Humanity is the Measure

Optimization, Institutional Formation, and the Thinning of the Human Commons

We live in the age of optimization.

Everything must be optimized:

the workflow,
the labor market,
the quarterly report,
the classroom,
the body,
the platform,
the supply chain,
the engagement metric,
the self.

And yet all around us we see the signs of a society growing harder and harder for human beings to inhabit.

Which raises the question our ruling ideology rarely pauses long enough to ask:

Optimizing for what?

Because optimization is not neutral. Every society selects for outcomes and suppresses others. Every economy rewards certain forms of life and punishes others. Every incentive structure is an anthropology in motion.¹

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We know how this works.

A small-town school board gathers in the library on a Tuesday night.

Coffee percolates in the back beside a tray of grocery-store cookies nobody really wants. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. Old basketball trophies sit behind glass along the hallway outside. Somebody’s dad still wears his work boots to the meeting because he came straight from the mill.

The superintendent arrives, a three-ring binder under his arm, thick with reports — charts and trend lines, targets and performance metrics:

reading scores
math proficiency
graduation rates
college placement statistics
objective, quantifiable achievement.

It feels scientific.
It feels progressive.
It feels like the future.

The district down the road is already climbing the rankings. Families are moving there. Grants are flowing there. Ambitious teachers want to work there. Their schools are rated an eight. Ours is still a six.

The superintendent has studied the formula carefully.

More time for tested subjects.
More emphasis on measurable outcomes.
More optimization around the metrics that matter.

Nobody in the room hates children.
Everyone believes they are helping children succeed.

Slowly, surely the institution begins reorganizing itself around the new deliverables.

Woodshop gets chopped.
Orchestra, slashed.
Student newspaper, defunded.
Debate club, discontinued.
Theater, privatized.
Athletics become pay-to-play.
Gifted program gets withdrawn.
Language program, cut and cut and cut again.
Recess, rationed.
Counselors, reduced under impossible caseloads.
Libraries convert to testing centers.
Increasingly teachers teach how to pass tests.

In early returns, the numbers improve.

The district climbs from a six to an eight. The dashboards glow green. Recognition follows. Families move in. Property values rise. Funding increases.

And while the district grows more competitive, its children are growing less whole.

Less curious.
Less confident.
Less capable.
Less civic-minded.
Less resilient.
Less rooted.
Less joyful.

Sawdust disappears from the hallways.

Folding chairs stop scraping cafeteria tile before winter concerts.

Fewer students stay late building sets for the spring musical.

Fewer arguments break out in debate club about history and justice and what kind of country we want to become.

Nobody in the room hates children.
Everyone believes they are helping students succeed.

This is how societal transformations usually arrive.

Incrementally. Procedurally. Administratively.

Not as coup.
As optimization.²

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Back in the ’90s, turning humanities into sciences felt like the future.

We had won the Cold War. We had new tools. New computational capacities. New models. New managerial techniques. New ways of measuring and ranking and coordinating institutions at scale.

The impetus to lean in felt like obligation.

The youthful progressive looked at the gains: efficiency, legibility, predictive capacity, optimization.

The conservative elder asked: What disappears when this way of seeing becomes sovereign?³

Time has revealed the wisdom of the concern.

Because models are not neutral mirrors.
They are filters.
Nets.
Ways of seeing.

And every filter is designed to catch certain things while allowing other things to pass through.

The optimization regime elevated filters designed for efficiency, legibility, scalability, prediction, and extraction into positions of governing authority over human systems.

And so the realities those filters were incapable of retaining —

belonging,
stewardship,
reciprocity,
wonder,
civic trust,
craftsmanship,
ecological embeddedness,
moral formation,
durable community,
embodied competence,
intergenerational obligation —

the human commons itself —⁴

gradually lost institutional standing.

Not because they ceased to matter.

Because the governing filters increasingly treated them as noise.⁵

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Societies work this way too.

A society optimized for extraction over time produces its own extraction regime:

asset concentration,
labor precarity,
monopolization,
addictive engagement,
subscription dependency,
surveillance,
friction asymmetry,
enclosure,
financialization.

And that regime produces extraordinary rewards for those positioned nearest the extraction points.

The system is not irrational from the perspective of those harvesting the gains.⁶ And around those gains an economy forms — trafficking in favors and tastes of that sweet, that nasty, that gushy stuff — until entire sectors of society grow dependent upon the continuation of the harvest itself.

And because the incentives are real, the optimization deepens.

Exhaustion schemes become profitable.
Attention traps become profitable.
Subscription mazes become profitable.
Private-equity strip-mining operations become extraordinarily profitable.
Addiction becomes business model.
Outrage becomes revenue stream.
The runaround registers as cost savings.

The outputs are not accidental failures of the system — they are the system working as designed.

