Sometime around 7500 BCE, in a settlement in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in what is now western Iran, a person made a small cone out of clay. It was about the size of a thumbnail -- unremarkable, easily lost, the kind of object that would mean nothing to anyone who did not know what it stood for. But someone did know. The cone stood for a measure of grain. Not grain itself -- there was no grain in it, no grain attached to it, no grain anywhere near it. The cone was a representation. A token. A small, fired piece of earth that meant something only because two people agreed it meant something. This is where our story begins -- not with coins or banks or interest rates, but with a lump of clay the size of a child's fingernail, standing in for something that was not there.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat at the University of Texas spent decades tracing these objects across the archaeological record of the ancient Near East. What she found overturned the conventional story of how human civilisation became literate. The tokens -- cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, tetrahedrons -- appeared across a vast geographical range, from Turkey to Pakistan, and they preceded writing by approximately four thousand years. Each shape represented a specific commodity: a cone for a small measure of grain, a sphere for a large measure, a disk for a sheep, a cylinder for a domestic animal. They were the species' first accounting system. Before the ledger, before the tablet, before the stylus pressed into wet clay to produce the cuneiform script that we call the beginning of writing -- there were tokens. Small objects that stood for other objects. Fictions, in the precise sense I have been using the word. Shared representations maintained by collective agreement.
Around 3500 BCE, the system evolved. The tokens began to be stored inside hollow clay balls -- bullae -- which were sealed and stamped with the impressions of the tokens they contained. If you wanted to know what was inside without breaking the seal, you looked at the impressions on the surface. And then someone had the insight that would change everything: if the impressions on the surface contain all the information, why keep the tokens inside at all? The three-dimensional objects became two-dimensional marks on a clay tablet. The marks became symbols. The symbols became script. Writing, Schmandt-Besserat argued, was not invented to record poetry or prayer or the names of kings. It was invented to count sheep. The entire apparatus of human literacy -- every novel, every constitution, every love letter, every scientific paper, every text message sent at two in the morning -- descends from a small clay cone that stood for a quantity of grain that was not there. We built civilisation on the ability to agree that something absent could be represented by something present. It is, when you stop to think about it, the most human thing we have ever done.
I begin here because the origin of money is the origin of a technology so powerful that the species that invented it has been unable, in nine thousand years, to master it. And the first thing to understand -- before the criticism, before the diagnosis -- is that this technology was, and remains, an achievement of staggering brilliance.
Consider the difficulty. You are a social primate living in a group of approximately one hundred and fifty individuals. Robin Dunbar's research, which I discussed in Chapter 4, establishes this as the approximate limit of the human brain's capacity for stable social relationships -- the number of people you can know well enough to trust. Within this group, exchange is simple. You give me fish, I give you firewood. If I have no firewood today, you give me the fish anyway, because you know me, you know where I live, you know I will repay the debt -- not necessarily in firewood, not necessarily this week, but eventually, in some form, because we are embedded in a web of ongoing relationships where reputation matters and memory is long. This is what anthropologists call a gift economy. Marcel Mauss described it in 1925 in The Gift: the obligation to give, to receive, and to repay, binding individuals to one another through cycles of reciprocal debt that constitute, in effect, the social fabric itself. The gift economy is not primitive. It is beautiful. It is cooperation distilled to its purest form: I help you because you are part of my world, and my world holds the debt.
The gift economy works beautifully within the trust network. It works because the animals know each other. It works because the reputational cost of defaulting -- being known as someone who takes and does not give -- is, in a group of one hundred and fifty, socially lethal. You cannot disappear into anonymity. Your debts follow you because the same faces follow you, every day, for your entire life.
Now scale the group beyond one hundred and fifty. Suddenly you need to exchange with strangers. The stranger has grain. You have pottery. The stranger does not want pottery. She wants obsidian. You do not have obsidian. In economic terminology, this is the "double coincidence of wants" -- the problem that William Stanley Jevons formalised in 1875 in Money and the Mechanism of Exchange: for a direct trade to occur, each party must possess precisely what the other desires, simultaneously. In a small community with ongoing relationships, this is manageable -- debts are tracked informally, favours are exchanged over time, credit is extended on the basis of personal trust. Beyond the trust network, it is unworkable. The stranger does not know you. You do not know the stranger. There is no reputation to protect, no relationship to maintain, no shared history to guarantee the debt. The gift economy cannot cross the Dunbar threshold. And so the species faced a question that would define everything that followed: how do we cooperate with people we do not know?
