The Tetrad: Value in a More-than-Human World

Adam Greenfield

Release Date: October 1, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9997930-4-1

Within capitalism or beyond it, any possible economic system implies a theory of value: What matters? How do we reckon its worth? Is this value best understood as inherent or as value-for-us?

In The Tetrad: Value in a More-than-Human World, renowned technology and urban design theorist Adam Greenfield argues that we’ve been asking the wrong questions. The true absurdity of capitalism is not simply that it extracts, exploits, and abstracts value, but that it forgets the meaning of value itself.

This concise book explores the meaning of value that must come before any price or measurement. Drawing on a long tradition of philosophical materialism to assess the discipline of Economics from the outside, The Tetrad invites us to remember the four foundations from which all value arises: the Sun, the Earth, the Biosphere, and Human labor in its physical, intellectual, and affective manifestations. Taking the reader beyond both economics and its Marxian critique, Greenfield develops a theory of value that is folded within planetary time, soaked in groundwater and carried through mycelium, and metabolized by bees and bacteria long before anything human arrives on the scene.

Adam Greenfield is a London-based writer and urbanist. His previous books include Against the Smart City (2013), Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Verso, 2017), and Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Verso, 2024).

Praise for books by Adam Greenfield

Lifehouse 

• “When three emergencies — climate, political and social — build together into the storm of our present, we need to start thinking from the ground-up. In this we have no better guide than Adam Greenfield. Lifehouse constructs a much needed, hands-on strategy for urban care. Read it and start planning.” — Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land

Radical Technologies:

• “Tremendously intelligent and stylish...a landmark primer.” — Steven Poole, The Guardian.

• “Brilliant and scary.” — Saskia Sassen.

• “This is an essential book.” — Brian Eno.

Against the Smart City (2013)

• One of Verso's Books of the Year, 2013.

• “Adam Greenfield does for ‘urban renewal’ in the twenty-first century what Jane Jacobs did for it in the twentieth.” — Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.