03. The Cheapest Available Behavior - Research Brief
Bioregional Demurrage Money as the Engineering Point for the Next Form of Human Coordination
The third of three research briefs placing bioregional economies within the context of the evolution of human coordination. This brief synthesizes the substrate hypothesis and the TIMN-mycelial overlay, and weaves in a non-coercive, bioregionally-issued monetary form as the operative engineering response. Part 1 and Part 2.
Standfirst
The first brief in this sequence formalized the convergence of M.G. Taylor and Elisabet Sahtouris on a single load-bearing claim: coordination is a property of the substrate that holds the participants rather than a property of the participants themselves. The synthesis came from 4 years of involvement with both subjects, while noticing a deep overlap that had not been published. The second overlaid David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework onto that hypothesis and argued that the +N form, properly instantiated, looks like bioregional mycelial coordination at the planetary scale. This third brief takes up the engineering question that completes the sequence.
1. Abstract
The first brief in this sequence proposed the substrate hypothesis: coordination, in groups and in ecosystems, is a property of the substrate that contains the participants rather than a property of the participants themselves. The second overlaid Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework onto that hypothesis and argued that the +N form, properly instantiated, finds its biological warrant in Sahtouris’s mature ecosystems, its engineering grammar in the Taylors’ DesignShop substrate, and its civilizational instantiation in bioregional regeneration coordinated as a mycelial network of stewardship nodes. Both briefs identified an engineering question they did not answer. If coordination is a substrate effect, and if the +N form requires a substrate that prices symbiosis cheaper than the alternatives, then which substrate variable does the most work?
This brief argues the answer is monetary form. Money is the most leveraged substrate variable in any civilizational coordination architecture because monetary form sets the price of every other behavior; selects for or against the relationships participants can sustain; carries the operative ideology of a society in its most condensed and most enforced form; and is the variable through which the prior dominant TIMN form attempts to capture the next. The brief develops this claim in five steps. First, it draws on Lietaer, Polanyi, Graeber, Steiner, Ulanowicz, Goerner, and Brunnhuber to establish money as a substrate variable with measurable structural properties. Second, it shows that the current monetary substrate (sovereign fiat issued as interest-bearing debt, single denomination across all jurisdictions, enforced by securities law and central-bank infrastructure) is structurally incompatible with the +N form because it prices extraction cheap and symbiosis expensive. Third, it specifies an engineering brief for a monetary substrate that selects for symbiosis: bioregional issuance bound to the natural unit of the watershed; demurrage as a holding cost that compels circulation; commons backing rather than collateral extraction; broad-base seeding through Regenerative Participation Income; and transvestment pathways that convert extractive capital into regenerative substrate without confiscation. Fourth, it surveys the empirical record, drawing on Wörgl, the WIR Bank, Sarafu under Will Ruddick’s commitment-pooling protocols, Chiemgauer, Banco Palmas, Sardex, and the failure modes of Argentina’s Trueque and the UK regional pounds. Fifth, it locates the Valley of Grace project at Genadendal as a living instance at the watershed scale, with appropriate epistemic restraint. The brief separates documented fact, academic inference, structural inference, and speculative projection in the discipline of the prior briefs, engages dissenting voices including Andreotti’s critique of emancipation as a modern-colonial trope, Bollier’s warning about bioregional buzzword capture, Greco’s correction of the standard reading of Wörgl, and Alves’s critique of meta-crisis framings, and refuses the closing reassurance that the work is bound to succeed.
2. Thesis
Money is the most leveraged substrate variable in any civilizational coordination architecture, because monetary form sets the price of every other behavior. The +N form Ronfeldt described will not arrive by the addition of digital connectivity, by exhortation, or by ideology. It will arrive when monetary substrates are deliberately constructed that price symbiosis cheaper than competition, command, or kinship. The substrate that makes that possible is bioregional in its origin, demurrage-bearing in its time profile, commons-backed in its issuance authority, and broadly seeded in its initial distribution. The institutional architecture this brief calls the Emancipation Architecture is the engineering specification. The watershed is the unit. The mycelial network is the topology. Sahtouris supplies the biological warrant. The Taylors supply the grammar. Ronfeldt supplies the developmental position. Gesell, Steiner, Lietaer, Brunnhuber, Ostrom, and Barnes supply the substrate-engineering tradition. The brief proposes the synthesis.