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011, made the important argument that the standard economics textbook narrative -- barter leads to money leads to credit -- is historically backwards. There is no record, Graeber demonstrated, of any society primarily organised around barter. Barter appears only at the interstices between societies, or in the aftermath of monetary collapse. What preceded money was not barter but credit -- ongoing networks of obligation maintained through social memory. Graeber was correct about the sequence. But the underlying problem was real regardless of its solution history: at some point, the animal outgrew its trust network, and it needed a mechanism for exchange between strangers.
The mechanism it invented was the token. An object -- a clay cone, a cowrie shell, a disc of electrum, a slip of paper, a number on a screen -- that carries value not because of what it is but because of what it represents. And what it represents is trust. Not personal trust between known individuals, but systemic trust -- the shared agreement that this object can be exchanged for goods and services because everyone else in the system agrees that it can. Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, called money "the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised." He was not being poetic. He was being precise. Money is a trust technology. It solves the problem of cooperation between strangers by replacing personal knowledge with shared fiction.
And here, for a moment, I want to resist the instinct to criticise. The instinct is strong -- the word "fiction" has pejorative connotations, and the trajectory of this chapter will take us through interest, debt, fractional reserve banking, and the discovery that the civilisation's operating currency is created from nothing by the act of lending it. The critical analysis is coming. But first, the acknowledgement. The achievement.
Money fed billions. Not metaphorically -- literally. The token system enabled the coordination of agricultural surplus across populations that would otherwise have starved. It enabled specialisation -- the potter could devote herself entirely to pottery because the token system allowed her to exchange her work for food she did not grow, shelter she did not build, tools she did not forge. It enabled hospitals, libraries, aqueducts, vaccines, the printing press, the telescope, the surgery that saved my younger son's life when he was three weeks old and would otherwise have died from a condition that has been operable for approximately sixty years. None of this happens without the token. None of this happens without the shared fiction that a small object can stand in for a quantity of value and be trusted across thousands of miles, between complete strangers, across generations. I need you to hold this in mind as the chapter darkens, because the temptation to dismiss money as the problem is as dangerous as the failure to see what it has become. The token is not the enemy. The token is one of the most remarkable things our species has ever produced. What happened to the token -- what we allowed it to become -- is the problem.
The impulse -- to extend cooperation beyond the trust network -- was correct. The impulse was, in zoological terms, an extraordinarily successful enrichment strategy for a social species that had outgrown the scale at which its natural trust mechanisms function. What happened next is what happens to every successful adaptation in an environment that keeps changing: it was extended past the conditions under which it worked.
The earliest recorded interest rates come from Sumerian cuneiform tablets dating to approximately 3000 BCE. The rates were not arbitrary -- they were codified, standardised, and eventually enshrined in law. The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1754 BCE, specified interest rates of thirty-three and a third percent per annum on grain loans and twenty percent on silver loans. These rates reflected the agricultural cycle: grain was lent before harvest, when it was expensive, and repaid after harvest, when it was cheap. The premium on grain over silver compensated the lender for the expected price decline. The logic was straightforward, the mathematics transparent, and the system -- at this scale, in this context -- functional.
But embedded in the transaction was a concept that has no biological precedent. The concept that tokens grow by sitting still. Let that register for a moment. In what other domain of life does anything grow without effort?
In every biological system on the planet, surplus is generated through activity. A squirrel buries acorns. A bee collects nectar. A farmer plants grain. The surplus requires work -- metabolic expenditure, time, risk, the physical engagement of the organism with its environment. Interest reverses this logic. The lender deposits tokens. Time passes. The tokens multiply. No work is performed. No grain is planted. No risk is taken beyond the risk of default. The tokens generate more tokens through the passage of time alone.
Aristotle saw this clearly. In the Politics, he distinguished between two forms of acquisition: the natural form, which involves the production and exchange of useful goods, and the unnatural form, which involves the generation of money from money -- what he called chrematistike. "The most hated sort," he wrote, "and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest." He called it the most unnatural of all trades because it violated a principle that the biological world confirms: nothing alive generates surplus by being stationary. Growth requires metabolism. Interest requires only time.
