Most of us have watched something we cared about get measured, and get worse for the measuring.
In 1998, ten daycare centres in Haifa began fining parents who turned up more than ten minutes late. The fine was small, about ten shekels. Late pickups roughly doubled. When the fine was taken away, the problem persisted.
Before the fine, being late violated a social norm. After the fine, being late had a price, and a price is something you can simply decide to pay. The fine eroded the sense of responsibility by turning a relationship into a transaction, and this couldn't simply be undone by removing the price tag. Rebuilding a norm takes empathy and care and time, and nobody has a line item for that.
Michael Sandel made that study famous in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. He uses it for a general claim, which is that markets don't only allocate goods, they express and promote attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Put a price on something and you change what people take it to be. Sandel's conclusion is that we ought to be having a public argument about where the limits of markets should fall, and he's careful not to draw the line himself.
Marcus Barrick's book starts roughly where Sandel stops. He has spent about fifteen years following that same observation down to its root. His conclusion, put briefly, is that our economic system doesn't have a measurement problem. It has an ontology problem. It treats a world of living processes as though it were a world of things, and then profits from the fragmentation.
His book is called Healing Fragmentation, and Grokkist Press is publishing it.
What the book argues
Marcus came to this through engineering physics and neuroscience, eventually finding that neither discipline alone could fully account for the situated, relational character of experience. What he found instead was systems theory, process philosophy, 4E cognitive science, and a distinction he builds the whole book on.
A product economy is founded on representations of value. Prices, property, votes, metrics. Feudalism and capitalism and communism are all product economies in his sense, because they all trade in stand-ins for the thing itself. A process economy is non-monetary and arises from meaning or concern. It's relationally embedded, commons-based, and its pinnacle examples are care work, education work, ecological work, and real innovation. Rather than serving an abstract end goal, it orients towards and aims to support that which is meaningful, transformative, and cannot be sold by the unit.
The things that are transformative, done without a goal in mind, and impossible to sell by the unit.
His claim is that we keep trying to run the second on the machinery of the first, and that every time we do, we stamp out the intrinsic motivation that made the work worth doing. Even if no-one intends it, this happens because a process forced into the shape of a product becomes exploitable, and what gets extracted is a fraction of what was actually there.
… a process forced into the shape of a product becomes exploitable, and what gets extracted is a fraction of what was actually there.
The book doesn't call for abolishing the product economy. It calls for teasing the two apart and rebalancing, and it takes some care to show why the process economy's incompatibility with capitalism is a feature. A reform that can be absorbed will be absorbed.
If you want to meet Marcus before you meet the argument, he told the story of how he got here in his Red Thread Talk, Interrelating our Collective Agency in a Fragmented Era, and we've published a readable version of it.
Why we chose this process
Here's the part that made us do something unusual.
Marcus's argument is that you cannot have a process: a process is something you enact. Which puts a publisher in an awkward position. Hand a finished treatise about relational process across a counter, wrapped and stamped, and you risk turning the book into exactly the kind of object it's arguing against.
So we're not doing that. We're releasing it in the open instead, one section at a time, with readers in the room. In Marcus' own words:
I’m inviting readers into this process to explore where it resonates, where it meets resistance, what questions it opens, and what it makes possible when encountered from different lives and perspectives. Those conversations will help shape how the book is framed and carried into the world—and allow us to practice the kind of collective sense-making that the book itself advocates.
Like most things that happen at Grokkist, it's an experiment of sorts. So let me try to be clear about what "joining the process" actually means.
The manuscript is complete. The argument is fully developed, and Marcus has spent years polishing its five sections. We're not looking for help rewriting his work, and we're not putting his thesis to a vote.
This process will shape the places where the manuscript meets the reader: the opening pages, the framing that says who is speaking and why they care, the moment key concepts are introduced and how readers first encounter them. What happens in this circle will become new material that welcomes readers into the text and helps them to build a transformative relationship with it. Alongside this, we're writing a second text, the account of how the whole thing came to be, which doesn't exist yet in any form.