3. Methodological note
This is the third brief in a sequence. The first established the substrate hypothesis from the convergence of two corpora that developed in parallel without mutual citation. The second overlaid Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework on that hypothesis. This brief carries the synthesis to its engineering conclusion. The author has worked on the bioregional implementation of the architecture proposed here at Genadendal in the Western Cape since 2020. The synthesis crosses four bodies of work, two of which the author engaged directly between 2016 and 2020 (the M.G. Taylor and Sahtouris corpora, documented in Brief 1) and two of which are textual (Ronfeldt’s TIMN, documented in Brief 2; the monetary heterodoxy lineage from Gesell forward, documented here). The interpretive frame is the author’s. Where the brief moves from documented fact to inference, this is marked in Section 9. The brief acknowledges that the synthesis it proposes has not, on extensive but non-exhaustive review of the academic and practitioner literature, been published previously in integrated form. Adjacent partial syntheses exist, each carrying part of the argument; the integration is the contribution. External engagement with the present author’s prior bioregional and monetary work has been primarily through long-form podcast interviews rather than through academic citation. The brief is an invitation to that engagement, not a survey of it.
4. The substrate hypothesis, compressed
Brief 1 documented a structural convergence between two bodies of work that developed in parallel without mutual citation. Matt and Gail Taylor, founders of the M.G. Taylor Corporation (1980–2013), produced a methodology for human coordination at the workshop scale, organized around the DesignShop, the 7 Domains framework, the Vantage Points framework, the 14 Axioms, and the NavCenter and WorkFurniture environments. Across thirty-three years of practitioner deployment, the Taylors produced a body of operational engineering specifying how to build a substrate at workshop scale that crosses participants from positional, competitive default behavior into iterative, collaborative, higher-order solution-finding. Their working term for the phenomenon the substrate produces is Group Genius. Matt Taylor’s operational definition states the engineering claim plainly: “the goal of the DesignShop method is to make total environment, physical, mental, informational, workflow within which individuals, teams and groups work with minimal intervention and unintended consequences affecting their result” (legacy.mgtaylor.com).
Elisabet Sahtouris, evolutionary biologist (1936–2024), produced a complementary framework for understanding cooperation in living systems, organized around Margulis’s symbiogenesis, the maturation cycle (unity, individuation, competition, negotiation, cooperation, and new unity at a higher level of organization), three documented evolutionary thresholds (the archaebacterial threshold approximately two billion years ago, the eukaryotic threshold approximately one billion years ago, and the multicellular threshold producing cities), and a typology of ecosystem development inherited from Eugene Odum’s “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development” (Science, 1969). Type I ecosystems are pioneer or immature, characterized by competition, high productivity, low diversity. Type III ecosystems are mature or climax, characterized by symbiotic coordination, high diversity, and the redistribution of resources across species lines. The threshold from immature to mature, in Sahtouris’s framing, is crossed when cooperation becomes more energy-efficient than competition. The framing is thermodynamic, not moral.
The two corpora make the same load-bearing claim from opposite disciplinary positions. Coordination is a property of the substrate that contains the participants. The Taylors demonstrated this in engineered environments at the workshop scale. Sahtouris demonstrated it in evolved environments at the cellular, organismic, and ecosystemic scales. Bernard Lietaer (1942-2019), who corresponded with Sahtouris and who knew her work, made the bridge to economics in plain language: “How would a body survive if we decided that all the blood should go to the brain or the liver, or certain organs should only be irrigated with blood on certain conditions? This is precisely what is happening to our world economy under a monoculture of national currencies” (lietaer.com). The image is exact. Mature ecosystems coordinate by distributed, conditional, reciprocal flows. Immature ecosystems concentrate flow into a small number of dominant nodes. The Taylor substrate engineers the conditions for distributed flow at the workshop scale; the Sahtouris framework names the same pattern at the biological scale; Lietaer applied the same principle to monetary architecture. The substrate hypothesis claims the structural identity across all three.