Extraction begins by teaching us to see living things as resources before we ever touch them as such.

Our forests become timber inventory.
Our rivers become water rights.
Our neighborhoods become real estate inventory.
Our fellow citizens become labor supply.
Attention becomes engagement metrics.
Friendship becomes networking.
Children become future productivity.
Education becomes workforce preparation.

Life rendered legible for extraction.⁷

And over time a society organized around extraction conditions people to perceive themselves extractively too.

We begin asking:

How marketable am I?
How productive am I?
How visible am I?
How optimized am I?
How monetizable am I?
How scalable am I?
How useful am I?

The extractive gaze gets internalized.

That is existentially devastating.

It explains the burnout.
The performativity.
The anxiety.
The identity instability.
The loneliness.
The permanent self-surveillance.
The restlessness.

Compelled to relate to ourselves and to one another primarily through extractive categories —

The self is no longer encountered as person, citizen, neighbor, parent, friend, or participant in a living ecosystem.

The self becomes portfolio.⁸

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And eventually the system begins cannibalizing the human commons itself:

Trust erodes.
Attention fragments.
Social cohesion collapses.
Institutions lose legitimacy.
Relationships thin.
Ecological stability deteriorates.

The extraction regime begins consuming the substrate necessary for its own continuation.

That is the late-stage feeling so many of us already sense when we say:

“Everything’s a scam now.”

Not merely moral disgust.
Recognition that reciprocity itself is collapsing.⁹

A fragmented society cannot effectively resist the extraction regime because fragmentation itself is one of the regime’s core outputs.

The superorganism loses coherence because the constituent layers no longer experience themselves as belonging to a shared living whole.¹⁰

The isolated individual confronts planetary-scale systems alone:

platforms,
monopolies,
financial networks,
algorithmic systems,
surveillance infrastructures,
vertically integrated extraction regimes.

And when the superorganism loses coherence, its collective power dissipates.

This is why estrangement serves the optimization regime.

Disconnected people are easier to monetize.
Easier to isolate.
Easier to exhaust.
Easier to manage through algorithmic mediation and consumption cycles. Easier to convince that belonging to Amazon Prime or Costco Club, Starbucks Rewards or Uber One is a viable substitute for human belonging.

Once systems become sovereign over humanity rather than subordinate to it, the inversion is complete.

The tool reaches through the hand.¹¹
The model governs the human.
The institution forgets the people for whom it exists.
Civilization consumes the humanity that legitimizes it.

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The logarithmic tax code restrains pathological accumulation before wealth hardens into domination. Its counterpart must establish an equal and opposite principle:

Loving parents the world over teach their growing children

Leave the room in better condition than when you entered it.

Ancient wisdom.

But republics must obey the same law.

A society cannot permit private actors to extract immense wealth while exporting the downstream costs onto families, communities, institutions, and the commons itself.

Exhaustion.
Addiction.
Ecological damage.
Loneliness.
Fragmentation.

For decades the public has absorbed the losses while those nearest the extraction points harvested the gains.

R > E ¹²

Restoration must exceed extraction.

What extraction depletes, extraction must restore — and more. Because systems require resilience margins.

And no citizen should fall below the material threshold required to live, work, belong, raise children, care for elders, serve neighbors, and participate meaningfully in self-government.¹³

Not just survival, participation.

That is the standard ordinary citizens should be able to look their representatives in the eye and demand: those who extract must restore more than they deplete, and no citizen may be left beneath the floor of meaningful participation.

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We know what thriving humanity looks like.

We see it in summer ballfields and packed live-performance theaters, in farmer’s markets and workshops humming with apprentices, in neighborhood cookouts and Main Street parades, children running ahead laughing.

Because the measure of a society is not merely what it produces.

The measure of a society is the kinds of people it makes easier to become.¹⁴

And every society, whether it admits it or not, selects for something.

To select on purpose is already to optimize for the selected trait.

What matters is what we choose to reward.
What we choose to cultivate.
What we choose to optimize for

We choose one another. We choose humanity.

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¹ David Graeber repeatedly argued that bureaucratic and economic systems are never neutral administrative arrangements; they encode assumptions about human nature and produce corresponding forms of social life. James C. Scott similarly demonstrated how modern states and institutions simplify human systems into administratively legible categories optimized for management rather than flourishing. See David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

² The neoliberal transformation of late twentieth-century institutions did not typically arrive through overt abolition of democratic systems, but through procedural managerial reforms emphasizing efficiency, competition, privatization, quantification, and market coordination. Intellectual roots trace through the Mont Pèlerin Society and later crystallized through Thatcherism, Reaganism, the “Washington Consensus,” New Public Management, and managerial consulting regimes that increasingly treated institutions as optimization problems. See Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

³ Critiques of technocratic rationality emerged from multiple traditions throughout the twentieth century. Michael Oakeshott warned against reducing practical human traditions into technical systems. Jacques Ellul argued that technique inevitably expands beyond its proper domain into sovereign social authority. Alasdair MacIntyre later described the fragmentation of moral traditions under bureaucratic modernity. See Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

⁴ The concept of the commons historically referred not merely to shared economic resources but to the social, civic, ecological, and moral conditions sustaining communal life itself. Elinor Ostrom’s work challenged the assumption that commons inevitably collapse absent privatization or centralized control, while Wendell Berry repeatedly emphasized that healthy communities depend upon durable reciprocal obligations extending beyond market logic. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977).

