The Spiral Economy Begins Before the Economy

Before we begin

First, thank you.

Some of you subscribed while this publication was still rather suspiciously quiet—before I had published a single post here. The fact that you came anyway, simply because the question spoke to you, means a great deal to me.

Today, we begin.

Over the next nine pieces, I will unfold the complete arc of the Spiral Economy: from the individual and the gap, through identity, relationship and generative value, into the Generator, organisations, care systems, AI and, finally, coordination without capture.

Not as a finished ideology you are expected to adopt.

I will show you how the architecture emerged, what it means in ordinary life, where I believe it may become useful—and where the questions are still open.

I also want to thank Jeffrey Peel at The New Era, who first encouraged me to bring the Spiral Economy into public view and published the original essay that opened this door.

And thank you to The Light. Your questions, encouragement and willingness to engage with the work helped me realise that perhaps it was time to stop keeping all of this inside my own rather extensive collection of papers, conversations and slightly mad diagrams.

So, here we go.

This is the first movement.

The Spiral Economy did not begin as an economic theory.

It began with me sitting on a terrace in Andalucía because, quite frankly, my body had finally had enough of me carrying on.

First my cervical spine, from C4 to C7, broke down. I had surgery and came out with a titanium plate and six screws in my neck.

And I went on.

Then I had two serious lung infections.

And I went on.

Then a finger got cut off.

And yes, I still went on.

And through all of this, I had Leon at home—first a baby, then a toddler.

He still needed his mum. He needed breakfast, baths, comfort, stories and someone to hold his small world steady.

There was no recovery mode in which the rest of life simply stopped.

Leon was not the problem. He was life. But life with a baby does not wait politely while your body tries to put itself back together.

So I carried on.

Until, finally, I literally ran out of breath.

Burnout.

Done. Finished.

My body had apparently decided that subtle messages were not working.

I could no longer fix the situation by working harder, solving the next problem or holding everything together for everyone else. I had to stop.

So there I was, on a terrace in Andalucía, with absolutely no intention of inventing a new economy.

I was simply trying to understand what the hell had happened.

And in that stillness, I began to notice a gap.

Not a mysterious gap. A very practical one.

The gap between what our systems say they are built for and what living inside them actually does to people.

The gap between the incredible capabilities of our organisations and the shrinking room human beings have to breathe, decide and act within them.

The gap between everything we measure and what actually makes the whole thing worth doing.

Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

We have companies capable of coordinating thousands of people across the world, yet many of the people inside them have less influence over their own work.

We have healthcare systems full of highly trained specialists, yet patients and their families often have to hold the whole story together because the parts do not speak to each other.

We have digital platforms that can connect billions of people, yet most of the value created through those connections ends up inside a handful of companies.

The systems become more capable.

The people inside them often become less so.

That is the gap.

And that is where the Spiral Economy began for me.

Not with money.

Not with capitalism versus socialism.

And definitely not with me waking up one morning and thinking, “You know what the world needs? Another economic ideology.”

It began with a much simpler question:

What happens to life inside the systems we build?

The economy begins before money

We usually think the economy starts when money changes hands.

But something has already happened long before that.

Someone notices a need.

Someone else knows something, has something or can do something that might help.

They speak. They decide whether they trust each other. They work something out. They repair something, make something, teach something, carry something or care for someone.

Only then might money enter the picture.

Money can be very useful. It can carry value across time and distance. It can make exchange easier between people who do not know each other. It can help us coordinate things that would otherwise be almost impossible to coordinate.

I am not against money.

Money is not the problem.

The question is what happens through the relationship in which it is used.

Does the exchange leave the people involved more capable of acting?

Does it strengthen the conditions that made the value possible?

Does anything return to the people, the community or the place from which the value came?

Or does everything move in one direction until the source is exhausted?

That difference matters.

Because extraction is not only about profit.

Extraction happens wherever capacity keeps leaving a relationship and does not find its way back.

A company can do this to its employees.

A platform can do it to its users.

A state can do it to its citizens.

A person can do it to another person.

And, as I discovered rather impressively, we can also do it to ourselves.

I kept giving, solving, carrying and continuing without asking whether there was any real path of return.

Until there was nothing left to return.

No economic language was needed. The architecture was already there.

Before the system, there is a person

Large systems do not begin with structures.

They begin with people.

A person brings experience, knowledge, relationships, judgement, creativity and the ability to respond to what is actually happening.

But systems often see only the bit of the person they can use.

The employee.

The consumer.

The patient.

The taxpayer.

The provider.

The recipient.

The role slowly becomes more important than the human being performing it.

I know that pattern very well.

I have been the IT architect, the CEO, the mother, the carer, the woman recovering from burnout and the person standing in the kitchen washing dishes while thinking about the architecture of an economy.

All of those are real parts of my life.

But none of them is the whole of me.

We get into trouble when one form is expected to contain the entire person.

A living person changes form all the time. We work. We rest. We care for someone. We create. We get it wrong. We withdraw. We return. We begin something new.

Coherence cannot mean staying in one fixed form.

This became one of the simplest statements in the Spiral Framework:

The axis is stable. The form is free.

In normal language: something essential can remain true while the way it appears changes.

That does not mean that anything goes. Freedom of form is not freedom from responsibility.

It means the form serves life. Life does not have to keep serving a form simply because that form already exists.

