HUMANLEDGER

About

A working spec, not a manifesto

This site exists to hold one argument still long enough for people to attack it properly.

Why this exists

Serious institutions are already building pieces of a human ledger. The UN has a Beyond-GDP dashboard. The OECD has How’s Life?. The ONS has sixty well-being measures. Partnership on AI has a workforce well-being framework. The problem isn’t absence — it’s that the work sits in silos that don’t talk to each other, and not one of them lands on a marketing director’s desk.

Nobody has translated Beyond-GDP thinking into an operational instrument for the one industry that manufactures attention for a living. That is the gap this is aimed at.

Who’s behind it

The Human Ledger is written by Rafael Freitas, who has spent twenty years in advertising and marketing — in agencies, in brands, and more recently building AI products for creative teams. The argument comes from watching the same pressure land on the same people from the inside: eternal growth targets, shrinking headcount, and AI deployed for volume rather than judgement.

That vantage point is also the bias. This is written by somebody with a commercial interest in creative work continuing to be done by people. Worth knowing when you weigh it.

More about the work behind it — twenty years of campaigns, businesses and AI products, in rather more detail than belongs on this page.

How to contribute

The useful contributions, in order:

  1. Kill a principle. Five are proposed. Principle One is the load-bearing one and the one I’d defend hardest; the other four are design choices I’d happily lose an argument about.
  2. Fix or kill the two broken metrics. Originality distance and trust delta break Principle One by my own reasoning. They are still in the table because I’d rather find out whether they can be rescued.
  3. Answer one of the four open questions. Especially the fourth: what stays permanently out of scope, and who guards the boundary.
  4. Send a signal. Regulation moves, new research, industry data points. If it belongs in the field notes, send it over.

One deliberate absence

There are no comments here. Self-hosted discussion at this traffic level is a graveyard, and a half-empty comment box makes an argument look weaker than it is. The debate happens on LinkedIn, where the people who’d have to file these numbers actually are.

Licence

The five principles and the ledger table are released under CC BY 4.0. Take them, use them, change them, argue with them in print. Adoption matters more than ownership — a standard nobody can copy isn’t a standard.

Contact

For anything that isn’t a public argument — a correction, a signal worth logging, a speaking request, or a metric you think can be rescued.