Part III

Electricity ordinarily vanishes into service. A motor turns, a furnace heats, a processor executes, and the purchased flow is gone. Computation has enlarged the range of things that can remain after the meter has run: a trained capability, a searched design, a body of code, an ordered ledger state. None is electricity stored in another costume. Each is the result of an institution arranging physical throughput so that some consequence survives it.

Factor Prime names that conversion layer. Physical throughput becomes economically consequential through computation and selection, sometimes as an immediate cognitive service, sometimes as reusable productive structure, and sometimes as work recognized by a protocol. Expenditure alone creates no economic value. What matters is the office it performs, the capability it leaves, and the social or technical order prepared to recognize the result.

This is an industrial claim before it is a theory of value. Computation can make energy productive as cognition without making cognition reducible to energy. Selection can preserve a result without proving that its history was uniquely necessary. Protocols can make specified work constitutive of a claim without allowing work to dictate the claim's market price.

Wrigley's Britain escaped part of an organic economy's photosynthetic constraint by drawing on mineral stocks.¹ Computation addresses a different limit: the speed, endurance, and reproducibility of human cognitive labor. The analogy is not an identity. Coal released heat; a model can participate in judgment. Yet both reorganize production by routing physical capacity through machinery that changes what can be done at scale.

Here capital and labor do not dissolve into a common substance. Their boundary becomes politically unstable because a trained system may be owned as an asset while supplying services once purchased as labor. The chapters ahead examine that instability without mistaking technical substitutability for social equivalence. Electricity can be capitalized. The decisive question is what kind of productive claim survives the conversion, and who is allowed to own it.