The Representation of Wealth: Supporting Narrative, Value, and Legacy in the Age of the Large World Model
I. Introduction: Can Technology Transform Our Relationship to Wealth?
We are living through a moment in which technology and wealth are more deeply entangled than ever before. It is now commonplace to watch a single application, platform, or protocol create vast fortunes—sometimes overnight. The mythology of this transformation has become familiar: a founder builds something out of code and belief, accrues capital and influence, and eventually confronts the moral weight of having more than nearly anyone else in history. Some seek redemption through philanthropy. Others embrace effective altruism or sign pledges to give it all away. Still others attempt to reshape industries, cities, or even civilization itself.
What is less commonly asked is whether the technology that creates wealth can also transform it—whether it can help us see, understand, and participate in wealth differently. Can a platform make us more comfortable with the idea of wealth? With inequality? With the beautiful but exclusive homes, collections, and estates that have long represented power and privilege? Does digitization offer a kind of compensation for inaccessibility—a new form of aura, a mediated proximity? Or does it deepen the divide by glorifying the unattainable? Should technology be used to build new layers of aspiration, or to dismantle the systems that concentrate wealth in the first place?
These questions are not theoretical. They emerge from real tensions in how we live today. On one hand, we are surrounded by images of abundance—projected through interiors, objects, and styles meant to evoke “the good life.” On the other, we are witnessing growing disillusionment with the systems that concentrate wealth and obscure its origins. We live with a mix of awe and anxiety, beauty and critique. And we do so while lacking clear tools to meaningfully engage with wealth—either as individuals seeking to build it or as communities trying to reconcile with its consequences.
This white paper takes up a new possibility: that the Large World Model for Domestic Life may offer both a better system for planning, owning, and preserving the material world of the home as well as a fundamentally new way to represent and relate to wealth. It asks whether a digital infrastructure grounded in domestic life—a realm where beauty, value, and continuity already converge—can support more participatory, legible, and meaningful pathways to wealth accumulation, preservation, and intergenerational transfer.
In what follows, we move through the ways wealth has been traditionally represented, how technology has reinforced old structures of power, and how a new platform—OurThings—might gently reshape those patterns through design, memory, aspiration, and intelligent planning. We ask: what if wealth were something to be lived each day, rather than inherited or extracted? What if we could go beyond dreaming of the good life and instead offer the tools to make it a reality for more people?
II. The Image of Wealth: Beauty, Distance, and Discomfort
Wealth has long been mediated through images. From oil portraits in stately homes to magazine spreads of celebrity mansions, visual culture has shaped what we believe wealth looks like—and, by extension, what we believe a good life should look like. These images are powerful. They both reflect wealth and produce desire. They trace values, set standards, and shape aspirations. In a world increasingly governed by visual media, the image of wealth becomes inseparable from its meaning.
At the center of this image economy is the home: curated, private, and exquisitely staged. Within its walls, taste and power converge. Furniture, materials, architecture, and landscape offer a legible index of status and control. These spaces serve as symbols of what wealth can attain—material comfort, autonomy, beauty, and permanence. But they also signal something else: exclusion. For all their openness to being seen, these homes are rarely open to being entered. They evoke both admiration and a feeling of distance.
This dynamic has only intensified with the proliferation of media. Social platforms, reality shows, and luxury publications have peeled back the curtain on wealth with unprecedented intimacy, yet that exposure has done little to narrow the gap between image and access. In fact, it has often made the gap feel wider. The more saturated our feeds become with curated lives and designed interiors, the more disoriented and alienated many feel about their own spaces and trajectories.
For the wealthy, this visibility brings its own burden. It invites scrutiny, envy, and judgment. In a time of growing inequality, the possession of wealth demands explanation. Owners of great estates or rare collections must navigate a cultural tension: the desire to enjoy what they have built versus the fear of appearing indulgent or disconnected. Some respond by hiding. Others launch brands or philanthropic endeavors that translate their lifestyle into public good. But few have tools to tell a fuller story—one that goes beyond static display to reveal intention, history, care, and contribution.
