How much do you value your economic freedom?

If your answer is “a lot,” here’s the good news: a new economic paradigm is emerging — one that allows people to prosper on their own terms, without dependence on extractive companies that don’t have their best interests at heart.

At its core, this paradigm rests on a simple idea: open and permissionless collaboration.

Here’s how it works: networks fund projects that strengthen their own growth and prosperity. Funding happens retroactively, making the process self-sustaining.

Within these networks, everyone has free access to non-scarce resources. People can build openly on each other’s work — and get compensated for it.

This model creates a new mode of production where individuals have the freedom to work entirely on their own terms, plug directly into Value Creation Chains, and get rewarded for their contributions

Imagine journalism under this new system.

The network signals its need for unbiased reporting on current events related to it — posting both the request and the payout. Contributors step forward: some do research, others conduct fieldwork, others fact-check, and still others publish reports in multiple formats. These contributors don’t compete with each other for attention or clicks, instead they all contribute to sensemaking in the network.

The network reviews the outputs and releases funding accordingly.

But here’s the challenge: if decentralized journalism is truly permissionless, who decides the value of each individual contribution?

A top-down approach, where the network has to review contributions is not practical — no more than consumers can do the same for any good they buy.

Can you imagine if, whenever you bought a product, you had to figure out how much the designer, the factory worker, and the shipper should each be paid? Now what if there are 100 people contributing to this process? 10,000? Such an approach just wouldn't scale.

Moreover, the more removed the assessor is from the contribution the less context they have on who contributed what.

Instead, what we need is a bottom-up, localized assessment system; for each output, a contributor can fairly evaluate the inputs — whether sources, collaborators, or tools — and post the weighted distribution alongside the final work. With AI tools, much of this process can be streamlined.

Of course, self-assessment raises the risk of abuse. What stops contributors from inflating their own share and minimizing that of others?

For that we need an incentive mechanism backed by staking and arbitration.

Here’s how this could work:

Anyone can dispute a contribution claim by staking the payout amount in question.

The contributor being challenged must stake the same amount.

Until resolution, payout on the disputed amount is frozen.

A decentralized arbitration system then settles the dispute; the rightful party gets their stake back, plus a portion of the other party’s stake. The remainder goes to the network (that can then compensate arbitrators).

This system creates powerful incentives:

If you overvalue yourself, you risk costly arbitration.

If you make frivolous claims, you risk losing your stake.

As a result, most disputes can get resolved amicably before ever reaching arbitration.

Why do both parties need to stake an amount equivalent to the payout?

Because if the amount was smaller, the contributor would have an incentive to overvalue their contribution, even a bit, as statistically they would have a chance to get away with it and be profitable.

One caveat: individuals without capital to stake could be excluded. This can be solved by allowing investors to fund stakes in exchange for a share of successful claims — ensuring that even less-capitalized contributors still have access to fair compensation.

With this mechanism in place, Value Creation Chains become both open and fair.

Journalists can focus on truthful reporting instead of chasing clicks.

Developers can publish open-source code without fear of exploitation, knowing they’ll be compensated whenever their work is used (and can make a claim on others if they don’t)

The result is a sustainable system where individual freedom aligns with collective prosperity.

You get the freedom to work on your own terms — and the community gains growth, resilience, and goods our current system could simply never produce.

A win-win for everyone.