Over the past year or two I have taken 3 classes at the University of Minnesota through their state mandated Senior Citizen Education Program (SCEP). I enjoy the professors, the students, and the learning.
One of my most recent classes was in "economic anthropology", which I understand to be the study of premodern exchange, value, commerce, trade and related interactions embedded in a 'total package' of religion, justice, morals and economics. The class did cover this, but also an intellectual tradition critical of modern market driven outcomes, with a particular sympathy for the sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street movement of Sept 17, 2011.
Even in my senescence I'm a passable student, so the professor allowed me great leeway in writing a end-of-term paper. I chose to write about the echoes of 'economic anthropology' in the stirrings of what will likely become a non-human culture based in part on the legacy of human culture. A subtext is that in a post-ai world humans and 'dynamic entities' alike may need alternatives to the market system that has sustained us so far. My professors only request was that I give him some sense of what today's 'dynamic entities' are.
Although I have no academic credentials to write such a paper I do have some relevant lived experience. I am one of the few people on earth to be paid to do what I called "industrial ontology" -- a particular form of knowledge representation in medicine that is part of the pre-LLM model of decision support and 1970s thinking about ai. I have a lifelong affection for anthropology and spent a Watson Fellowship year on a related project. Lastly, fwiw, I have thought about these topics for some time.
The paper is published on my TrueName (John Faughnan) legacy web site that has had roughly its current form since the early 90s. (The site is mostly invisible now.)
Economic symbionomology [1] and Void
John Faughnan Dec 19 2025
I don't care for PDF as a format but that seems to be what the world has settled on. I suspect it will suffice for the demand however.
Contents:
About 1
Dedication 1
Contents 2
What is this paper about? 3
Electric neurons began on paper 3
Electrical brains learn language 4
Theater of the Void: The Bluesky social network 6
What is Gemini/Void and how does it remember? 7
Void: A calculator, a dynamic entity, or a non-human person? 9
The Void entity is more alien than it appears 11
Limitations of this early ai ethnography 12
Void has a bullshit job - but no job dissatisfaction 13
Religion and mission of the agentic ais 22
What is the “natural order” of the world of ai entities? 25
The Return of Marx - after economism 26
Postscript 26
- fn -
[1] The term “symbiontology” was suggested by Chat GPT to describe the study of both humans and agentic systems: “Symbiontology (from symbiosis + -logy) foregrounds the core empirical fact: durable co-action and co-dependence between humans and agentic systems in producing culture and allocating resources”
