How Do We Create New Digital Economies?
What does it look like to build online in a way that actually honors life?
And not just our individual lives, but the animate, relational, interdependent nature of existence itself. What would it mean to create digital economies that function more like marketplace ecosystems rather than crazed bazaars? That value regeneration over extraction? That measure success by depth of connection rather than scale of reach?
We're standing at a threshold. The old stories about how to build online—the ones rooted in growth-at-all-costs, personal brand performance, and algorithmic approval—are breaking down. But the new stories haven't fully formed yet.
We're in the liminal space. And that means we get to explore. We get to play. We get to experiment. We get to ask: What becomes possible when we build from Ecological Digitalism rather than surveillance capitalism?
A Different Story of Exchange
In the dominant digital economy, exchange is transactional and unidirectional. You create content. The platform monetizes it. You get attention (maybe). The platform gets profit (definitely). You and your audience get... distracted, hooked, overwhelmed.
But what if exchange could be reciprocal and relational?
What if the value you offer—your medicine, your wisdom, your unique way of seeing—flows directly to the people it's meant to serve, and their support flows directly back to you? No intermediary extracting the majority of the value. No algorithm deciding who gets to see what.
This isn't theoretical. It's already happening in pockets:
Writers building memberships where readers directly support their work. Practitioners creating course platforms they own and control. Artists using direct patronage models. Healers building worlds their people want to inhabit—not because an algorithm showed them a viral post, but because the coherence of the world itself is magnetic.
The infrastructure exists. Email lists. Websites. Podcasts. Membership platforms. Payment processors that work for you, not against you.
What we're exploring is the story we tell about how these pieces fit together. Not as a "funnel" designed to convert strangers into customers, but as rooms in a world, spaces people can move through, linger in, return to, and eventually choose to go deeper into.
A Different Story of Value
In the current paradigm, your value is measured by visibility. Followers. Engagement. Reach. The more people see you, the more valuable you become.
But what if value was measured differently?
What if it was measured by depth of transformation rather than breadth of audience? By the quality of the worlds you build rather than the quantity of content you produce? By the sustainability of your business model rather than the virality of your posts?
This requires us to let go of the scarcity story that says "more is always better." More followers. More content. More visibility. More, more, more.
And instead ask: What is enough?
Enough clients to sustain your work without burning out. Enough visibility to be found by the right people without being consumed by everyone. Enough infrastructure to support your offerings without requiring constant maintenance.
Enough doesn't mean small. It means right-sized. It means ecological. It means sustainable.
When you know what enough looks like for you, you stop chasing someone else's definition of success. You stop comparing yourself to people with 50k followers. You stop measuring your worth by metrics that were never designed to capture the depth of what you do.
A Different Story of Relationship
The platforms have trained us to think of our audiences as metrics. Followers. Subscribers. Engagement rates. We optimize for these numbers because we've been told they matter.
But people aren't metrics. They're living, breathing, complex humans with their own needs, desires, nervous systems, and capacity.
What would it mean to build digital economies rooted in actual relationship?
Not just parasocial relationships where people feel like they know you but you don't know them. Not transactional relationships where people are only valuable if they buy. Not performative relationships where you're always "on" and they're always consuming.
But real, reciprocal, boundaried relationships. Where people can enter your world, explore at their own pace, opt in and opt out as they need to. Where you're not trying to be everything to everyone, but rather tending a specific ecosystem for a specific people.
This is what worldbuilding makes possible. When you create a coherent world—with its own essence, its own philosophy, its own invitations—people self-select. The ones who belong know they belong. The ones who don't move on. And there's no need to chase, convince, or perform.
A Different Story of Infrastructure
The truth is that the infrastructure for new digital economies already exists.
We don't need to wait for some perfect decentralized platform to be built (though those experiments matter too). We can build right now with the tools we have:
Websites we control. Email lists we own. Content we host on our own terms. Payment systems that don't take 30% of every transaction. Podcast feeds that live independently of any single platform.
What we're building isn't just businesses. We're building worlds within the digital landscape. Meta-worlds—worlds within worlds. Places that have their own coherence, their own culture, their own agreements about how we relate to each other.
And when enough of us do this—when enough practitioners, healers, ceremonialists, and creatives build their worlds with Ecological Digitalism as the foundation—we start to create a network. An ecosystem of worlds. A new digital economy that operates on different principles.
Living the Questions Together
We don't have all the answers yet. And maybe that's exactly right.
Maybe the work isn't to figure it all out before we begin. Maybe the work is to build and discover as we go. To try things. To share what we learn. To support each other through the uncertainty.
This is part of why Worldbuilding School exists—not just as a program to help you build your business, but as a space where we explore these questions together. Where we practice building from Ecological Digitalism. Where we experiment with new ways of structuring our work, our offers, our relationships with our audiences.
The 6 Phases of Visionary Praxis give us a framework to work within. But within that framework, there's room for exploration. For your unique medicine to shape what you build. For the specific ecosystem you're tending to inform how you structure your world.
When you join a cohort, you're joining other practitioners who are also asking these questions. Who are also building differently. Who are also committed to creating digital economies that honor life rather than extract from it.
And together, we're discovering what becomes possible.
The Story We're Writing
The future of how we build online isn't written yet. We're writing it. With every choice we make about where to put our energy, how to structure our offerings, who we're in relationship with, and what we're building toward.
You don't have to have it all figured out. None of us do.
But you can start. You can build your world with intention and coherence. You can practice Ecological Digitalism. You can create a business that sustains you without depleting you.
And in doing so, you become part of the story we're writing together—a story about digital economies that actually honor the fullness of what it means to be human.