At first, this was something I recognised in my own life.

Then I began to wonder whether it also applied at other levels.

Can two people create a relationship without either person having to become smaller to preserve it?

Can an organisation coordinate hundreds or thousands of people without turning them into interchangeable functions?

Can an economy create capabilities at a larger scale without gradually removing agency from the people and communities underneath it?

I did not have proof.

I had a pattern and a question.

That distinction is important.

An insight can show us where to look. It does not prove what we will find there.

The value between us

Our economic systems are very good at seeing things.

A product.

A company.

A building.

A worker.

A piece of land.

A unit of currency.

A transaction.

But much of the value in life does not sit neatly inside any of those things.

It happens between them.

Two people meet.

Each has a different history, perspective and set of abilities.

If one has to give up that difference for the relationship to survive, the relationship may continue to exist, but it loses something important.

If both can remain themselves and genuinely meet, something new can happen.

A conversation produces an idea neither person had before.

A friendship creates courage that was not available alone.

Two people create a family, a company, a piece of music, a solution or an entirely new area of work.

Something now exists that did not exist inside either person separately.

That is what I mean by a generative relationship:

A relationship that creates possibilities that did not exist in either participant alone.

The two people do not have to become the same.

In fact, their difference is part of what makes the new possibility possible.

This sounds obvious when we talk about people.

But we rarely build our economic systems around it.

We still tend to act as if value sits inside an object or an organisation and is then passed around through transactions.

What if some of the most important value is actually created in the relationship?

What if the purpose of an economy is not only to distribute resources, organise transactions or increase output?

What if part of its purpose is to make generative relationships easier to form—and to stop the value they create from being captured by default?

That changes the question.

Instead of asking only:

How do we make the system bigger, faster and more efficient?

We can also ask:

What relationship allows this particular system to remain generative?

Bigger is not automatically the problem

I am not arguing that everything should remain small and local.

There are things we cannot do alone.

We need hospitals, infrastructure, transport networks, communication systems, research, shared knowledge and forms of protection that are simply not possible at the level of one person or one household.

That is the purpose of a larger system.

It should create capabilities that are not available at the smaller scale.

The problem begins when the larger system forgets why it exists.

The company continues, but its employees become less capable.

The platform grows, but its users lose control over the value they create.

The state expands its capacity, but citizens lose the ability to shape the conditions of their own lives.

The healthcare system becomes more sophisticated, but the relationships that make care work disappear between departments, processes and software.

From the outside, the system may still look perfectly functional.

It may be organised.

It may be compliant.

It may be profitable.

It may have very impressive dashboards.

But order is not the same as coherence.

A coherent higher-order system should create something its individual parts could not create alone while preserving the ability of those parts to act.

And some of that new capability should return.

Knowledge should return.

Infrastructure should return.

Resilience should return.

Time should return.

Trust should return.

Room to act should return.

Not as a gift handed down from a generous centre, but because return is part of what keeps the entire system alive.

When nothing returns, growth becomes accumulation.

Coordination becomes dependency.

Participation becomes extraction.

And eventually, the system exhausts the very people and places that make it possible.

I know what that looks like in a human body.

I suspect we can also see it in our companies, institutions and economies.

This is not another finished answer

The Spiral Economy is not a new model that everyone must follow.

It does not prescribe one type of ownership, one kind of currency, one ideal size of organisation or one correct relationship between public and private institutions.

Those are forms.

Different places, people and situations will need different forms.

The form is free.

What remains stable are the questions underneath it:

Does this system preserve the capacity of the people participating in it?

Can people remain different without becoming disconnected?

Does working together create something that was not possible before?

Does the larger whole increase the ability of its parts to live and act?

Does useful capacity return—or does it collect at the top?

Can the system change, learn and become something new?

We can ask those questions of a household, a company, a school, a hospital, a digital platform, a municipality or an international organisation.

The answers will not be the same.

They should not be.

The whole does not arrive fully formed.

Its grammar starts appearing locally.

The gap is already speaking

When I sat on that terrace, I was not trying to design an economy.

I was trying to understand what life had been trying to tell me before it finally had to shout.

Why do some relationships leave us more alive, more capable and more ourselves?

Why do others leave us diminished, even when everything still appears to function?

Why does the same pattern keep appearing inside people, families, organisations, technologies and institutions?

And what becomes possible if we stop repairing each symptom separately and begin looking at the relationships underneath?

The Spiral Economy began in that gap.

The gap between what the system says it does and what it actually does to life.

Between functioning and living.

Between coordination and coherence.

Between the value a system collects and the capacity it returns.

I am not asking anyone to believe in a new economic model.

I am asking us to notice.

Look at one relationship in your own life. It may involve work, money, care, knowledge, technology or attention.

What moves through it?

What becomes possible because the relationship exists?

Who becomes more capable?

Who becomes less capable?

What is strengthened?

What is slowly being used up?

And when the movement is complete, what returns?

That is where the economy begins.

Long before we call it one.

Next in the arc

The Ground Is One. Its Forms Are Many

What happens when we stop asking which of our roles is the “real” one—and begin to recognise the stable ground from which many different forms can move?

If this first piece made you recognise a gap in your own life, work or organisation, tell me in the comments.

What does the system say it does?

And what does it actually do to life?

I read and answer the comments myself.

Martina