Solidarity Squads
Description
Benjamin Life:
"It begins with people deciding to work together.
It’s not too difficult to imagine: a software engineer gets laid off when her company automates half its workforce. A designer watches his freelance rates collapse as AI tools flood the market. A project manager leaves her corporate job because she can no longer stomach optimizing extraction for shareholders. Instead of retreating into the isolation of the job hunt, competing against thousands for a shrinking pool of positions in a system that just demonstrated how disposable they are, they form a cooperative. Three people, then five, then twelve. They pool their skills. They use AI not as a replacement for their labor but as a catalyst for their collaboration, automating the back-office overhead, accelerating research, handling the operational friction that used to require a full corporate infrastructure just to function. What once demanded venture capital and a C-suite now demands a shared Signal group, a clear operating agreement, and the willingness to split revenue fairly.
These are solidarity squads. Small, agile cooperatives that form organically around shared values and complementary skills, not to build the next unicorn, but to build viable livelihoods rooted in mutual benefit. They don’t need permission. They don’t need investors. They need each other. And as these squads begin to find one another, as they discover that the cooperative down the street shares their values and serves a complementary market, they start to federate. They share leads. They collaborate on larger projects. They create informal networks that begin to exhibit the upward spiral dynamics this essay describes, not in theory, but in the lived experience of people whose economic lives are embedded in relationships of trust and reciprocity.
This is already happening. In Boulder, Colorado, the Regen Hub began as a simple co-working space, a shared physical location for people building regenerative businesses and non-profits. But physical proximity generates relationship, and relationship generates collaboration, and collaboration generates shared economic activity. The Regen Hub evolved into a community third space, a place where the boundaries between professional and civic life dissolve, where conversations over coffee become project partnerships, where the social fabric of a regenerative economy gets woven in real time. And now it is evolving again, into a venture incubator designed to scale cooperatives, to take the organic energy of solidarity squads and give them the structure, the mentorship, the seed capital, and the networked relationships they need to become durable enterprises. It is, in miniature, the entire arc of this essay: from shared space, to shared values, to shared economy. From co-working to co-owning.
The crucial insight is that we don’t have to wait for the macroeconomic transition to be complete before we start. Every cooperative formed is a node in the emerging network. Every federated relationship is an edge. Every dollar that circulates between cooperative enterprises rather than leaking to distant shareholders is a small victory for the upward spiral. And AI, the same force that is accelerating the extractive endgame, can be leveraged right now to turn your solidarity squad into a solidarity swarm, lowering the barriers to cooperative formation, handling the complexity of shared governance, making it easier for small groups of aligned people to coordinate, create, and share in the value of their collective work. The tools of acceleration are not inherently extractive. The question is who wields them, and toward what ends."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/upward-spiral-economics)