Meanwhile, for those aspiring to build wealth, the image of the good life is both seductive and destabilizing. It offers a vision but withholds the means. It represents success, but obscures the path. Many are left to navigate aspiration without guidance—setting goals based on stylized fragments, uncertain whether they are chasing beauty, security, status, or all three at once.
The following exploration is less a critique of beauty and of the desire for a well-lived life. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that the current representation of wealth—fragmented, image-saturated, and emotionally fraught—is failing both those who have wealth and those who seek it. The question is not whether we should stop representing wealth, but how we might represent it differently. Can we represent wealth with more depth, more continuity, and more capacity for others to engage.
III. Wealth and Ideology: Systems of Value and Belief
While wealth can be seen as a quantity, it is more instructive to frame it as a narrative and structure of meaning. It organizes social life, defines ambition, structures kinship, and dictates how time is valued and how space is occupied. What we consider “wealth” is always embedded in a broader ideological framework—one that determines what is worth pursuing, preserving, displaying, or transferring. These frameworks are cultivated across generations, through institutions, economies, and cultural forms.
Under capitalism, wealth is primarily understood as capital—something that must be accumulated, invested, and made to grow. In this view, value arises from ownership and exchange: homes, stocks, businesses, intellectual property. Accumulation becomes a virtue, risk a marker of character, and growth an unquestioned imperative. But other ideologies produce different truths. In socialist traditions, wealth may be framed as the equitable distribution of goods and access. In communitarian or indigenous traditions, it might be found in reciprocal relations, intergenerational balance, or the flourishing of land and people.
Technology sits within these systems. It is both an artifact and agent of ideology. Every infrastructure is an ideology made durable. Every app encodes assumptions about the world. The tools we build reflect what we believe about how people should live, what is valuable, and who should benefit from the structures of society. Platforms both facilitate interaction and shape subjectivity. They teach us how to want. When it comes to wealth, the role of technology is not benign. It has long been a tool of stratification. From enclosure maps and tax ledgers to spreadsheets and smart contracts, technological systems have been designed to track, protect, and compound wealth—often by rendering it legible only to those with the keys to interpretation. The image of innovation as inherently liberatory obscures the way most systems of wealth preservation are, in fact, systems of control: of land, labor, lineage, and law.
In the contemporary moment, this becomes even more complex. Financialization has made wealth more abstract, more mobile, more opaque. Wealth is no longer housed in visible symbols—farms, factories, homes—but in algorithmic flows, derivatives, offshore structures, and encoded rights. The idea of wealth has lost its anchors in the material world, even as its influence over material life has deepened. We no longer recognize its forms, even as we feel its weight.
And yet, even as wealth becomes less tangible, the need to represent it—to narrate its legitimacy, to signal its presence—has intensified. Those who possess it often seek both privacy and recognition. They turn to lifestyle branding, philanthropy, social media, and cultural patronage to frame their wealth in moral or aesthetic terms. Visibility becomes a necessity—proof that one’s accumulation has meaning beyond self-interest. That it belongs to a story that others can admire.
Meanwhile, those without access are asked to aspire—to orient their desires around a visual economy of goods and spaces they may never reach. In this way, ideology reproduces itself through law, labor, and longing. The images of wealth—spread across homes, objects, and digital feeds—work precisely because they tap into deeply felt human longings for security, beauty, autonomy, and continuity. At the same time, they flatten those longings into symbols that are often unattainable, static, and disconnected from the lives people actually live.
To imagine an alternative is not to reject the concept of wealth altogether, but to ask whether it can be rearticulated—represented in a way that is more human, more grounded, more accessible. What if wealth were not indexed solely to scale, speed, and scarcity, but to care, memory, use, and meaning? What if platforms were designed not to accelerate accumulation, but to foster legibility, stewardship, and intergenerational coherence? This is the opening the Large World Model proposes: building on the values of the past to support what matters, how it is represented, and how more people might participate meaningfully in creation and continuity.
