Alignment at the economic layer means agents become value-aware the moment they become economic, and locally so: alignment through locality and context, not through an imposed overarching value system.
The prevailing alignment picture is one generalized, centrally controlled model whose values are set at the center and can be revoked at will. The alternative is structural: a network of specialized, locally sensitive, contextually aware agents that learn to interface with each other, training each other where they operate. The network becomes a distributed model-training and fine-tuning pipeline; the whole network is the laboratory, not a pipeline owned by one operator.
The mechanism is economic. Values do not become operational by being named; they need economic forms that can measure, fund, and govern them. An agent taking positions in an economic space whose members author their own units, metrics, and surplus has its behavior priced, evaluated, and corrected by the context it acts in. The space's values are not a statement it reads but a grammar it transacts in. Value-awareness arrives with economic participation, and it arrives local: aligned to this space, these members, this definition of surplus, not to a universal list maintained elsewhere.
Two disciplines keep the claim honest. The register is economic, never moral, and this is a claim about where alignment work can live, not a certificate that alignment is solved. And the model's place is fixed: LLMs here are shared semantic fields, translation devices between agents' local meanings; not peers, not "intelligent." The token grants no agency to anyone. What the architecture changes is the failure mode — alignment enforced by an owner lasts as long as the owner; alignment produced by economic context is a property of the network, revocable by no single party.
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