⁵ Optimization systems necessarily privilege measurable variables while marginalizing realities difficult to quantify. Goodhart’s Law — “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — captures one dimension of this phenomenon. Contemporary critiques of metric fixation similarly warn that institutions increasingly distort themselves around administratively legible outputs. See Marilyn Strathern, “‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University System,” European Review 5, no. 3 (1997): 305–321; Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

⁶ Late-stage extractive systems often appear socially irrational while remaining internally rational from the perspective of actors positioned nearest the points of accumulation. Thorstein Veblen, Karl Polanyi, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, and Matt Stoller each describe different dimensions of concentrated extraction, enclosure, monopoly consolidation, and crisis opportunism under advanced capitalism. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007); Matt Stoller, Goliath (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).

⁷ Modern extractive systems frequently depend upon reducing living realities into administratively tractable categories. Heidegger warned that technological modernity increasingly “enframes” reality as standing reserve available for use, while James C. Scott described state and managerial simplification as processes rendering complex human systems legible for control. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Scott, Seeing Like a State.

⁸ Contemporary neoliberal culture increasingly pressures individuals to understand themselves as entrepreneurial projects requiring perpetual optimization, branding, monetization, and self-surveillance. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

⁹ Human societies depend upon generalized reciprocity and social trust extending beyond immediate transactional exchange. Robert Putnam documented the collapse of civic association and social capital across late twentieth-century America, while Émile Durkheim warned that atomization and anomie destabilize collective life itself. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Émile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: Free Press, 1951).

¹⁰ The metaphor of civilization as a layered organism or superorganism appears across systems theory, ecology, cybernetics, anthropology, and political philosophy. Healthy systems maintain coherence across nested scales: individual, family, community, society, civilization. Fragmentation across these layers produces systemic brittleness and declining collective capacity. See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968); Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

¹¹ Human beings have always extended themselves through tools; the danger emerges when tool logic begins subordinating human purposes to technological imperatives. Relevant parallels appear in Heidegger’s analysis of technology, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Kevin Kelly’s technological evolutionary framing, and Tristan Harris’s warnings regarding persuasive technologies and algorithmic governance. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010); Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, “The AI Dilemma,” Center for Humane Technology, 2023.

¹² The closest constitutional antecedents to the restorative principle proposed here likely emerge from the Preamble’s commitment to “promote the general Welfare” and secure the blessings of liberty “to ourselves and our Posterity,” later expanded through anti-monopoly traditions, ecological economics, civic republicanism, indigenous stewardship traditions, and modern critiques of externalized social costs. See U.S. Constitution, Preamble; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944; Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons; Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (Vatican City, 2015); Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, arts. 71–74 (2008).

¹³ The restorative principle proposed here requires not only limits on pathological accumulation, but also affirmative protection of the material conditions necessary for meaningful participation in republican life. Classical republican traditions generally understood liberty not merely as noninterference, but as the possession of sufficient independence, security, and civic standing to participate in self-government without domination. Modern democratic societies similarly depend upon broad access to the social foundations of participation: stable housing, nutrition, healthcare, education, family formation, civic inclusion, and freedom from conditions of chronic precarity that render formal political equality functionally hollow. Contemporary political philosophy often frames this as the threshold beneath which democratic participation itself begins to erode. Expressed formally:

Pᵢ ≥ Pₘᵢₙ

where meaningful participation (Pᵢ) must remain above the minimum threshold (Pₘᵢₙ) required for citizens to function as durable participants in republican life rather than merely surviving subjects within an extractive order. Related antecedents appear in Aristotle’s account of the polis as existing for the good life, republican traditions opposing domination and dependency, Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed “Second Bill of Rights,” Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, and contemporary civic republican theory emphasizing the material preconditions of democratic agency. See Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

¹⁴ Classical political philosophy generally understood politics not merely as administration or production, but as formation: shaping the kinds of citizens, communities, and moral cultures capable of sustaining collective life. Aristotle described the polis as existing not merely for life, but for the good life. Republican traditions similarly tied liberty to civic virtue, participation, and the cultivation of citizens capable of self-government. See Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).