Resiliency, Materialism, and Markets

Materialism is an ideal market solution but it doesn’t yield resiliency. In fact, materialism is an ideal market solution because it doesn’t yield resiliency. 

To be resilient refers to the ability of a system to hold together, maintain its function, and grow in the face of change.

Only natural and biological processes can be truly resilient. We can only pretend that covering an entire local ecosystem with solar panels or that damning a river is a ‘green solution’ if we’re not sophisticated enough to measure the effects downstream.

In economics, these downstream, unintended effects are called negative externalities. The materialist effectively arbitrages the information gap between limited data and negative externalities. The limitations of the materialist outlook are the source of its appeal to markets. 

The most surprising thing about technology, to those who have never worked in the field, is how crude it is. Our most sophisticated instruments only measure a handful of data points. The aesthetic of technological progress is mostly a marketing gimmick to entice investment capital.

To use isolated data points to justify a product, policy, or course of action, is not a scientific approach. Materialism, as a rigorous scientific discipline, actually confirms the interconnectedness of nature, as it reveals the complex relationships between its parts.

There is a profit motive to produce products that are not resilient. Planned obsolescence is applied through many vectors across product and service lines.

There is a never-ending market incentive to identify problems, and to provide products and services that address these ‘problems’. In a perfectly efficient and honest market, a problem is identified, and a solution is incentivized through the market. But do we have honest markets?

Inevitably, there are bad actors who discover that if they can manufacture a problem, or use data in a way to present a ‘problem’, they can sell a ‘solution’. Bad actors aren’t necessarily cynical, they could be merely misinformed, or improperly interpreting crude data.

In economics this ouroboros, snake eating its tail, structure is called a ‘vicious circle’. Materialism is the perfect vector, seemingly tailor-made for capitalism, to justify the implementation of this cycle.

The application of materialism in markets, especially at scale, does not leverage what is known about resilient, natural processes, but instead intentionally obscures what is known, in order to optimize for cherry-picked targets, often revealed in time to serve cynical strategies.