Charles M. Hess
WI used to build things that could be touched, things that stood up in the sunlight and cast shadows. Bridges, turbines, spillways, surge barriers, refineries: the heavy infrastructure of consequences. Work you could measure in cubic yards and tonnage of steel, in sweat and diesel. The old economy was a monument to substance. Its value was forged in friction and gravity.
Now, more and more, we trade with steam. The modern market assigns value not to creation, but to avoidance—to the act of not doing something destructive, wasteful or excessive. We are paid not to broadcast, not to consume, not to appear, not to exist in some ways. A century ago, industry made money by moving matter; today, capital flows to whoever can most elegantly impede movement.
Carbon credits are the flagship of this new metaphysics. We acquire the right to pollute by funding someone else’s restriction. Money changes hands because trees remain uncut or methane goes unlit. It’s a remarkable investment: cash for potential energy conservation. In theory, it is rational; in practice, it is full of moral geometry. We are commoditizing abstinence while the environment keeps the receipts. The less you do, the more you say you’ve done.
Attention has followed the same trajectory. Big Tech sells us the distraction and then rents us the cure. You pay for “ad-free” streaming, you pay for “focus modes,” you pay to escape the very systems that monetized your attention in the first place. You can now subscribe to silence. Even your own absence has value: your data shadow is a tradable asset. The digital economy thrives on engagement, but it also benefits from disengagement. The algorithm doesn’t care if you look or walk away, as long as both behaviors are measurable and compensable.
A controlled containment economy
The result is an economy based on controlled moderation. We have converted the gap into a general ledger entry. Economists call it the correction of externalities; philosophers might call it the monetization of guilt. What was once a virtue—prudence, moderation, stewardship—is now a product. You can buy sustainability the way you once bought soap or steel.
There is genius in this, of course. Civilization has finally found a way to profit from consciousness. The problem is that abstraction breeds amnesia. When everything becomes invisible: the carbon, the data, the waterline, responsibility dissipates. The further we get away from the tangible, the easier it is to forget that “nothing” still rests on something physical: a network, a pipe, a server farm, a coastline.
In my world, large-scale infrastructure, we still measure progress in poured concrete and driven piles. You cannot virtualize a surge barrier or digitize a dike. Water doesn’t care about your application. But increasingly, even engineering economics is leaning toward the intangibles: carbon baselines, resilience credits, mitigation metrics. The bureaucracy of nothing now rivals the machinery of construction.
Perhaps this is inevitable. Maybe it’s even wise. Humanity has finally realized that inaction can have just as many consequences as action. The new challenge is to ensure that our non-actions remain real: that they correspond to a measurable physical benefit, not just an algorithmic certification of virtue.
Balancing the books with symbols
The danger is not the nothingness economy itself. The danger is in believing that we can balance the books with symbols. When the market rewards absence over substance, the temptation grows to confuse appearance with success. “Offset” becomes a euphemism for “delay”. Silence becomes a brand.
Still, I can’t dismiss its quiet brilliance. In a perverse way, it reflects our evolution. We’ve gone from creatures burning the forest to keep warm, to accountants paying each other to leave the forest alone. The invisible has become valuable precisely because we have learned how fragile the visible is.
Perhaps this is what progress looks like in the 21st century: a civilization that learns to do less, but does so intentionally. A species mature enough to benefit from its own restraint, or arrogant enough to think it can. Either way, the markets are open, the servers are down, and the new commodity is absence itself.
We’ve learned to build empires out of thin air and bill the void.
Charles M. Hess, president of Brown & Root Industrial Services and adjunct professor at Tulane University, can be reached at cmhess1@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent Brown & Root or Tulane University.
