A Diagnostic Toolkit for Agency in the Meta Crisis

This article examines a structural driver of the contemporary Meta-Crisis rooted in the product-oriented bias of modern socioeconomic systems. It argues that prevailing forms of ideological, communicative, and economic coordination operate through representational abstractions without a processual counterpart, resulting in fragmented relational agency across scales, concentrating power in intermediaries while attenuating local feedback and collective sense-making. Part 1 diagnoses the perverse incentives within what is termed a “Product Economy” that create market dependency and tension between individual and national scales at the expense of the local scale, where relational collective agency is possible. Drawing on Process Philosophy, it outlines the contours of a “Process Economy” founded on meaning rather than value, prefigurative culture rather than representative politics, commons rather than ownership, proactivity rather than productivity, relation rather than transaction, and concern rather than desire. It lays out a path to relieve pressure on the Product Economy, shifting it toward a plurality of games with multiscalar agency. Part 2 develops an Enactive Viable Agency (EVA) that synthesizes Meta-Cybernetics, Process Philosophy, and Buddhist process-relational ontology. This model integrates nested systems regulation with higher-order reflexivity to provide a metalinguistic and diagrammatic framework for diagnosing fragmentation and supporting shared dialogue for collective coordination. By re-coupling product with process and restoring relational feedback across scales, the proposed framework offers conceptual tools for reorienting societal agency toward ecological viability.