What Is the Third Oikos?
Tech is reshaping the household. What does the good life look like now?
Welcome to The Third Oikos, a newsletter about what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household.
What are we talking about?
Oikos is a Greek term that means house, household, or family. The management of household work — oikonomia — is where we get the word “economy.” This project came from an essay by Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano in National Affairs; they argued that history has been dominated by two main forms of household organization and production. But, almost without noticing, we’ve passed into a third form.
The first oikos was the household until the Industrial Revolution. Before that shift, the household was the central hub of economic production, and production was ordered by the needs of the household. In different societies, men and women had different roles, but “work” was something that both sexes did.
The second oikos came with the Industrial Revolution. Society centered on rational or scientific production, which moved outside of the household. In this period, productivity shifted to larger scale enterprises: the factory and the office. In the West, male and female spheres became more sharply delineated. As production moved to corporate settings, the home went from a site of both consumption and production to one of mere consumption. Many of our ideas about domesticity are rooted not in age-old norms, but in the modern split between the worlds of consumption and production.
But perhaps since the digital revolution, and surely since COVID, we’ve entered the third oikos. Technological developments have reshaped what a “household” is to a degree not seen since the Industrial Revolution. The digital revolution made economic production possible outside of the office, and a raft of even newer shifts — COVID, LLMs, and smaller automated machines among them — has accelerated the move away from traditional corporate forms. At the same time, those technological shifts toward digital existence have heightened isolation and polarization.
The result is a mix of opportunities and challenges for households. On the one hand, there are signs that production is returning to the household. Both white collar Zoom work and more hands-on production techniques are increasingly possible within family life, not just outside the home. There will be opportunities to retrieve ways of ordering a household that were impossible a generation ago.
On the other hand, the challenges to communal and family life are real: social isolation, a massive spike in gender polarization, a massive drop-off in pairing off, a dramatically increased cost of living, and a plummeting fertility rate look like parts of a vicious cycle. “How do I live a good life?” is an eternal human question, but it can feel like a completely new challenge today. We can no longer take for granted basic facts about friendship, neighborhood, community, and family.
Each month, I’m going to interview flourishing family and community builders. I’ll try to understand their ambitions, and identify the practical techniques they use to make their households functional and beautiful. I’m hoping to draw out how individuals and families have adapted to the new technological environment they find themselves in: how they are protecting against new challenges to family life, and taking advantage of new opportunities for flourishing.
Why this newsletter exists
I’m interested in finding and telling stories of working households because I benefited from them. As a child, I had a rocky relationship with my family of origin, and I experienced just how isolating contemporary suburban life can be. When I started college, the loneliness didn’t go away, and I wasn’t getting an education worth what I was paying for. I dropped out, but couldn’t pay for the other schools I was admitted to. Instead, I found myself on an unorthodox path: a software internship, enrollment in online community college, studying on buses and the metro on my way to my new 9-5. As my friends began their college lives, I didn’t know where to find community.
In this precarious state, I was welcomed into multiple households: a place to crash for months from a high school friend’s family, and a long-term home from another family, who I met through my now-husband’s family. What characterized these households was their entrenchment and investment in a broader community. They were committed to raising children together, even if it took living in the same cul-de-sac. In each home, both parents were intentional about building a culture of hospitality in their household, which they passed down to their children.
In these experiences, I saw firsthand the benefits of family as a social safety net, even though the families in question weren’t my own. There were pockets of the social fabric that were thriving, I learned, that protected me from adverse life circumstances. More than that, I saw other visions of what the good life could look like — not perfect, but beautiful, compelling visions that opened up my mind to a world of possibilities.
In the following years, I entered the world of venture capital, where I paid close attention to a set of technological trends that further expanded my sense of what was possible:
Digitization and modularization in healthcare and medical diagnostics is allowing more care to happen while patients remain at home.
Just-in-time logistics is allowing all sorts of niche expertise to be supported by materials shipped from around the world and cultivated through online learning.
Digital infrastructure and low earth orbit satellites mean homes anywhere could have a high-speed internet connection.
Instant payments, global banking, remote fundraising, and digital identity/KYC allows all manner of business, building financial transactions straight from the home.
My experiences with the strengths and weaknesses of our modern social fabric, particularly in family life and my close professional attention to technological trends meant I was compelled by a question Askonas and Toscano posed:
“The family as an institution is amenable to many different kinds of social organization and technologies of production, but not every kind. What must society’s underlying technological order feature for the family to survive? What kinds of technologies are conducive to its flourishing?”
They argued that new technological forms — high-speed internet, information technology, COVID, remote work, ubiquitous LLMs, and the broader acceleration of digital life — were driving huge economic shifts and reweaving our social fabric.
Technological changes
The ubiquity of smartphones since the early 2010s was already fully in motion, but COVID provided an additional push for all parts of daily life to be taken online. Whether it’s digital check-in stations at doctors appointments, check-out processes at grocery stores and restaurants or check-in processes at hotels; online religious services, telehealth and teletherapy appointments, or dating. Suddenly most institutions that involved a social aspect were forced to consider if they should replace it with a digital mode. The attention economies of social media also mean that our lives are punctuated by reminders that it would be easier to get cheap hits of dopamine by picking up a device, rather than more aversive and more meaningful physical tasks before us.