5. TIMN, mycelial coordination, and the +N form, compressed
Brief 2 overlaid David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework (Tribes plus Institutions plus Markets plus Networks) onto the substrate hypothesis. TIMN, introduced in Ronfeldt’s 1996 RAND paper P-7967 and elaborated across thirty years of further work, holds that human societies progress by adding organizational forms in sequence. Each addition is generative. Each prior form persists; mature societies must hold all four forms in dynamic balance. Tribes coordinate by belonging and identity. Institutions coordinate by command and authority. Markets coordinate by price and exchange. Networks, in Ronfeldt’s 1996 phrasing, coordinate by “heterarchic (or, to offer another term, ‘panarchic’) collaboration among members who may be dispersed among multiple, often small organizations, or parts of organizations” (P-7967, p. 11).
Across thirty years of writing, Ronfeldt has been candid that the word “Networks” is overloaded. In October 2025, in a Substack series titled Rethinking What “Tribes” and “Networks” Are Good For, he proposed renaming the fourth form. Verbatim, from Part I, davidronfeldt.substack.com, October 20, 2025: “’Networks’ is becoming too vague a concept to suit TIMN… naming the fourth form ‘Networks,’ though still accurate and pertinent, doesn’t help as much anymore. Partly that’s because the new field known as ‘network science’ took off in the 1990s-2000s too, only to classify all forms of organization as varieties of networks, including TIMN’s tribes, hierarchies, and markets.” His proposed substitutes are exonets and equinets, with the acronym becoming TIME.
Brief 2 took Ronfeldt’s terminological self-correction as decisive and proposed that the +N form, when properly instantiated, looks like bioregional mycelial coordination at the planetary scale. Three structural reasons supported the claim. First, Ronfeldt himself has converged on a constituency for +N that is bioregional in its grain: HEWE (Health, Education, Welfare, and Environment), which the prior brief argued shares the structural property of place-boundedness, since the relevant feedback loops close at the watershed. Second, Sahtouris’ distinction between immature competitive and mature symbiotic coordination supplies the biological warrant for why a fourth form must coordinate by symbiosis rather than by mere connectivity. The all-channel topology Ronfeldt specified is necessary but not sufficient. A topology of dense connections coordinated by competitive logic produces the dark networks Ronfeldt and Arquilla documented across two decades of netwar research. A topology of dense connections coordinated by symbiotic logic produces what Sahtouris calls a mature ecosystem. Third, the Taylors’ DesignShop methodology supplies the engineering grammar at the workshop scale. The +N form will arrive when substrates are constructed that price symbiotic coordination cheaper than competitive, hierarchic, or tribal coordination. The Taylor corpus is the practical handbook for that construction at the scale of a workshop. Bioregional regeneration is the application of the same logic at the scale of a watershed.
Michel Bauwens has now made the same TIMN-anchoring move from a different direction. In a 2025 chapter co-authored with Rok Kranjc and Mayssam Daaboul titled “Commons Economics,” Bauwens writes: “If we consider the markets and state forms as the first and second institution, and NGOs as the third, then it is clear that these cooperative and networked commons organisations can be considered to be a fourth sector. This is in line with the Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks (TIMN) framing proposed by David Ronfeldt (1996).” Brief 2’s structural claim is corroborated by Bauwens’s parallel anchoring. The bioregional and mycelial extensions remain the present brief’s contribution.
Two engineering questions remain after Briefs 1 and 2. First: of the substrate variables that the Taylors specified at the workshop scale (physical environment, informational tooling, temporal architecture, trained crew, scan-focus-act protocol, Vantage Points calibration), which can be carried up to the bioregional scale, which fail to scale, and which must be replaced? Second: what substrate variable is operative at the bioregional scale that was not operative at the workshop scale because the workshop’s monetary medium was provided externally?
The brief’s answer to the second question, which generates the answer to the first, is monetary form. The Taylor workshop was hosted within institutional or market money, sometimes within NGO money, but never within money bound to the bioregion. At the bioregional scale, the medium of exchange is itself the substrate variable that does the most work. The brief turns there now.
