Hi Jordan, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I obviously disagree with some of your points. I don’t think calculating the ROI of a complex information environment is as straightforward as calculating the ROI of a mass-manufactured product such as a chair or a teacup. For one thing, there are many costs to moving key social interactions to information environments (such as Facebook) that are not accounted for in any spreadsheet. (And perhaps can’t be accounted for, given the pervasiveness and complexity of these things. For example, what is the cost to our societies of having citizens’ opinions manipulated by “fake news”?)

To use an analogy from ecology: We only think it’s easy to calculate the ROI of carbon-based fuel extraction, production, and use because we’ve chosen to ignore the costs of these practices on the physical environment. If we did, fossil fuel use wouldn’t make much sense from an economic perspective. We haven’t done it thus far because calculating such costs is not at all straightforward. (Still, some people are tackling this: https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-year)