For four thousand years, this objection echoed. Moses, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, Gautama Buddha, Muhammad -- the prohibition against usury appears across virtually every major moral and religious tradition the species has produced. The prohibitions were not identical in their reasoning, but they converged on the same intuition: there is something wrong with money that breeds money. Something that violates the relationship between effort and reward that every organism understands. The medieval Church banned it. Islamic finance still prohibits it. The persistence of the objection across independent cultural traditions suggests it touches something deeper than ideology -- something the animal recognises, even if it cannot articulate the biology. What is it that we sense, across cultures, across millennia, when we feel that interest is wrong? I think the animal knows. The animal knows that nothing in nature grows without being fed.
The biology is this: in nature, compound growth is either bounded or catastrophic. A bacterial colony grows exponentially -- until it exhausts its nutrient supply and collapses. A cancer grows exponentially -- until it kills its host. No organism in the natural world sustains exponential growth indefinitely, because exponential growth in a finite system is, by mathematical necessity, a prelude to collapse. The economist Kenneth Boulding is credited with the observation -- though the attribution is disputed -- that "anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." The joke works because the observation is correct. Compound interest demands infinite growth from a finite system. The tokens must multiply, year after year, and the real economy of goods, services, and human labour must expand to match them, or the system between the tokens and what they represent breaks down. This is not a theoretical concern. It is the structural tension at the heart of every economy that has ever operated on the principle of interest-bearing debt. And it is the water we swim in. Every mortgage, every student loan, every government bond assumes that the economy will grow forever. Does that assumption strike you as reasonable? It does not strike any biologist as reasonable.
But I am running ahead. The first distortion -- interest -- introduced the concept that tokens can grow without corresponding growth in the reality they represent. The second distortion went further.
In 2014, three economists at the Bank of England -- Michael McLeay, Amar Radia, and Ryland Thomas -- published a paper in the Bank's Quarterly Bulletin titled "Money Creation in the Modern Economy." The paper was remarkable not for what it revealed -- economists had understood the mechanism for decades -- but for the clarity and institutional authority with which it stated what the textbooks still obscure. "The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans," they wrote. Not by governments. Not by central banks. Not by the minting of coins or the printing of notes. By commercial banks, in the act of lending.
The mechanism is this. When a bank lends you money -- say, two hundred thousand pounds for a house -- it does not take two hundred thousand pounds from a vault and hand it to you. It does not take two hundred thousand pounds from other depositors' accounts and transfer it to yours. It creates the money. The bank types the number into your account. The two hundred thousand pounds now exists. It did not exist before the loan was made. It was called into being by the act of lending. I remember the first time I read this clearly stated. I read it again. Then I read the source document, from the Bank of England itself, to confirm that I had not misunderstood. I had not misunderstood.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is not a heterodox interpretation. It is the operational description published by the Bank of England itself. "Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money." The textbook model -- in which banks act as intermediaries, collecting deposits from savers and lending them to borrowers -- is, McLeay, Radia, and Thomas stated plainly, "not an accurate description of how money is created in practice."
The implications are worth sitting with. I mean this literally -- put the book down for a moment if you need to, because what follows is either something you already know and have absorbed, or something you do not know and will need a moment to process. The entirety of the modern financial system -- the trillions that flow through economies, the numbers on screens that determine whether people eat or starve, keep their homes or lose them, work or are discarded -- is composed substantially of tokens that were created from nothing by the act of lending them. The money is the debt. The debt is the money. They are the same thing. When the loan is repaid, the money ceases to exist. When the loan is not repaid, the money remains in circulation but the debt does not disappear -- it transfers, it compounds, it becomes the substrate on which the next cycle of lending is built.
Global debt in 2024 reached approximately three hundred and eighteen trillion dollars, according to the Institute of International Finance -- a number so large it has no sensory referent, so I will try to provide one. If you stacked three hundred and eighteen trillion one-dollar bills, the stack would reach from the Earth to the Sun and back approximately one hundred and seventy times. The tokens now exceed, by multiples that are difficult to compute, the total value of every physical object, every service, every hour of human labour on the planet. The map is larger than the territory. The fiction has outgrown the reality it was invented to represent. What happens when a map grows larger than the territory it describes? At what point does the map stop representing the territory and start replacing it?
