Charles Hess
We used to build things that could be touched, that stood in sunlight and cast shadows—bridges, turbines, surge barriers, refineries and other heavy infrastructure of consequence and work you could measure in cubic yards, steel tonnage, sweat and diesel exhaust. The old economy was a monument to substance with value forged in friction and gravity. But now, more and more, we trade in vapor.
The modern marketplace assigns worth not to creation, but to avoidance—to the act of not doing something destructive, wasteful or excessive. We are paid not to emit, not to consume, not to appear, not to exist in certain ways. A century ago, industry made money by moving matter; today, capital flows to whomever can most elegantly prevent motion.
Carbon credits are the flagship of this new metaphysics. We purchase the right to pollute by funding someone else’s restraint.
Money changes hands because trees remain uncut, or methane remains unlit. It’s a remarkable inversion—cash for the conservation of potential energy. In theory, it’s rational; in practice, it’s riddled with moral geometry. We’re commodifying abstinence while the atmosphere keeps the receipts. The less you do, the more you claim to have done.
Attention has followed the same trajectory. Big Tech sells us the distraction, then rents us the cure. You pay for “ad-free” streaming, pay for “focus modes,” pay to escape the very systems that monetized your attention in the first place.
You can now subscribe to silence. Even your own absence has value—your data shadow is a tradable asset. The digital economy thrives on engagement, yet it profits equally from disengagement. The algorithm doesn’t care if you watch or walk away, as long as both behaviors are measurable and compensable.
Empire of Controlled Restraint
The result is an economy built on controlled restraint. We have turned the void into a ledger entry. Economists call it the correction of externalities; philosophers might call it the monetization of guilt. What once was virtue— prudence, moderation, stewardship—is now product. You buy sustainability the way you once bought soap or steel.
There’s genius in this, of course. Civilization has finally found a way to profit from conscience. The problem is that abstraction breeds amnesia. When everything becomes invisible—the carbon, the data, the waterline—accountability dissipates. The further we drift from the tangible, the easier it becomes to forget that “nothingness” still rests on the physical: a grid, a pipeline, a server farm, a coastline.
In my world—large-scale infrastructure—we still measure progress in poured concrete and driven piles. You can’t virtualize a surge barrier or digitize a levee. Water doesn’t care about your app. But increasingly, even the engineering economy is bending toward intangibles: carbon baselines, resilience credits, mitigation metrics.
The bureaucracy of nothingness now rivals the machinery of construction.
Maybe that’s inevitable. Maybe it’s even wise. Humanity has finally realized that not acting can have as much consequence as action. The new challenge is to ensure that our non-actions remain real—that they correspond to measurable physical benefit, not just to an algorithmic certification of virtue.
The danger isn’t the economics of nothingness itself. The danger is believing we can balance the books with symbols. When the market rewards absence over substance, the temptation grows to mistake appearance for achievement. “Offset” becomes a euphemism for “delay.” Silence becomes a brand.
Still, I can’t dismiss the quiet brilliance of it. In a perverse way, it reflects our evolution. We’ve grown from creatures who burned the forest to stay warm, to accountants who pay each other to leave the forest alone. The invisible has become valuable precisely because we’ve learned how fragile the visible is.
Maybe that’s what progress looks like in the 21st century: a civilization learning to intentionally do less. A species mature enough to profit from its own restraint—or arrogant enough to think it can. Either way, the markets are open, the servers are humming and the new commodity is absence itself. We’ve learned to build empires of thin air and invoice the void.