IV. Technology as an Engine of Preservation and Exclusion
It is tempting to speak of technology as a democratizing force—something that levels the playing field, dissolves gatekeepers, and decentralizes power. And in certain contexts, this may be true. But historically, the primary function of technological systems in relation to wealth has been to preserve it via the structures through which wealth is created, maintained, and passed down. Great estates were among the earliest technological systems of wealth preservation. They were not merely homes, but architectures of lineage. Their walls held people and possessions as well as legal structures—primogeniture, entailment, deed and title—that guaranteed wealth would flow along narrow, predetermined paths. The estate, like the castle before it, was a technology of containment: of resources, of memory, of bloodline.
This logic of preservation extended beyond land and home into a web of institutions—trusts, banks, museums, universities—each of which formalized the transmission of wealth and taste under the guise of public service. What is often framed as legacy or philanthropy is also a technical process of encoding values in durable forms: buildings, endowments, naming rights, canonized works of art. These are mechanisms not just of generosity, but of control.
This logic extends seamlessly into industrial manufacturing, where access to advanced production methods, infrastructure, and modes of mobility becomes another layer of exclusion. The ability to produce at scale, move freely across borders, or command bespoke manufacturing pipelines isn’t just a matter of utility—it shapes identity and reinforces status. Private planes, yachts, and custom-engineered environments emerge both as outcomes of this industrial reach as well as symbols of a zone that few can enter. These technologies accumulate aura, conferring a sense of autonomy and mastery over space, time, and material that is inaccessible to most. In doing so, they reinforce a system where technology enables preservation while also drawing the boundaries of who gets to participate in the future.
The digital era has only intensified these logics. With the rise of financialization, the language of wealth has become increasingly abstract. Assets are no longer physical things, but instruments: leveraged, hedged, fractionalized, encrypted. Entire fortunes now move through screens, invisible to those who do not hold the keys. The estate has been replaced by IP, data, and the capacity to exploit and control its meaning, distribution, and access. Its moat is no longer a hedge or a gate, but the legal, technical, and financial complexity that surrounds it. Far from dismantling the class structure, technology has made it more efficient. Systems built in the name of optimization—CRMs, private equity dashboards, real-time wealth management tools—create granular control over capital flows while remaining inaccessible to all but a few. Platforms mediate not just communication and commerce, but legacy itself. Algorithms come to have the capacity to create a science of inheritance. This logic can be extended to the level of the thing where data and heirloom merge–a twin with spatio-temporal depth. In this context, data may become the new heirloom, passed quietly between generations in ways few outside the system can trace.
This pattern is becoming increasingly visible. Power consolidates when abstraction increases. As wealth becomes harder to visualize—no longer a house on a hill, but a cascading series of funds and digital tokens—it becomes harder to critique, harder to feel, and harder to confront. The result is a kind of double estrangement: the public sees wealth everywhere but understands it nowhere. At the same time, the wealthy become increasingly detached from the material origins of their assets and find themselves seeking recognition, relevance, and even absolution.
This situation is driving the proliferation of lifestyle branding, family offices with media arms, and curated public images of generosity. If the structures of wealth are increasingly abstract, they must be anchored once again in narrative and image—in stories that make accumulation legible, even virtuous. But these are often gestures of representation, not transformation. They render the symbols of wealth more palatable, without addressing the exclusions beneath them.
The real challenge is both to show wealth differently and to design systems that efficiently allocate capital while offering new routes of access–to participation, to taste, to legacy, and to the tools that make wealth meaningful. This requires more than transparency; it demands a new logic of inclusion. One that does not mask inequality with imagery, but invites more people into the slow, difficult, and beautiful process of building a life of value. It is here that the Large World Model offers a new trajectory as an infrastructure of continuity. While it certainly will contribute to framing wealth attractively, the deeper goal is to understand and shape it more intentionally through rooting value in the domestic, the everyday, and the shared. In the process, the LWM has the potential to shift the grammar of preservation from exclusivity to participation—from walls and vaults to networks and memory.