As large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini come into mass public usage, outsourcing to the digital is accelerating. Around half of the population has used an LLM (as of July 2025, according to Rethink Priorities), and one third of that population uses LLMs daily (Elon University). Next to the benefits of these models, it’s hard not to notice that massive amounts of logical and social processing are assisted by — if not outsourced to — LLMs, across writing, intrapersonal navigation (apologies, love letters, etc.), professional negotiation, therapy, and more.
We’ve also hit other momentous technological inflection points. Reusable, low-cost rocket launch (SpaceX Falcon 9) means satellite launch costs are dropped by an order of magnitude and software-managed coverage allocation means low earth orbit of these satellites can provide high-speed internet almost anywhere. During COVID, millions of Americans fled cities but still needed modern connectivity that would enable online school, video calls, and remote work. Starlink meant that SpaceX was able to meet this demand relatively easily — no digging fiber-optic connections. It’s a thoroughly modern re-domestication of infrastructure.
The nature of technology is that it is always shifting, but our last 20 years or so have been marked by a complete digital transformation of society.
Social changes
Technological changes in both the second and third oikoi have led to massive social change. People are more lonely and more isolated. They have fewer close friends, spend less time socializing, and are invested less in community organizations like churches, unions, and hobbyist groups. Work norms have shifted toward decentralized, always-on models. People also struggle to begin family life: we’re more polarized by gender, go on fewer dates, get married later, have fewer children than we desire, and so on. We’re less invested in and supported by extended family, or other forms of community. An increasingly large swathe of social life is now facilitated through the digital, and all of these changes were rapidly accelerated by the pandemic.
98% of Americans own a cellphone, and about 9 in 10 Americans own a smartphone (Pew). As work moves to the digital, always-on norm, the friction to answering one more work email is significantly lower. As engaging in the digital world has atrophied social skills, slipping into spending a few more hours on salaried digital work feels like an easier choice than putting ourselves out there socially — going on a date, attending a new social group, or having a less than perfect catchup call with an extended family member.
Partially as a result, we’re experiencing a friendship recession. The percentage of US adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990). People are less involved in their local communities. Access to social life is also intensified by socioeconomic status, with lower and middle class people spending less time in community organizations. People are more transient on average, and invest less in social watering holes where they historically met neighbors, friends, and spouses (offices, religious community, and community spaces like parks or libraries).
Dating has also become harder as people move around more often, and apps encourage a market-like mentality around potential romantic partners, as well as social life as a whole. People are also having less sex, especially young people, which researchers tie to the decline in the percentage of partnered people (married or living together) in this age cohort.
Families are challenged by a lack of tight-knit communities that can help them share childcare, share in discipline and in joy, and pick up slack when families face tragedy. Moreover, as spaces are designed by and presided over by a population with fewer children, and less proximity to children - more of daily life becomes needlessly frictional or even hostile to families, mothers, and children (You should hold more babies.)
Economically, family life has been strained by an increased cost of living — housing, healthcare, and childcare in particular — and higher-than-ever cultural standards for family life. Millennials can no longer expect a better life than their parents, and therefore struggle to expect a better one for their children. Without progress further along a perceived “adulting” path, they feel they can’t expect to build a family.
The positives of digital life
Now, I will be the first to say that the shifts of the third oikos have brought benefits as well as costs. The Twitter habit I developed in the first year of college, which started because I felt intellectually isolated in my physical environment, contributed to me landing both a job and a husband, as well as several people I count as close friends. In a world without “learning in public” online, I would have missed out on some of the best things in my life. Additionally, many parents are able to spend more time with their children because of remote work, and we’ve also seen a fertility boost for married women and men who work for home who already have children. In many ways the digital can allows production and social life to re-localize, if we properly harness it to do so.
And if there’s one lesson I take from Askonas and Toscano’s essay defining the third oikos, it’s not to glamorize the recent past. The 1950s were not the peak of domesticity, or societal ideals, and many of the ideas we have about domesticity simply were not built to survive economic and technological change. It’s often easy to fixate on ideals that were made possible by a very specific moment in time. A flourishing social fabric of community and families in the moment we live in will look fundamentally different in many ways.
Where we’re going
The world needs families for many reasons, not least as a social structure that absorbs and insulates many people from the downsides of life. And families are often made of and supported by many more people than just our nuclear and biological families. As my church says, our family is meant to “Multiply each other’s joy and divide each other’s sorrows.” But what those families look like — how they’re formed, who works, where, and how, how kids are educated, how they’re cared for — is likely to change. As the media scholar Marshall McLuhan argued, “Every medium or technology enhances some human function, obsolesces some older form, retrieves some previously obsolesced form, and when pushed to its limits, reverses into its opposite.” To thrive in the third oikos, we may have to look back to ways of living before the second oikos.
We’ll also have to look ahead, and think proactively about the technologies we’re building. As Askonas and Toscano argue, “We must reassert the authority of families and local communities over the technologies that shape their everyday lives… restoring power and responsibility to local actors. Doing so will require favoring technology that enhances local and familial autonomy.” Some technologies, like those that enable remote work, may be a great boon to families, even as social media may be a harm.
What does the good life look like in the third oikos? I don’t exactly know yet, but join me and let’s figure it out.
This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.
Love your observations! How complex families are, embedded within societies that are evolving so fast we can't keep up. Thanks for being a thought leader, Nic!
I love that you’re exploring this. I think we need a real narrative shift, beyond the girlboss and tradwife eras toward something new. It’d be great to also hear from families with kids in their 20s, and from both men and women who’ve built exceptional careers in the past decade without fitting either mold.