’t agree on basic facts, what kind of economy can you really have?
An increasingly distrusted Base Layer is then less able to regulate harmful behavior or address externalities created by powerful firms; those firms can frame any enforcement as partisan persecution or political retaliation. And in an environment of pervasive distrust, many people find that story compelling.
That undermines enforcement further, which in turn makes the system look even more captured and ineffective. The more it looks captured, the less people trust it; the less they trust it, the harder it is to enforce anything.
At the same time, when it is difficult to credibly show how public goods benefit society as a whole, it becomes politically harder to allocate public funds to them at all.
Over time, this weakens public goods markets, reduces the resilience of the economy, and leaves the entire system more fragile and less capable of serving the common interest. And that fragility sets the stage for something else to appear — something the current system is not designed to escape from once it starts.
The Economic Vortex
Without an effective trust layer providing structural integrity to the economy, what we get is the formation of an economic vortex. But what does that actually look like in motion?
What is an economic vortex? Think of one of those coin vortex toys you might have seen at a science museum or in a shopping mall. You drop a coin near the outer edge and it starts circling slowly, but as it spirals inward it accelerates, moving faster and faster until it disappears at the center.
The economy behaves in a similar way when there is no effective Base Layer, except that what forms the vortex is the race to the bottom by corporations, where the greater the competition, and concentration of wealth, the greater the harm to society. At first, the spin is barely noticeable. By the time you feel it, you’re already halfway down.
Why does this vortex form? It starts with a degraded information ecology that makes it harder for the Base Layer — for government — to respond when corporations make profits by cutting costs in ways that create public harm.
When the public cannot agree on basic facts, or cannot see clearly who is causing which harms, it becomes much easier for firms to externalize costs and much harder for the Base Layer to push back in a legitimate, trusted way. As a result, harmful business models are rewarded and copied. Copying them becomes the rational choice.
This dynamic sets off a race to the bottom. Firms that profit at the expense of the public gain more wealth and power, while those that try to internalize social costs or act in the common interest are put at a competitive disadvantage.
As wealth and influence concentrate, the government becomes weaker and more constrained in dealing with the situation, both politically and practically. The more you need a strong Base Layer, the less capable it becomes.
Over time, more and more wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, automation accelerates joblessness, and there are fewer incentives to produce things directly for public benefit.
Meanwhile, the information ecology continues to degrade. AI and social media make it even harder to make sense of the world, amplifying noise, outrage, and manipulation.
But who benefits when people can’t make sense of the world around them? It certainly isn’t the people — it’s powerful interests. These interests can better shape narratives, drown out criticism, and extract even more profit at the public’s expense.
In such an environment, when government does act against any particular corporation, the move is easily framed as an attempt to help rival corporations or as partisan retaliation. So each intervention further polarizes trust instead of rebuilding it. Every attempted fix becomes more fuel for the vortex.
The deeper the economy falls into this vortex, the more harm is inflicted on society. The end state is hard to see clearly, but the direction is dystopian: a kind of techno-feudalism in which people depend on a small number of corporations for basic subsistence. A world where democracy is purely ceremonial, and a few entities control most critical resources and digital infrastructure, and where ordinary people live increasingly at their mercy.
The slide into the vortex is gradual at first, but as competition accelerates, as wealth concentrates, and without any credible institution to affect the trajectory, the pull inward just keeps accelerating until the system breaks.
So how do we reverse the slide into the vortex?
It’s clear that no amount of intervention in the economy would be effective before we rebuild the structural integrity of the economy — before we restore trust in the Base Layer.
But how do we even begin to restore trust? The entire global economy is made up of national economies where the Base Layer is run by governments. But, as we’ve already established, restoring trust is not a task that governments are well suited for.
So what can we do? We can’t just sit around hoping that government reinvents itself. Especially when everything is trending in the wrong direction and the slide into the vortex is accelerating.
What we need therefore is an alternative framework — one that empowers individuals to act from the ground up. This is where network economies come in.
Network Economies: A New Trust Layer
The idea with network economies is that you don’t need a whole national economy to switch systems all at once — you can start small, prove that it works, and expand from there. The question becomes: what does an economy look like when the trust layer is designed from first principles, rather than inherited from 20th century politics?
A network economy sets up its own Base Layer, which in turn makes it possible for Commercial and Consumer Layers to operate on top of it. In other words, it provides all the basic functions an economy needs, but in a very different way from a nation-state.
Network economies differ from national economies in a few important ways:
Participation is voluntary, and members can opt in or leave at any time.
They do not require a centralized government; they rely on programmatic, distributed governance and value consensus for decision-making.
They don’t need territorial sovereignty; they only need monetary sovereignty.
They can work at different scales, from small communities to global networks.