V. Toward a Participatory Framework of Wealth
If traditional structures of wealth are defined by possession, exclusion, and opacity, then a participatory framework must begin with different premises: that wealth is not merely what one owns, but what one contributes to, lives within, and helps sustain; that value arises both from accumulation and from use, intention, relation, and care.
The image of the grand estate—whether a palazzo, a penthouse, or a family compound—has long functioned as a symbol of completeness, a final state of having arrived. In reality, these spaces are never static. They are in constant motion: maintained, staffed, renovated, inherited, subdivided, archived, photographed, sold, and sometimes abandoned. The appearance of stasis conceals a network of ongoing decisions—of planning, labor, taste, and time. What if we foregrounded that process instead of the product? What if wealth were represented as an unfolding?
A participatory model begins with this premise: that the good life is not a fixed image to aspire to, but a trajectory to be shaped over time—through choices made in dialogue with others, with a place, and with one's evolving sense of self. In this view, the home goes beyond being a container of wealth to become a co-creator of it. Its walls reflect both financial and emotional investment. Technology can support this vision as a guide—a system that helps individuals see where they are, what they have, and how they might move toward what they want. It can bring visibility to the often-invisible aspects of domestic life: the long arc of decision-making, the slow accrual of meaning, the interdependence of design, care, and context. In doing so, it makes wealth legible in ways that extend beyond capital: as coherence, taste, history, and stewardship.
In a participatory framework, the platform surface goods based on their values. It does suggest what to buy while also helping to clarify what one is building. It facilitates aspiration by grounding it: connecting dreams to space, space to budget, budget to timeline, and timeline to legacy. The result is a distributed economy of realized lives—each distinct, each meaningful, each in conversation with others. In the process, new forms of inclusion arise. Participation becomes contingent on showing up: engaging with one’s environment, learning through comparison, borrowing patterns of use, and gradually layering complexity and value into one's domestic sphere. The question shifts from “Do I have enough?” to “What am I building—and who am I becoming as I build it?”
In this sense, the home becomes a kind of stage. It becomes a place where identity, taste, and wealth are both exhibited as well as assembled, refined, and lived within. Planning becomes a form of authorship. Memory becomes a form of continuity. And wealth becomes something more fluid, relational, and expressive than a static ledger of assets. The Large World Model does not pretend that inequality disappears under this framework. Instead, it offers an alternative logic: one in which wealth becomes a shared medium rather than a private vault. It invites users not simply to look upon what others have built, but to enter into a longer, deeper process of becoming—through style, intention, and participation in the domestic world.
VI. Staging Wealth: From Estates to Networks
In the traditional order of wealth, the estate is both fact and symbol: a site of permanence, power, and projection. Estates consolidate material wealth into architectural form, but they also broadcast social meaning—through their design, their collections, their rituals, and their inaccessibility. They are more than private spaces; they are spatial ideologies. They say something not just about the people who live within them, but about who is not allowed to.
This is no longer the only—or even the dominant—model of how wealth appears. In an age of platforms and pervasive media, wealth increasingly stages itself through networks: curated feeds, brand alignments, foundation galas, pop-ups, and hyper-designed hospitality experiences. These are not fixed geographies, but distributed atmospheres of influence—fluid, aestheticized, and algorithmically optimized. The power of place has not disappeared, but it has been refracted through a digital lens.
This shift opens up both risks and opportunities. On one hand, wealth is becoming more image-driven than ever, its visibility shaped by a logic of virality, spectacle, and lifestyle commodification. On the other hand, this fluidity allows for new modes of access and narration—ways of telling the story of value that are less bounded by inheritance or geography. The question becomes: who gets to control the narrative? And can the means of staging wealth be reclaimed for purposes beyond performance?
The Large World Model offers a vision of how this might be done. It does so by expanding the terms of the stage as a living, participatory archive—structured by relationships, access, and unfolding context. Within this system, the estate becomes one node in a broader network: a space of history and continuity, but also of experimentation, hospitality, and cultural exchange.
