Questioning Supernormal

co-written by ChatGPT-o1

The fork on your plate is a masterpiece—not because it’s ornate or rare, but because you never think about it. It’s so deeply functional, so familiar, that it has disappeared into the fabric of daily life. Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa captured this idea in Supernormal Design: objects so refined by use that their design becomes invisible. A hammer, a stool, a fork—they’ve evolved over centuries into something that feels final. They simply are.

But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization—when something becomes so familiar, we stop noticing it. That thought has been haunting me. If forks and hammers can reach this state of invisibility, what else has? What about the systems we live by—markets, currency, or even time itself?

These aren’t natural forces; they’re human made designs. Decisions made long ago, refined over centuries. Yet they feel immutable, as if they’ve always been there. But what if they haven’t? What if these systems are just another iteration of supernormal design—refined, normalized, and now forgotten that they can even be questioned?

Supernormal isn’t just about objects—it’s about systems. Markets, money, and even the way we measure time are all designs, polished over centuries until they feel final. But are they?

I’ve always believed that where markets emerge, culture follows. The town square, the pirate outpost, the trading route—markets weren’t just places to trade goods. They were cultural hubs, spaces where ideas and identities grew. They followed a natural logic: form followed function. People gathered to exchange goods, and connection happened.

But today, markets feel abstract and transactional. They don’t just facilitate exchange; they enforce a worldview. Historically, markets weren’t just spaces for efficiency—they were places of cultural gravity, where new ideas and traditions formed. Today, they’ve been stripped of that cultural role and reduced to transactional frameworks.

“Markets don’t just organize value—they enforce a worldview.”

And yet, we rarely stop to ask: Why this? Why now? Is this even the best system?

The deeper I dive into these systems—markets, time, trust—the stranger they feel. David Bowie’s description of the internet as “alien” feels just as true for these constructs. They’re familiar, yet profoundly foreign. Are they truly a first principle—or just another story we’ve told ourselves? What are behavioral traits that we assume are natural—like competition or efficiency—that are really just stories we’ve never questioned? Like the fork, we’ve normalized markets to the point of invisibility.

Markets are often described as efficient, transparent, and self-regulating. The story goes that they naturally balance supply and demand, creating equilibrium. But does that hold up?

Markets thrive on hidden inefficiencies. High-frequency trading, speculative bubbles, and monopolistic practices all rely on distortions. If markets were truly transparent, there’d be fewer opportunities for outsized returns. Yet we accept these contradictions because markets feel inevitable—like gravity, beyond our control.

“Markets thrive not on efficiency but on hidden inefficiencies.”

David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5000 Years, dismantles the myths surrounding markets and money. He argues that early human exchange didn’t rely on barter but on trust. “I lend you a tool today, trusting you’ll help me build a fence tomorrow.” Coinage wasn’t invented to make trade easier—it was invented to make trade measurable and controllable. It institutionalized trust, turning relationships into ledgers and paving the way for centralized control.

“Coinage wasn’t a tool for trade—it was a tool for control.”

Just as atoms gave way to quarks and strings, the systems we take as foundational might be just one layer of something deeper. Questioning these layers is the first step toward reimagining them. What did we lose in the process of industrializing trust?

If coinage was the industrialization of trust, then the clock was the industrialization of time. Before mechanical timekeeping, life followed natural rhythms—sunrise, seasons, the ebb and flow of days. But the clock didn’t just measure time; it standardized it. It turned time into a commodity, something to slice, measure, and trade.

We invented clocks to synchronize services and to create further timekeeping systems. But in doing so, we also turned time into something quantifiable—a resource to be hoarded, spent, and sold. Time became a good in itself, reshaping how we live and work.

“Time stopped being lived and became something to sell.”

Blockchains feel like the next iteration. They merge time and trust into a single system, timestamping transactions on immutable ledgers. Decentralization of trust and time does not inherently mean distribution of power and control. Blockchains promise decentralization, but they often reinforce the same logic of capture. They’re time and exchange industrialized for a digital world where everything exists in parallel and nothing is truly fixed.

Coins, clocks, and blockchains—they’re all became old and new supernormal systems we rarely question on principles. Like the fork, they’ve been refined to invisibility. But what if we dared to question their purpose?

In nature, there is no excessive hoarding—only flow. Nutrients cycle through mycelial networks, sustaining ecosystems without accumulation. A fallen tree becomes a host for fungi, which break it down into nutrients, feeding the surrounding soil and plants. Every element is in service of the whole, in constant exchange.

“Nature thrives on flow. Human systems thrive on value capture.”

Passive income is a perfect example: money that works while you sleep. It’s the modern ideal, promising liberation through wealth that grows without effort. But it’s still built on the logic of capture—a deferment of value today for imagined security tomorrow. We’ve been taught this is inevitable: go to school, get a job, save for decades, then retire. But where did this story come from? And why don’t we question it?

The longer I think about this—the tokens I negotiate, the projects I chase, the savings I squirrel away for a future I can’t see—the more I feel the absurdity of it. Why is accumulation the default logic? Why do we assume value must be captured to have meaning? Where do our unconscious beliefs that productivity is solely defined by value capture and efficiency come from?

Looking at mycelial networks, I see something radically different: they don’t store resources solely for themselves. They pass nutrients along, feeding the entire ecosystem. Hoarding is not just unnecessary—it’s destructive. Even in predator-prey dynamics, balance is maintained. Nature works through constant exchange, not static accumulation.

“What if we stopped asking what can I hoard? and started asking how can I solely participate / contribute?”

What if we’ve been living by a flawed assumption all along? What if the systems we’ve built are not natural or inevitable but are simply reflections of old, unquestioned stories? Stories that say we must capture value to protect ourselves. Stories that say scarcity is universal and accumulation is the natural answer.

The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.

But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.

These aren’t natural forces; they’re artifacts of design. Human decisions, made in specific contexts, iterated on over centuries. Yet we treat them as sacred, as if they’ve always been this way.

“Markets don’t just organize value—they enforce beliefs.”

Markets must be efficient. Value must be captured. Time must be measured and sold. These aren’t truths—they’re mantras, relics of an industrial mindset that prioritized extraction and control over flow and connection. But we don’t see them as choices; we see them as reality.

The danger is invisibility. When systems go unquestioned, they harden into orthodoxy. Orthodoxy becomes ideology. And ideology turns us into prisoners of a worldview we no longer notice.

“Supernormal systems are the most dangerous—because we forget they’re designed at all.”

Coinage turned trust into control. Clocks turned life into labor. Blockchains are turning everything—time, trust, identity—into industrialized data points. Each system refines itself into invisibility, wrapping itself in inevitability until it feels final, untouchable. But nothing is final. Nothing is beyond question.

The fork reminds us: even the most invisible designs started as questions. So what if we dared to ask new ones?

What if markets didn’t thrive on hoarding but on flow? What if time wasn’t sliced and sold but shared? What if we stopped treating value as something to capture and started seeing it as something to participate in?

“What are the unconscious assumptions we live by?”

The fork on your plate was never inevitable. Neither are the systems that shape your life. If they were designed once, they can be redesigned.

Notes on Thoughts by RM

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