They use inflation‑neutral monetary expansion instead of taxation.
Together, these features allow a network economy to do something national economies cannot: build a Base Layer that can actually maintain public trust. The whole system is designed so that incentives point toward credibility, transparency, and aligned interests. But how does that design translate into real decisions?
At its core, a network economy exists to promote the common prosperity of its members. That means its Base Layer has to work in a way people can trust: decisions need to be made in the common interest, and public funds need to be used carefully and visibly for that purpose. So how does it get there?
It starts with clear rules, explicit alignment around the goal of shared prosperity, and built‑in mechanisms that make it very hard for bad actors to manipulate the system.
A network economy is formed when founding members pool resources, decide whom the network is for (a community, municipality, region, industry, shared interest, and so on), define membership rules, and decide how member influence is weighted.
They then define a Value Consensus Mechanism: the process by which the network agrees on what it values, how much it values it, and under what conditions funding is released to contributors. This is where the “trust layer” of the network actually gets implemented in code and process.
There can be many possible implementations of such a mechanism, but the goal is always the same: everyone needs to see that decisions are transparent, grounded in credible public data, and that public funds are used sustainably in the common interest rather than captured by any particular group.
Abundance Protocol is one example of a Value Consensus Mechanism. It is designed to satisfy these criteria and to make manipulation by bad actors self‑defeating, rather than rewarding.
Interest Alignment
The primary interest of members in the network is not to accumulate raw influence for its own sake, rather, it’s to maximize their ability to prosper within the network. To do that, they want two things: more members and more (Base Layer) contributors.
They want more members because a larger network means more opportunities to trade, cooperate, and make a living. They want contributors because contributors build the infrastructure, knowledge, and public goods that make the network more productive and resilient.
To attract members, the network has to show that:
The rules are clear and predictable.
The system is fair and meritocratic.
Influence corresponds to real contribution.
Decisions are made transparently and in the public interest.
The currency maintains its value over time.
To attract contributors, the network has to send a clear signal about what it values and then actually pay fairly for contributions that deliver that value.
If a network underpays contributors, it simply discourages future contributions. That slows economic growth and damages the prosperity of its own members. But if it overpays — remembering that compensation comes from monetary expansion — it dilutes the currency, makes holding it less attractive, and pushes members to exit.
So it’s in the network’s own interest to compensate contributors fairly. Fair compensation preserves the currency’s value while maximizing future growth and shared prosperity. Notice what’s happening here: fairness is no longer just a moral appeal; it’s necessary for success.
That balance is not enforced by a benevolent ruler; it emerges from the incentives of members who are free to join or leave and who all feel the impact of bad decisions.
Putting It All Together
At this point, the network has:
A clear set of rules.
A Value Consensus process.
An alignment of interests around maintaining a credible Base Layer that signals what the network values and fairly compensates those who create it.
With these pieces in place, the Value Consensus process can generate credible “demand signals” (what the network wants and how much it values it) and “supply signals” (how contributors are compensated once the impact of their work is realized). So what does that look like when the stakes are real?
This gives the network functioning information and public goods markets in its Base Layer. And with those in place, the network can maintain the structural integrity of its economy.
Consider a concrete example. Suppose there is a risk that a particular chemical is harmful. The network can:
Signal how much it values an independent study of this chemical’s effects.
Fund that study through its Base Layer.
Based on the results, impose a fine on companies using the chemical, proportional to the harm they cause to the network and its members.
Even if a company doesn’t trade directly with the network, the network can impose the fine on members who buy from or sell to that company. This reduces the incentive to do business with the company and nudges it to change its practices.
Because members can audit the study data and see how the decision was made — including how the fine was calculated and why — there is little room to claim that the process was arbitrary or corrupt. The network has both the information and the legitimacy to act in the common interest.
By contrast, a national economy can fine companies, but it cannot easily prove that its process is neutral, that the data is trustworthy, or that political interests did not affect the decision.
Companies can claim they are being targeted, and the public has no way to settle the question definitively — which is exactly how the system keeps sliding further into the vortex. Network economies offer a way to interrupt that slide.
Scaling trust across networks
Perhaps the most counterintuitive feature of network economies is that they are not meant to compete in the way states or corporations do today. Their job is not to dominate or exclude, but to faithfully project the demand and values of their members into the world. Each network economy, with its own currency and value consensus mechanism, reveals a high‑definition signal about what it cares about and is willing to fund: research, infrastructure, local services, open‑source tools, and more.
When many network economies do this at once, their signals don’t cancel out; they add up. If one network sees that another is funding a certain kind of work, it can join in and amplify that signal rather than free‑ride on it. Free‑riding would undermine trust in that network and make contributors view it as a riskier place to invest their time and talent.
