EnleashedEnleashed
Menu
Join EnleashedSign in
Fix the economy
Draft

Adaptive Economic Operating System

A feedback-controlled market economy designed around human wellbeing, productive freedom, circular resource use and measurable public value.

Solution section

Digital Product Identities

The mechanism that gives physical-outcome taxation and lifecycle accountability something real to act on, with verification built in.

Digital product identities

This is the mechanism that makes physical-outcome taxation and lifecycle accountability practically implementable, rather than a nice equation with no way to populate its inputs.

A product entering the economy can carry a digital product identity: a machine-readable record containing, or providing controlled access to, verified attributes such as:

  • manufacturer, model and product category;
  • constituent materials and recycled content;
  • embodied energy and expected energy consumption in use;
  • repairability and spare-parts availability;
  • expected lifetime and durability;
  • hazardous substances and disassembly information;
  • the intended recycling / recovery pathway;
  • conformity documentation and safety certifications.

Exact requirements would differ by product category — a toaster does not need the same information architecture as an electric vehicle. The principle is that a physical product should increasingly carry a machine-readable description of what it actually is, usable across its whole life:

Product Design→Conformity→Market Entry→Sale→Use→Repair / Reuse→Recovery / Recycling\text{Product Design} \rightarrow \text{Conformity} \rightarrow \text{Market Entry} \rightarrow \text{Sale} \rightarrow \text{Use} \rightarrow \text{Repair / Reuse} \rightarrow \text{Recovery / Recycling}

That single identity is designed to interface with systems that today largely operate as disconnected paperwork describing the same object: product standards, product safety, taxation, customs, consumer information, trading standards, repair and resale markets, and recycling.

This does not mean self-certification is trusted at face value. A manufacturer declaring 80% recycled content, a 15-year expected lifetime or high repairability needs a credible probability of that claim being checked — which is what standards bodies, laboratories, conformity assessment and trading standards already exist to do:

Declaration→Market Access→Monitoring→Inspection→Enforcement\text{Declaration} \rightarrow \text{Market Access} \rightarrow \text{Monitoring} \rightarrow \text{Inspection} \rightarrow \text{Enforcement}

Digitalisation does not remove this regulatory function — it lets it become more targeted: risk-based surveillance concentrated on products, manufacturers or supply chains with unusual patterns, complaints or inconsistencies, rather than uniform inspection of everything.