I think I generally agree with what you are saying. The second part of this essay is .. well, it feels more like some impressionistic, poetic painting with words, masquerading as a rationally structured argument. Its hard to understand as a logical thesis; but its easy to agree with at an emotional level.

But whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that somewhere, we have to have the place where “the rubber meets the road”. The road, today, is defacto the flow of money-capital. It is mostly, but not fully determined by decisions made by bankers and billionaires, and is mostly not under the sway “distributed play through extended cognition”. Even though, I guess, we would like it to be.

Towards that end, I’d like to again point at “liquid democracy” as a practical, workable mechanism for attaching the social etherium to money-capital flows. If you want to fix the under-valuedness you mention here, I believe that liquid democracy is the way to do it.

Aside: you should explain, in greater detail, what you mean by the words “category” and “category exchange”. You sort of dive in and start using them, and I struggled to understand what you actually meant.