In the United States alone, household mortgage debt stands at thirteen point two trillion dollars. Student loan debt totals one point eight trillion, making it the second-largest category of consumer debt after mortgages. Forty-three million Americans carry student loan debt, and eighteen percent of them report that the debt makes it difficult to afford daily necessities. These are tokens that were created from nothing, lent at interest, and must be repaid with tokens that the borrower acquires through labour -- real, physical, time-consuming labour -- over periods that frequently span decades. The mortgage. The word itself deserves a moment. It comes from Old French: mort, death, and gage, pledge. A death pledge. The deal dies when the debt is paid or when the property is seized. The etymology is not metaphorical. It is precise. The organism pledges a portion of its remaining lifespan -- twenty-five years, thirty years -- to the repayment of tokens that were created, at the moment of lending, from nothing. We pledge our lives to repay numbers that were typed into existence. Does the animal understand this? I am not sure the animal has ever been told.
I have a mortgage. I should say this clearly, because the tendency in writing about money is to position oneself outside the system being described, as though critique confers exemption. I have a mortgage on the flat in Leiden where the Duplo castle was built and the research papers were spread across the kitchen table. I understand the mathematics of compound interest. I have a doctorate and access to every source cited in this chapter. I signed the document anyway. Not because I was deceived. Not because I failed to understand. Because the alternatives available to me within the current enclosure were worse. Renting in Leiden costs more per month than the mortgage, builds no equity, and provides no security of tenure -- the landlord can terminate with three months' notice. Living further from the university would reduce rent but add commuting time, which would reduce the hours available for writing, research, parenting, and sleep. The organism assessed its options and chose the least harmful one. The enclosure does not require ignorance. It requires that the alternatives be worse. That is the mechanism. Not deception. Not force. Just the quiet architecture of a system in which every exit leads back inside.
Here is where the two distortions combine to form something that a zoologist, observing the species from outside, would find difficult to classify as anything other than a welfare failure.
The tokens are created from nothing. The tokens accrue interest. The organism must repay the tokens -- plus the interest -- through labour. The labour is performed over decades. During those decades, the organism is bound to the institution that employs it, because the cessation of labour means the cessation of income, which means the cessation of repayment, which means the loss of shelter. The organism cannot stop. It cannot pause. It cannot take a year to paint watercolours or sail or sit in the garden, because the tokens do not pause. The interest compounds whether the organism rests or not. The death pledge does not sleep. Do you see the enclosure now? Not the walls and the ceiling -- those are visible. The invisible enclosure. The one made of numbers. The one that follows you everywhere, that converts your time into debt service, that makes every morning a Monday morning whether you are flourishing or not.
A young woman graduates from university in the United Kingdom with student loan debt averaging approximately forty-five thousand pounds. She enters the labour market and begins repaying. She earns enough to rent a room in a shared house. She cannot save for a housing deposit because her rent absorbs too large a proportion of her income. She cannot reduce her rent because she must live near her work. She cannot change her work because her skills have been shaped by the education that generated the debt. The system is circular. The debt funds the education that generates the skills that fund the labour that services the debt. At no point does the animal step outside the loop. Is she free? The question matters. It is the question the enclosure does not want us to ask.
She is not enslaved. The word "slavery" implies force, and no force is used. She signed every document voluntarily. She had options -- other courses, other universities, no university at all. The option she did not have was the one that would have required the system to be different: an education that does not generate thirty years of debt, a housing system in which shelter is not a commodity to be speculated on, a labour market in which the organism's time is valued above the tokens it produces. She was free to choose, within a set of options that the enclosure defined. The freedom was real. The options were designed.
David Graeber made this point with characteristic directness in Debt. Throughout history, he argued, the language of debt has been deliberately intertwined with the language of morality -- in German, Schuld means both "debt" and "guilt"; in English, we speak of "obligations," "dues," and "redemption." The conflation is not accidental. It serves a function: it transforms a structural economic arrangement into a moral one, so that the debtor experiences the debt not as a feature of the system but as a personal failing. "I should have chosen differently. I should have saved more. I should not have taken the loan." The diagnosis is located in the individual. The enclosure is not examined. We do this to ourselves. We feel guilty about our debts the way we feel guilty about our exhaustion -- as though the problem were a character flaw rather than an environmental condition. The enclosure has taught us to blame ourselves for the shape of the cage.
A zookeeper who observed this pattern -- an enrichment system that had become the primary source of the animal's stress -- would not blame the animal. The zookeeper would not conclude that the animal was insufficiently disciplined, that it had made poor choices, that it should have selected different enrichment tokens. The zookeeper would recognise that the token system had drifted from its original function. The tokens were supposed to serve the animal. The animal is now serving the tokens.
