The Evolution of Entrepreneurship
Introducing Framers as the next iteration of entrepreneurship: Farmer ⇢ Forger ⇢ Founder ⇢ Framer
As an entrepreneur, you’ve felt the urge to build something, fix something, or create something new. What if this urge is something deeper than personal ambition? Could the entrepreneurial drive be Earth’s metabolism moving through you?
For more than a decade, I’ve tracked civilizational transitions. More specifically, I’ve tracked how the world is navigating the transition from the end of the Cycle of Globalization to whatever emerges next.
But something always niggled me: How does entrepreneurship itself change during this cycle?
Then I realized I was asking the wrong question.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t ‘change’—it metabolizes (processes) different substrates.
Or stated differently, the domain in which entrepreneurship happens has evolved over the past 12,000 years:
Farmers processed soil (Neolithic Revolution)
Forgers processed coal and steel (Industrial Revolution)
Founders processed data (Digital Revolution)
Framers process consciousness itself (Noospheric Revolution, currently unfolding)
With this pattern established, I’d like to propose an entirely new definition of the notion of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship [en·tre·pre·neur·ship] n.
The conscious participation in Earth’s metabolic creativity — the process by which Earth, through human awareness and action, transforms available energy and material into novel forms that serve the continuation and evolution of life.
This definition is more than metaphor; it’s a biological and cellular fact that plays out in any living system.
I know what you’re thinking. Today’s entrepreneurship doesn’t feel life-serving. It feels extractive, exploitative, destructive.
True entrepreneurship has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with aliveness.
When a bird builds a nest, is it ‘entrepreneuring’? Absolutely. It’s transforming available materials into a form that serves life’s continuation.
When mycorrhizal fungi trade nutrients with tree roots, is that ‘business’? Yes. It’s metabolic exchange that increases total system health.
When you compost your food scraps, you’re entrepreneuring, because you’re participating in Earth’s endless cycle of death-into-life.
The word entrepreneurship has been kidnapped by extraction and the rapid-growth Materialist phase of human development. We’re taking it back.
Framers (the next iteration of entrepreneurship) don’t ‘start businesses.’ We become conscious compost, by transforming the dying worldview of separation into the fertile soil from which regenerative culture can grow.
This is biology. This is love. This is Earth remembering herself through us.
Which brings us back to the question: How has entrepreneurship — this metabolic process — actually served life?
This pattern of Farmer ⇢ Forger ⇢ Founder ⇢ Framer shows us the answer: entrepreneurship functions as social ATP — the universal energy currency of human civilization.1 Just as every cell requires ATP to maintain life, every culture requires entrepreneurship to maintain vitality. Without ATP, cells die. Without entrepreneurship — without the transformation of energy and material into novel forms — cultures ossify and collapse.
Side Note: In late-stage empire, financialization replaces transformation of material and energy into goods. In this phase, capital trades only in abstractions of abstractions, creating no new energy forms. This is negative ATP: the civilization consuming its stored surplus without metabolic renewal. It is the final stage before collapse. Financialization is what hollows out society, and it’s what we’re witnessing now.2
ATP functions as an energy coupling mechanism. It captures energy from one reaction and makes it available for another, enabling cellular work that would otherwise be impossible. Entrepreneurship operates identically at social scale: it couples available energy from one domain to unmet needs in another. The farmer couples solar energy through photosynthesis to human nutrition. The forger couples mineral deposits through mechanical work to goods society needs. The founder couples networked attention through information access meeting the informational needs of society. Both ATP and entrepreneurship exist because energy and need are rarely found together — they require an intermediary to bridge the gap.
The Farmer perceives soil fertility and a need for food, transforms the soil through cultivation, and distributes surplus through trade. The Forger perceives mineral potential, transforms it through manufacturing, distributes value through markets. The Founder perceives network effects, transforms them through platforms, distributes connection through code.
It’s the same mechanism, just with a different substrate each time. All of them operate in service to life.
Entrepreneurship through the ages has served life, and in order to continue doing so, it must evolve.
We’re not entrepreneurs IN the world.
We are the world ENTREPRENEURING herself.
To understand this more fully, let’s explore how the domain of entrepreneurship has abstracted over time, in an ongoing mission to serve the continuation and evolution of life.
Farmer (Soil | Zero Abstraction)
Direct relationship with land. Physical proximity required for production and exchange. Agricultural knowledge created surplus for trade.Forger (Factory | Low Abstraction)
Severed link between entrepreneur and production site. Global supply chains replaced local dependencies. Management became the primary entrepreneurial skill.Founder (Computer | Medium Abstraction)
Software and platforms generated value through network effects. Physical assets became secondary to digital infrastructure. Business models operated globally without geographic constraints.Framer (Consciousness | High Abstraction)
Platforms operating on consciousness itself. Collective intelligence enhancement through networked awareness. Morphic resonance, co-creative adaptation, and temporal fluidity integrated.
This trajectory offers hope beyond metacrisis narratives and so that’s why the Framer OS Substack exists. My objective is to answer three basic questions:
How can this interpretation of history help readers?
What can this worldview help them achieve?
Why should they care?
Who this is for
A Framer doesn’t need validation. A Framer responds to the evolutionary tug that the status quo resists.
The Framer domain is not for everyone. We will always need Farmers, Forgers, and Founders. But if you feel the metabolic pressure to transform consciousness itself — if you recognize that your creativity is not yours but Earth’s — then perhaps you’re already Framing.
The whole question about the ethics of entrepreneurship — especially for those questioning everything about business — is about whether you’re ready to embrace the entrepreneurship of the planet herself and become the next iteration of entrepreneurship: a Framer. Perhaps it’s not so much about considering something new, but asking whether you’re willing to remember you already are one.
If you’ve had doubts about where entrepreneurship is going — especially during the Metacrisis — it helps to recognize that Earth is entrepreneuring through you right now.
The only choice is whether you participate consciously or not.
Adenosine Triphosphate, or ATP, is a small, relatively simple molecule. It is the main energy currency of biological cells, much as money is the main economic currency of human societies. ATP value exchange in nature is essential for life. It allows cells to obtain the energy they need to survive and to perform all of the cellular processes that keep them, and the body which houses them, alive. There are lessons we can learn about value exchange from ATP.
In late-stage empire, ‘entrepreneurship’ often becomes pure financialization — the creation of abstract financial products layered upon abstractions. A derivative of a derivative of a bet on a future price of something that may never exist. This is negative ATP rather than entrepreneurship. It is the consumption of civilization’s stored energy without creating new forms. It’s economic autophagy. Real entrepreneurship transforms energy: farmer → food, forger → machines, founder → platforms. Financialization transforms only claims: derivatives → synthetic CDOs → algorithmic trading on volatility indices → market bets on those bets. True entrepreneurship creates surplus. Financialization extracts from future surplus until the system collapses. When capital decouples entirely from energy transformation — when markets trade only in abstractions of abstractions — the civilization has entered its terminal phase. The financialization of nature itself (carbon credits, biodiversity banking, ecosystem service markets) is the final symptom: attempting to commodify Earth’s metabolism to sustain the extraction paradigm just a little longer. This is why the emergence of Framers matters. We’ve abstracted beyond the productive into the pathological.