Overview

Animaconomy is a philosophical, cultural, and design manifesto for a new epoch of value — an age in which economics evolves from the extraction of resources to the cultivation of aliveness.

Drawing from art, moral philosophy, place-based transformation, and artificial intelligence, the book argues that humanity’s next great revolution will not be political or industrial, but ontological: a re-anchoring of how we define, generate, and exchange value itself.

The book emerges from the author’s work across civic systems, applied AI, and regenerative economics — and culminates in the thesis that every act of creation, cooperation, and awareness contributes to a living field of value: the Animaconomy.

Core Premise

“Value emerges wherever awareness meets engagement.”

Capitalism, in its current form, measures value through scarcity and control. Conscious capitalism attempted to humanize this system by introducing empathy and purpose — yet it remained transactional.

Animaconomy transcends both. It proposes that the real wealth of a society lies in its capacity to sustain aliveness — creativity, coherence, relational vitality, and moral imagination — across all systems of life and labor.

Structure

Prologue – The Inheritance of Calm

The book opens with a meditation on Atlas Partnership’s performance of Gabriel and the unfinished American inheritance of liberty.

Through this reflection, the author introduces the paradox of modern freedom: that the pursuit of mastery and the longing for safety — Nietzsche’s master, and slave moralities — still govern how we organize our economies and identities.

The prologue sets the emotional and moral tone: liberation must now be understood as coherence, not control.

Part I – Genealogy of Value

1. The Moral Economies of Power
   Reinterprets Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality as a story about the evolution of economics: from domination (master morality) to dependence (slave morality), and shows how these dualities still underlie capitalism, socialism, and all systems of exchange.

2. The Shadow of Capital
   Traces how capitalism’s narrative of productivity evolved from moral theology — the “Protestant work ethic” as salvation through labor — and how this psychology still binds modern workers.

3. The Market as Myth
   Reframes the market as a cultural operating system — not a neutral mechanism, but a moral imagination that must now be rewritten for life-affirmation rather than extraction.

Part II – The Science of Aliveness

1. The Field Equation
   Introduces the theoretical backbone of Animaconomy: value as a dynamic field generated by the interaction of awareness (A) and engagement (E).

   
   Aliveness = f(A × E)…
   Explores its parallels in thermodynamics, ecology, and cognitive science — positioning “aliveness” as a measurable yet poetic economic principle.

2. Systemic Intelligence and the Future of Work
   Articulates Modern Ancients’ future-of-work thesis: that AI can either automate bondage (efficiency without meaning) or amplify freedom (coherence through creative participation).

   
   Describes frameworks for designing systemic intelligence that cultivates structural agency in cities, organizations, and digital economies.

3. The Body, the Mind, and the City
   Maps how animaconomic systems mirror human physiology — circulation, metabolism, and nervous coherence — suggesting cities themselves can be living organisms when designed with feedback loops that sustain vitality.

Part III – The 12 Mirrors of Value

Each “mirror” represents a field of economic reflection — a way of generating aliveness through relationship.

The mirrors serve as archetypes that balance innovation and integrity.

Each mirror is a portal — a way for individuals, organizations, or cities to assess their vitality index. Together they form a framework for measuring Animaconomic ROI — Return on Integrity, Imagination, and Interbeing.

Part IV – The Civic Field

1. Place-Based Brand Transformation
   Chronicles how the East Riverfront Innovation Coalition (ERIC) and the Intermediate Terminal Building serve as living laboratories of the Animaconomy — converting abandoned industrial heritage into a hub for regenerative innovation.

2. Character Developer and the Culture of Participation
   Details how cultural intelligence tools, narrative modeling, and participatory design can realign communities with their own agency — creating civic systems that learn as living organisms.

3. Policy for Aliveness
   Outlines how governments and institutions can adopt animaconomic metrics: measuring vitality, belonging, and coherence alongside GDP, equity, and sustainability.

Part V – The Animaconomic Imagination

1. The Mirror of Work
   Explores work as an evolutionary stage of consciousness — from survival labor to expressive vocation.
   Argues that automation should not eliminate human labor but transform it into a medium of meaning.

2. The Market of Meaning
   Envisions a creative economy where advertising becomes ritual, storytelling becomes governance, and branding becomes moral technology.

3. Toward the Next 250 Years
   Concludes by returning to America’s 250-year experiment with freedom. Proposes that the next declaration of independence will not be political but existential — freedom from duality, from disconnection, from lifeless systems of value.

Core Concepts

Aliveness as Currency: The fundamental wealth of any system is its capacity to sustain creative, emotional, and ecological vitality.

Structural Agency: The design of systems that empower individuals and communities to act autonomously while remaining interconnected.

Systemic Intelligence: AI as a civic infrastructure that learns from human values rather than optimizing against them.

Return on Aliveness (RoA): A new metric integrating social, ecological, emotional, and economic health into a unified index.

Economy of Presence: The reorientation of value around awareness, relationship, and care as productive forces.

Tone and Style

Animaconomy moves between philosophy, design science, civic storytelling, and visionary prose.

Its style echoes Lewis Mumford, Ursula Le Guin, and Iain McGilchrist — intellectually rigorous yet poetic, civic yet cosmic.

Each chapter alternates between reflection, diagram, and practical framework, inviting readers to feel the new economy rather than merely understand it.

Intended Impact

For economists: A paradigm shift from scarcity-based valuation to vitality-based modeling.

For technologists: A blueprint for humane AI and post-industrial civic systems.

For policymakers: A new language for measuring collective well-being.

For artists and entrepreneurs: A moral and imaginative grounding for regenerative creation.

For citizens: A reminder that the power to create value has always been within them.

Closing Vision

“The future of freedom will not be decided by who rules the market,

but by who remembers that value itself is alive.”