I said at the beginning of this chapter that I would resist the instinct to criticise before acknowledging the achievement, and I have not yet done so fully enough. Let me be more explicit, because this matters. It matters because the impulse to dismiss money entirely is as much a failure of understanding as the impulse to worship it.
The impulse behind money was to enable cooperation between strangers. This impulse was not merely clever -- it was generous. It was the impulse of a species that had built something beautiful within its trust network -- the gift economy, the web of mutual obligation, the intricate dance of give and receive that Mauss documented -- and wanted to extend that beauty beyond the limits of personal knowledge. How do I help a stranger? How do I feed someone I have never met? How do I contribute to a community larger than my village? The token system was the answer. And for most of human history, in most of its forms, it worked.
The first coins -- electrum discs minted in Lydia around 600 BCE -- were not instruments of oppression. They were instruments of trust. A merchant in Sardis could trade with a merchant in Miletus because the coin guaranteed the value. The guarantee was not personal -- neither merchant knew the other -- but systemic. The king's stamp on the coin was a promise: this metal is pure, this weight is true, this token can be exchanged. The promise enabled the exchange. The exchange enabled the specialisation. The specialisation enabled the surplus. The surplus enabled the city, the library, the theatre, the hospital. The arc from clay cone to electrum coin to modern currency is an arc of expanding cooperation. Each step extended the radius of trust. Each step enabled more strangers to help each other. This is our species at its best -- finding ways to widen the circle of care beyond the limits of what our neurology can manage alone.
The hospitals were real. The libraries were real. The vaccines were real. My son's surgery was real. The fiction of money produced real outcomes -- real food on real tables, real shelter over real heads, real medicine in real bodies. The impulse was good. The execution was good. For a very long time, the tokens served the animal.
What changed was scale. And this is the pattern that will recur through every chapter in Part Two, because it is the pattern that explains the enclosure: a good impulse, implemented successfully at a scale compatible with the animal's biology, extended incrementally to scales at which the original design assumptions no longer hold, until the system produces outcomes that its original designers would not recognise and would not endorse. We will see this pattern again and again. It is the pattern of our civilisation. The good idea that grew past the animal.
At village scale, the token system works because the community can see it. The tokens represent real goods. The debts are between known individuals. The interest, where it exists, is calibrated to a comprehensible cycle -- grain lent before harvest, repaid after harvest, the premium reflecting a real temporal asymmetry in the availability of a physical resource. At civilisation scale, the tokens have detached from physical reality entirely. They are created from nothing by the act of lending. They compound at rates that demand infinite growth from a finite planet. They bind organisms to decades of labour for the repayment of numbers that were typed into existence. The community cannot see the system. The system has exceeded the Dunbar threshold by orders of magnitude. There is no village to observe it, no web of personal relationships to hold it accountable, no reputational cost for the lender who creates money from nothing and charges interest on the creation.
The fish cannot see the water. The animal cannot see the token system. It is everywhere. It mediates every exchange, every relationship, every decision. It determines where the organism lives, what it eats, how long it works, when it rests, whether it can access healthcare, whether its children can access education, whether it can afford to leave a harmful situation or must remain because the alternatives are economically impossible. The tokens that were invented to serve the animal now constitute the single most pervasive environmental pressure in the human enclosure. Financial stress is the leading cause of relationship breakdown. Financial insecurity is among the strongest predictors of poor mental health. Financial precarity consumes the cognitive bandwidth the organism needs to address every other dimension of its welfare. The enrichment tokens have become the primary stressor. The tool has become the cage. And we, the animals inside it, have been taught to call the cage "the economy" and to measure our worth by how many tokens we can accumulate before the death pledge is paid.
Here is how a zookeeper would see it.
An animal in your care has developed a token-exchange system. This is not unusual -- token exchange has been documented in captive chimpanzees, where researchers at facilities including the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have observed that primates can learn to associate tokens with rewards and will work to acquire them. The system was introduced as enrichment -- cognitive stimulation, a mechanism for rewarding desired behaviours, a way to give the animal agency in acquiring its own resources. Good. This is standard enrichment protocol.