So the offer is precise. The manuscript is ready, and now it needs to encounter its audience and discover how to welcome them in. This is the process we hope you'll join us in.
The manuscript is ready, and now it needs to encounter its audience and discover how to welcome them in. This is the process we hope you'll join us in.
The aspirations of this process were given words in the discussion after the talk itself. Amber, who is a fine artist and psycho-spiritual therapist and had never touched systems theory, asked whether the book and the circle would be accessible to someone brand new to these ideas. And Alok, who works in sociology of science, answered her before Marcus could:
A badly constructed fact is less dangerous than a poorly imagined fact. What Marcus is doing is elaborating the full canvas with which we need to imagine the facticity of being a material, symbolic, cultural species. He's framing questions we don't know to ask and definitely don't know to ask well. And when Amber was asking, my heart just wanted to jump up and say, come, come to the book club, because the questions are more important. All these scientists and engineers don't do a good job of imagining as artists do.
In scholarly publishing there's a concept called open access, which means the work isn't behind a paywall. That's one kind of accessibility. There's another kind, which is whether a person can actually encounter the ideas, understand them, argue with them, and put them to use in their own life. A book can be entirely free and still be closed to almost everyone.
For a book like this one, the second kind matters more. If it only lands with people who have already read the same books and know the same references, it has failed at the precise thing it's asking for. So we need all kinds of people to encounter it early, while the shape of it can still respond.
Alok added one more thing later, which has more or less become the design brief:
We're not wanting to grow our reading lists. We're actually wanting to be practitioners of these things that we are reading about. Artists have no trouble being practitioners. Musicians don't read a score of music, they play it in their heads.
Inside the reader circle
The mechanics are simple, the rhythm is spacious, and participation is flexible.
The book comes in five sections: diagnosis, meaning, agency, narrative, and the process economy. We release one section roughly every two months, starting with Section One in September 2026. Each section goes by email to people in the circle, with a few questions to read alongside it.
Between the releases we gather. The first gathering is in the second half of October 2026, once Section One has had time to sink in. Marcus opens each one with a short talk, twenty minutes or so, to reacquaint everyone with the territory and say what he currently hopes the section is doing. Then the room opens. There will be light facilitation and questions to think with, and there is deliberately not much more structure than that.
The sections are shared with the circle for the purposes of the process, and we ask that they stay in it. This isn't a published edition, and it isn't a substitute for one.
The whole arc runs about twelve months, and at the end of it we publish two things. The collected book, with its new framing chapters carrying what came out of those rooms. And the companion text, which is the record of what a community-powered knowledge artifact looks like when someone actually tries it, written down so the next person can do it better.
We'll call that the enduring version rather than the final one. Nothing is ever final. It's an infinite game.
What we're asking of you
Read a section every couple of months. Come to a conversation. Say the thing you're not sure is clever enough to say, because in our experience that's usually the useful one.
You don't need a background in economics or philosophy or systems theory. Plenty of the people in the circle don't have one. The circle wants artists and carers and teachers and builders and people who came for the questions, at least as much as it wants people who already know the literature.
There's no cost. Grokkist is sponsoring this project in full, which we're doing because we want to learn how to publish this way and Marcus's book is worth learning with.
Sign up for the reader circle below. Tell us your name, what draws you to it, and what you think you might bring. We'll come back to you with the details, the date of the next gathering, and whatever has been released so far.
The ideas in this book are chewy. That's why the rhythm is slow, and there's time to digest.
If you've found this after it started
This page will outlive the calendar printed on it, so let's deal with that now. It doesn't much matter when you arrive.
Sign up whenever you find this. We'll send you every section released so far, with the questions that went alongside each one, and you'll be on the list for the next gathering. The only barrier to entry is the desire for a good discussion with your fellow readers.
This isn't a course with prerequisites, and each conversation will be facilitated so that newcomers can enter at any point in the process. Whether you've read every word or are still contemplating the first paragraph, your contributions are welcome. In our experience the person who asks the question they think is too basic is the one the room needed.
And if the whole arc has finished by the time you get here, the form still works. Say hello and we'll tell you where the book has got to, and what we're doing next.
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