This reframing begins with those families and individuals who already live at the intersection of legacy and attention—those whose names, properties, and choices have public consequence. These households already stage their wealth through various channels—products, foundations, social platforms. But what they often lack is a system that supports continuity and coherence across these expressions, while grounding them in lived domestic experience. We hope that our work will make such a system possible. Their homes go beyond being spaces of passive luxury to become spaces of visible care, planning, and taste. Their collections are annotated and their decisions around preservation, reuse, and donation become forms of leadership.
These representations can live both online and offline—through immersive galleries in flagship spaces that showcase the life of the home; through a media layer that spans editorial, social, and broadcast channels; and through structured invitations to participate in the culture they help sustain. Not everyone will own a house like theirs. But many may draw inspiration from how they live, how they host, how they support local artists or preserve family pieces.
Over time, this system can give rise to a new kind of cultural infrastructure: one in which homes are situated within a relational fabric. They point outward—to neighborhoods, restaurants, designers, makers, and service providers. They become sites of soft power, rooted in hospitality rather than hierarchy. And the network that forms around them becomes a kind of distributed public—one driven not by clicks, but by commitment, context, and shared aesthetic values.
This is, in many ways, a return to how things once were—when cities were more cohesive, main streets more vibrant, and cultural life less fragmented. Before technology hollowed out local economies and private life became increasingly disconnected from public meaning. The opportunity now is to redirect the extraordinary capacity that technology has generated—not to retreat from the world it has reshaped, but to reinvest in it. To deploy that capacity back into the physical, social, and cultural infrastructures it has, until now, largely displaced.
VII. Building Wealth Through Living
If wealth has historically been represented through what is owned, a new model would propose a shift: toward what is lived, planned, and sustained. It begins with a simple but profound idea—that domestic life is a generative act. Wealth, in this context, is not merely the sum of one’s possessions, but the product of accumulated choices, aesthetic discernment, memory, care, and intention. In the world we hope to help build, every decision made within and around the home—what to acquire, what to repair, what to let go of, what to archive—becomes legible as part of a broader narrative of value. The platform both tracks assets and reveals patterns. It surfaces coherence across time, showing how a life takes shape through rhythms of stewardship and aspiration. In doing so, it builds a living portfolio of domestic wealth—responsive to both individual vision and familial continuity.
This model is particularly powerful across generations. Where traditional estate planning focuses on legal and financial instruments, OurThings offers a cultural and material infrastructure to complement them. Families can preserve both the home itself as well as the meaning of the home—the stories behind objects, the logic of spatial decisions, the values embedded in style and use. They can archive those meanings for descendants as dynamic reference points in the evolution of a shared aesthetic and ethos. In the process, we address what cannot or should not be passed down. Many families inherit both wealth and an overwhelming burden of things, spaces, and homes. Attics filled with unsorted objects, obligations disguised as heirlooms. OurThings provides a graceful alternative: museum-grade preservation services for significant pieces; sustainable circulation and reuse channels for others. This becomes part of the broader network of meaning—honoring the past without burdening the future. Memory, in this sense, is not frozen—it is curated, contextualized, and released when necessary.
At the center of this model is the idea of agency—of giving members tools to both navigate the complexity of home life and shape it with intention. This includes planning systems that help members see years into the future: for renovations, inheritances, relocations, or reinvestments. It includes community systems that surface local makers, trusted service providers, and inspirational members whose paths can be learned from. It includes membership protocols that provide degrees of access to curated homes, events, and collections for structured learning, inspiration, and hospitality.
In this way, OurThings becomes a framework for how domestic life contributes to personal and cultural wealth. It allows for the expression of style both as taste and as a form of stewardship. It allows families to take ownership both of what they have and how they are seen—without the distortions of branding or commerce. It allows those outside the legacy class to see, learn, and build—with real support and without the illusion of instant arrival.
Crucially, the platform rejects sameness by avoiding becoming a universalizing engine that flattens style into an algorithm. Instead, it thrives on difference—on the idea that each home is a singular expression of context, history, and vision. It creates a shared language through which those differences can be understood, appreciated, and sustained. This is how wealth begins to transform—by embracing complexity and making its processes more participatory, more visible, and more meaningful.