But over time, you notice something. The animal has become increasingly focused on the tokens themselves. It hoards them. It becomes anxious when its token supply is low. It exhibits aggression during token-acquisition activities that it did not previously exhibit. Its social behaviour has changed -- it is less likely to share food, less likely to engage in grooming, less likely to play. Its sleep patterns have shifted. Its cortisol levels are elevated. The tokens were supposed to enhance the animal's welfare. They are now the primary source of its distress.
What do you do? The question is not rhetorical. It is the question our species needs to answer.
You do not remove the tokens. The tokens serve a function -- they enable the animal to acquire resources, to exercise agency, to engage its cognitive capacity. The enrichment was successful. The system worked. The problem is not the tokens. The problem is that the token system has expanded beyond the conditions under which it functions well and has begun to impose costs that outweigh its benefits.
You redesign the token system. You ensure that the tokens remain connected to real outcomes -- real food, real enrichment, real social opportunities -- rather than becoming objects of value in themselves. You prevent hoarding by designing the tokens to expire or to lose value over time, so that the animal uses them rather than accumulates them. You ensure that no animal can acquire tokens at a rate that allows it to monopolise resources, because resource monopolisation in a social species produces exactly the social disruption you are observing. You calibrate the system to the animal. The tokens serve the animal. Not the other way around.
This is not a utopian fantasy. This is standard welfare protocol, applied to a problem that the species has, for nine thousand years, been unable to solve from inside the enclosure. We built the tokens. We can redesign them. The question is whether we will, or whether the water has become so invisible that we can no longer imagine different water.
Let me close with a number. Not the three hundred and eighteen trillion, which is too large to feel. A smaller one. One that sits closer to the body.
The average household mortgage in the Netherlands -- where I live, where the Duplo castle stands, where this chapter was written -- is approximately two hundred and thirty-two thousand euros. The average interest rate at the time of writing is approximately four percent. Over a thirty-year term, the total amount repaid is approximately three hundred and ninety-eight thousand euros. The difference -- one hundred and sixty-six thousand euros -- is the cost of time. Not the cost of the house. Not the cost of building materials, or labour, or land. The cost of time. The organism borrows tokens that are created from nothing and repays them over thirty years, and the additional one hundred and sixty-six thousand euros that it pays above the original amount represents the price the system charges for the passage of time during which the organism occupies the shelter it needs to survive.
One hundred and sixty-six thousand euros. That sum represents, at the average Dutch salary, approximately three and a half years of pre-tax income. It represents, in terms of labour hours, roughly seven thousand hours of work -- three and a half years of the organism's finite, non-renewable, irreplaceable lifespan, devoted to repaying the temporal premium on tokens that were created from nothing. Three and a half years. What would you do with three and a half years? What would any of us do, if those years were returned to us? Would we sleep more? Play more? Sit in the garden with our children more? Would we do the things the animal actually needs, instead of the things the token system demands?
I do not know what to call this. It is not slavery -- the organism consented. It is not fraud -- the terms were disclosed. It is not theft -- the law protects the arrangement and the organism benefits from the shelter. But I do not have a word for a system in which an organism exchanges years of its life for the repayment of tokens that were conjured into existence by the institution to which it is repaying them, and I notice that the absence of a word for something is often the most reliable indicator that the something is the water.
Here is what I do know. Money is the most successful fiction the species has ever produced. It enabled cooperation at a scale that no biological trust mechanism could achieve. It fed billions. It built hospitals. It connected strangers across continents and centuries and made possible the very civilisation within which I sit, in a warm flat, writing about its failures. The impulse was good. The execution was, for a long time, adequate. And then it scaled past the animal, the way every system in this book has scaled past the animal, and the tokens that were invented to serve the species became the framework within which the species lives, and works, and measures its own worth, and determines who eats and who does not, and the animal forgot -- or perhaps never noticed -- that it invented the tokens in the first place. We forgot. We forgot that we made this. And in forgetting, we lost the ability to see that we could make it differently.
The tokens structure the enclosure. They determine its shape, its pressures, its daily rhythms. But the enclosure has other features -- older ones, in some cases, with origins as deep as the clay cones of the Zagros foothills. What happens when the animal breaks the rules of the enclosure it did not design? What does the enclosure do to the animal that will not comply? The answer is in the next chapter. It is the oldest technology in the human enclosure, older than money, older than writing, older than the tokens themselves. It is the cage within the cage. And like every other system in this book, it began as something that made perfect sense.