Non-negotiable
01
Conditions, not merit
Audit the circumstances work gets made under. Never grade the work itself.
Working spec · v0.1
Measure the conditions of creative work. Never its merit.
The industries that manufacture attention need a disclosure standard. Not one that grades whether work is good — the moment a ledger scores merit, somebody has to define good, and you’ve built a ministry of taste in the one industry whose entire job is deciding what good means.
Five principles
Ten metrics
Four unfinished arguments
Nought settled
The five principles of the Human Ledger: conditions not merit; publish everything you measure; floors not targets; count what you export; protect the unmeasured space.
The problem
Kennedy’s critique, running on digital overdrive.
In March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy took apart the Gross National Product in front of an audience at the University of Kansas. His argument was that a purely transactional ledger is both blind and amoral: it counts air pollution, cigarette advertising and the ambulances that clear the highways of carnage, and has no category at all for the health of our children or the beauty of our poetry.
It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. Robert F. Kennedy · University of Kansas · 18 March 1968
Nearly six decades on, the equation hasn’t changed — it has amplified. In the physical era the metric was the accumulation of material things. Today we have monetised human attention, and the new ledger runs on engagement, consumption and output. It counts time on site while being entirely blind to whether that time was learning or anxious, compulsive doomscrolling. It celebrates user growth while ignoring a loneliness epidemic. It rewards content volume and offers no metric for depth.
Run that same logic through AI and it gets worse. The compute spent generating synthetic slop is booked as productivity. The billions spent on detection tools to protect us from that slop are booked as growth. Both the threat and the shield lift GDP, and society is no wealthier for either.
Systemic bug
We identify an easy-to-measure metric → we bend our entire culture to maximise it → we destroy the qualitative things we actually care about.
That is the bug this whole project exists to interrupt. Part I walks the full argument, from Kansas in 1968 to the agency floor in 2026.
The canon
Five principles
Get them wrong and better numbers won’t save us. Get them right and the numbers become an engineering problem.
02
Publish everything you measure
There is no unmeasured world. There is only a privately measured one.
03
Floors, not targets
No upside to exceeding a floor, so no incentive to fake one.
04
Count what you export
Otherwise the ledger is a laundering mechanism with a nice logo.
05
Protect the unmeasured space
Illegible work needs somewhere to survive until it becomes recognisable.
↗
All five, expanded
With the full case for Principle One, and the admission that two metrics break it.
Illustration, not proposal
The table
What those principles look like when they meet a real P&L. Argue with the principles; treat the numbers as illustration.
| Column AThe Growth LedgerWhat we count today | Column BThe Human LedgerWhat we’d have to start counting |
|---|---|
| 01Cost per asset | Copy linkSignal-to-volume ratioOutcome per asset, not assets per month |
| 02Time on site, scroll depth | Copy linkValue-per-minute“Was that a good use of your time?” asked of the audience |
| 03Content output volume | Copy linkOriginality distanceDistance from category convention, and from our own last 12 monthsBreaks Principle One |
| 04Headcount reduction | Copy linkCognitive space ratio% of paid hours spent thinking and making, not QA-ing machine output |
Unfinished
Four arguments I can’t finish on my own.
These are open. Not rhetorically open — actually unresolved. If you have the answer, it belongs in the debate, not in my drafts folder.
Question 01
Who holds the pen?
There are only three answers. A government, and you get direction. Capital, and you get liability management. Nobody, and you get exploitation with good quarterly results. I don’t think there’s a fourth. My own view: the pen belongs to a legislature for the disclosure standard and to nobody at all for the quality judgement. But that’s a position, not a settled fact.
Argue this on LinkedIn ↗Question 02
Which half of the table survives?
I suspect half of it collapses in the debate. I’d like to find out which half — and I’d rather find out from people who have to file the numbers than from people who like the idea of them.
Argue this on LinkedIn ↗Question 03
Who audits it?
D&I and sustainability reporting only grew teeth when disclosure became mandatory and third-party assured. Self-reported human metrics are marketing.
Argue this on LinkedIn ↗Question 04 · the hardest
What stays permanently out of scope — and who guards the boundary?
This is the one I’d most like help with, because a boundary that can be moved by a single majority isn’t a boundary.
Argue this on LinkedIn ↗The list
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