The result is an emergent, decentralized public market that spans networks and aggregates their demand, so contributors can see where their work will have the most impact and be most fairly rewarded.
Emergent Coordination
This same logic produces a second emergent effect: coordination instead of competition over shared resources and infrastructure.
In the current system, nations and even municipalities often end up competing over scarce resources, tax bases, or investment, and states sometimes even go to war over them. Internal politics and zero‑sum thinking turn potential win‑wins into lose‑lose outcomes.
Network economies, by contrast, are structurally pushed toward cooperation when shared infrastructure can create more value for everyone.
Imagine three “municipal networks” that each want to build roads for their members. Each network could fund an isolated road plan that ignores the others. But a road system that connects all three municipalities would generate more economic activity for each of them.
Because their demand signals are tied to expected growth, the shared plan produces stronger signals — and thus more justified funding — than three disconnected projects ever could.
So while national economies often stumble into coordination failures, network economies tend to produce coordination that uses resources more efficiently and benefits everyone involved.
And what makes this even more remarkable is that they can do it without a top‑down government ordering anyone around; the cooperation emerges from the way their incentives and public demand signals are structured. Which raises a bigger question: if this architecture works at the level of networks, what happens when it scales?
A 21st Century Economy
The new network economies architecture creates a historic opportunity to reverse the slide into the economic vortex and completely transform our economy.
We can enter an era where individuals can freely join the communities and ecosystems that serve them, where taxation is voluntary, and where public funds actually benefit the public.
In such an economy, individual self‑interest naturally aligns with the common interest, because the best way for members to prosper is to contribute to everyone’s prosperity. Instead of competing to extract from a shrinking pie, people compete and collaborate to expand the pie they all share.
With the establishment of a “trust layer” for the economy, we can — for the first time in history — self-sustainably fund public goods. And we can do so in a way that the return on investment is clearly seen by all.
The network’s inflation-neutral monetary expansion model ensures that the value of the currency is maintained while no one free-rides on public goods. And, since network credibility underpins success in this model, every network wants to fairly reward those who contribute to its prosperity — both at the level of businesses and the individuals that work for them.
Research, open‑source tools, local infrastructure, and shared knowledge all become first‑class economic goods, since without them the economy’s structural integrity crumbles.
In this new economy we can finally have business models where media and social media work for the public interest. This way, instead of a constantly deteriorating information ecology we can make sense of the world around us.
And when you have a robust trust layer for the economy, you can even counter fake AI content and entire media influence campaigns. This can only be done effectively if you have a powerful AI model that can detect manipulation. But more importantly, the AI needs to be open sourced, so that anyone can trust that the detection process was credible, and not just another proprietary AI distorting the information ecology.
You cannot have sustainable funding for such a powerful open source AI in the Commercial Layer, because it wouldn’t be profitable — why would people pay for something they can just copy? This can only be done at the Base Layer, and only if the Base Layer has credibility.
Much like powerful open source AI, there are countless other technologies and innovations that cannot be produced profitably at the Commercial or Consumer Layers. That’s because profit at those layers requires scarcity, or artificial scarcity, of the product. But at the Base Layer it only matters that the product contributes to the prosperity of the network — the ROI.
And so this new economic paradigm vastly expands what can be produced in the economy — both at the Base Layer and all the new products throughout the economy that the Base Layer will enable.
This expansion in economic possibilities will create an abundance of work — and not just any kind of work. While Al and automation can take care of all the menial tasks, people will be able to do meaningful and fulfilling work for society’s benefit.
Restoring the structural integrity of the economy will also end the race to the bottom of corporate giants. While corporations will continue to compete, they won’t be doing it at the expense of the public. Instead, they would have to internalize any cost they wanted society to pay for. This way, competition will benefit the public, and the race would be for what the companies can produce to benefit people more.
This is what “fundamentally transformed” means. It doesn’t mean tearing down existing institutions, or making people adapt new systems against their wishes. Rather, it means building alternatives and empowering people to come together for their common prosperity.
And it means creating an economic architecture where trust is earned by design, public goods are first‑class, coordination failures are resolved, and the system itself pushes individual self‑interest and the common interest in the same direction.
Let’s Build a 21st Century Economy
A 21st century economy isn’t going to build itself. Ideas like this only become real when enough people understand them, talk about them, improve them, fund them, and come together to start running actual experiments.
That also means treating this not just as a technical design, but as the basis for a movement: people willing to test, refine, and govern these systems together, and to offer a clear alternative to the economic vortex we’re being sucked into.
Network economies were designed to empower us to act — and not wait around for bureaucrats, politicians or powerful interests to transform the systems that serve them. So let us act.
Trust is the only value layer.