Having used ChatGPT from time to time to sharpen our focus to adequately describe what we’ve been exploring for the last few years (how the way we handle value is changing), I’ve taken a leaf out of Martin Geddes‘s book – using a combination of A.I. platforms (in this case ChatGPT and DeepSeek). At ChatGPT’s suggestion I presented its summary to DeepSeek, requesting a critical review and suggestions for improvement. These are incorporated in the following article:

From Money to Value: DACSO, WiseValue, and the Emergence of Direct Value Handling

Abstract

This article explores an observable transition in how human societies coordinate value: from money-mediated exchange toward emerging forms of direct value handling enabled by digital networks, platforms, and self-organising systems. Drawing on monetary critique, systems theory, platform economics, and contemporary technological practice, it introduces the DACSO (Distributed Autonomous Codependent Self-Organisation) and WiseValue frameworks as lenses for describing and responding to this transition. The argument is not that money will disappear, but that its monopoly over value recognition is being progressively eroded by coordination logics it was never designed to express.

1. Money as an Organising Technology — Not a Law of Nature

Money is often treated as a neutral, inevitable medium of exchange. Historically, however, it is better understood as a social technology: a mechanism for coordinating obligations, claims, and power relations at scale.

A lineage of monetary critique — from Silvio Gesell, Henry George, and Margrit Kennedy, to anthropological and heterodox economic traditions — has argued that interest-bearing money tends to systematically concentrate wealth and decision-making power, irrespective of individual intent. This perspective is not uncontested; mainstream economics typically frames interest as an efficient allocator of capital. Nonetheless, the critical tradition highlights structural effects that persist even under ostensibly fair market conditions.

Crucially, these critiques emerged in an era where large-scale coordination without price signals was technologically infeasible. Their proposals were therefore constrained by the organisational limits of their time.

2. Scale Change: From Industrial Productivity to Cognitive Coordination

The Industrial Revolution increased physical productivity by orders of magnitude over roughly two centuries. By contrast, the past 50 years have introduced tools — the internet, distributed computation, and now AI — that enable coordination of cognition, knowledge, and contribution at planetary scale.

This shift alters what can be organised without direct price mediation:

Wikipedia coordinates millions of contributors without per-contribution payment.
Open-source software underpins much of global digital infrastructure.
Knowledge, culture, and creativity are now routinely shared prior to, or entirely independent of, monetisation.

These systems do not exist outside the money economy; they are hybrid formations, embedded within it through donations, sponsorship, employment, and platform capture. Yet they demonstrate that sustained, complex coordination can occur where money is no longer the primary organising signal.

3. Platforms as Transitional Structures (GEFAM)

Dominant digital platforms — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft (GEFAM) — occupy a structurally ambiguous position.

On one hand, they:

dramatically lower coordination costs,
enable direct contribution at unprecedented scale,
facilitate non-market value creation.

On the other, they:

centralise ownership of monetisation channels,
enclose collective value within proprietary architectures,
extract rents disproportionate to their direct contribution.

These platforms can therefore be read in two ways:

as transitional scaffolds, revealing the feasibility of direct value handling while remaining enclosed within monetary governance, or
as the evolutionary apex of money-mediated capitalism, perfecting extraction through the appropriation of unpaid contribution.

The article proceeds on the assumption that both interpretations remain plausible — and that the outcome is not predetermined.

4. DACSO: Distributed Autonomous Codependent Self-Organisation

DACSO describes a recurring coordination pattern observable across successful non-hierarchical systems:

Distributed — no single point of control
Autonomous — participants act voluntarily and locally
Codependent — outcomes emerge from mutual reliance
Self-organising — order arises without central command

DACSO is descriptive, not prescriptive. It does not propose how systems should operate; it names how coordination already occurs in open-source communities, peer production networks, and informal mutual-aid systems.

What DACSO reveals is that money is no longer required as the primary organiser of contribution in many high-complexity contexts.

5. WiseValue: Value Recognition Beyond Exchange

While DACSO describes the structural pattern of coordination, it leaves open a critical question:

How is value recognised, recorded, and learned from when price is no longer the primary signal?

WiseValue addresses this information problem.

WiseValue proposes:

value as contextual and relational, rather than reducible to a single metric,
contribution histories instead of balances,
reputation, trust, and learning as first-class signals,
feedback loops oriented toward collective improvement rather than extraction.

Here, “value” is used capaciously, encompassing material utility, knowledge contribution, social cohesion, care work, and long-term system health — precisely those forms flattened or discounted by monetary abstraction.

WiseValue is not anti-money ideology. It is a response to the growing mismatch between money’s resolution and the complexity of modern value creation.

6. Institutional Blindness and Metric Capture

Institutions optimised around monetary accounting tend to systematically overlook value that does not pass through price.

This phenomenon is well documented in:

institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell), where organisations converge on measurable norms,
the tyranny of metrics (Jerry Muller), where indicators displace the realities they were meant to represent.

The result is a form of institutional blindness:

unpaid contributions are rendered invisible,
long-term systemic harms are discounted,
qualitative value is collapsed into short-term financial proxies.

Within such frames, reform efforts that leave the underlying value logic intact often reproduce familiar outcomes, even when intentions differ.

7. Challenges, Failure Modes, and Counter-Pressures

The emergence of direct value handling does not guarantee emancipatory outcomes.

Several risks merit explicit acknowledgement:

Recuperation and enclosure: Money-centric systems are adept at absorbing and monetising new coordination forms (as seen in platformisation and crypto-financialisation).
Reputation system abuse: Non-monetary recognition can devolve into opaque, coercive, or exclusionary mechanisms.
Scarcity and allocation: Not all resources are abundant or easily coordinated without price signals.
Persistence of money: Money may adapt rather than recede, hybridising with new recognition systems rather than yielding to them.

These challenges do not negate the transition; they underscore its contested, non-linear nature.

8. Transition, Not Replacement

Historical organising systems are rarely abolished outright. They are superseded when alternative coordination becomes unavoidable.

Money is therefore likely to persist:

as a legacy interface,
as a boundary mechanism,
as a transitional scaffold.

What is eroding is not money itself, but its exclusive claim to value recognition.

9. Conclusion: Direct Value Handling as an Emergent Reality

The central claim of this article is deliberately modest:

Direct value handling is already operating where sustained, complex coordination occurs without central command and without direct monetary compensation as its primary organising signal.

DACSO and WiseValue do not finalise this transition; they attempt to name and clarify it while it is still forming.

As with earlier paradigm shifts, language lags practice. The open question is not whether money can be reformed, but whether we are willing to recognise value where it already exists, even when it does not arrive wearing a price tag.

Indicative References (non-exhaustive)

Silvio Gesell — The Natural Economic Order
Margrit Kennedy — Interest and Inflation Free Money
David Graeber — Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth of Networks
Jerry Z. Muller — The Tyranny of Metrics
DiMaggio & Powell — The Iron Cage Revisited
DACSO / WiseValue essays — outersite.org