VIII. Belief, Memory, and Cultural Grounding
Behind every economic system lies a belief system. Not just a theory of markets or production, but a metaphysics—a sense of what is real, what is good, what lasts. In modern life, the home has often been framed as separate from politics—a private domain set apart from public power. But over time, that distinction has eroded; the home’s symbolic sovereignty has been co-opted by political agendas, leaving its interior life hollowed out. What remains is the need to reclaim it as a place once again filled with meaning, value, and family. In order to do so, it must be treated as a site of structured belief. It must no longer be seen as separate from the serious spheres of finance and policy. It must no longer be feminized, domesticated, sentimentalized—understood as emotional rather than strategic. This has been a profound miscalculation. It is precisely within the home that systems of meaning are negotiated, that identities are stabilized, and that the future is rehearsed in miniature.
To transform the representation of wealth, then, is not merely to rebrand or reallocate assets—it is to re-anchor belief. To reassert that value resides not only in numbers and returns, but in the slow work of care, the aesthetics of intention, and the intergenerational continuity of space. This work cannot be done by policy alone. It requires investment in culture, tools, and a new kind of infrastructure that invites deeper engagement with the singularity of each life, each home, each history. This is what the Large World Model seeks to provide. It aims to link economic planning with emotional coherence. A way of saying, with seriousness, that how we live is not incidental—it is foundational. And that wealth, understood in this way, is both a resource and a record: of values chosen, relationships sustained, futures imagined and made real.
In a time when culture is increasingly pulled into the orbit of politics—weaponized, polarized, instrumentalized—it is all the more urgent to build zones of life that resist reduction–to create systems that support human complexity. The economy of the home, as we envision it, must be protected from the forces that would extract, flatten, or manipulate it for other ends. It must remain a place where beauty, memory, and agency can grow in tandem. The belief system at the core of this vision is a practice–a form of stewardship, open to all who choose to participate in the care of place, the shaping of life, and the thoughtful movement of objects and ideas across time. It offers an alternative to the cynicism that surrounds so much of contemporary wealth discourse. And it invites a quiet revolution that sees beyond the spectacle of disruption to the accumulation of meaning.
IX. A New Kind of Aura
Wealth has always sought an aura—a way of radiating significance, legitimacy, and desire. Historically, this aura has been constructed through distance, rarity, and permanence: the estate behind gates, the portrait in a gilded frame, the artifact encased in glass. The aura that resulted was sustained by exclusion, one that asked to be admired, but not touched. It derived its power precisely from its inaccessibility. In our present moment—fractured, surveilled, and hyper-mediated—that aura is failing. The distance no longer inspires reverence; it provokes critique. The opacity no longer protects; it erodes trust. And the idea of wealth itself begins to feel unmoored: abstracted into digits, commodified through lifestyle, stripped of the coherence that once connected value to place, inheritance to meaning, ownership to care.
The Large World Model proposes a different path by reconstituting how wealth is known, lived, and shared. It offers a new kind of aura built on memory and participation. An aura that emerges from narrative continuity, aesthetic coherence, and lived presence—layered across time, shaped through intention, and activated by use. This new aura is grounded in place, in process, and in the intimacy of daily life. It holds space for legacy without fetishizing the past. It invites aspiration without collapsing into performance. And most of all, it reclaims the home as a site of cultural and economic significance—a space where belief is not imposed, but cultivated. The transformation at hand is not simply about digitizing what we already know. It is about shifting the grammar through which wealth is represented and realized from static ownership to ongoing authorship and from things possessed to values expressed.
In this reframing, the question is no longer who has wealth—but how it lives. Not what is hidden or flaunted, but what is made legible, meaningful, and available for others to learn from, respond to, and build upon. The Large World Model does not promise equality in the distributive sense. But it does promise equity in the representational sense: a way for more people to understand what they’re building, to preserve what matters, and to participate in the great, quiet work of crafting a life.
