Church Observation Economy
Concept · history · hypothesis · visibility: publishable
Her theory: the Catholic church was the first systematized observation economy — ‘getting there first and claiming it in the name of God while also systematizing extraction of any and all resources.’ The church didn’t just endorse extraction; it built the original framework of legitimate institutional surveillance and resource concentration under divine sanction. The secular observation economy — Silicon Valley’s data collection, late-stage capitalism’s bookkeeper-gatekeeper stack — inherited the architecture, not just the impulse. Correction she makes: the quant/accounting formalization of this came more from Protestants (‘the quant origin story on the protestants. i know that to be true irl, but never let the facts get in the way of a good story 🥲’). Philip Jenkins’s work on ‘rhetorical concentration’ — institutions concentrating meaning-making in themselves — is the academic frame she needs for this argument.
Connections
- → C.quant-observation-economy · historically_precedes
- → C.dead-internet-positioning · conceptually_related_to
source: Catholic church’s role in the observation economy (2026-04-22) · extraction: auto (schema v3.1)