Squad Culture
= squads are friends empowered by digital tools ... Squaddom is about new ways of being together, learning, and making meaning in an increasingly complex world. "Squads value self-determination, not through individualism, but through collective maintenance and care for one another". [1]
Contextual Quote
"Group collaboration is now the strong default, putting squads at the center of social, cultural, and economic life. To paraphrase K-HOLE: today people are born as individuals, and have to find their squad. ... Today's squads are expressions of digital locality and the new squad era forces us to reconsider the individuated logic of early social networks. Contrary to early visions of hypertext, the internet is not a singular World Wide Web, traversed by individuals. To be online today is to enter the global arena. Mass social media are hazardous PvP zones no one should traverse without team support ... Squads are woke to the empty neoliberal promises of gig-economy "employment" and para-social personal brands. Squads value self-determination, not through individualism, but through collective maintenance and care for one another. Squads value creative expression, but celebrate the group rather than individual authorship. For the squad, the autonomous is always collective.
But can squads scale? Squads are first and foremost cultures, not businesses.."
- Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti [2]
Description
Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti:
"Today's emerging culture of group cohesion is driven equally by the social and financial precarity of urban life. Family are those we share space and rent with. Priced out of tier-1 cities, individuals have banded together to survive a jobless market with no social safety net.
Squads are both a product of—and a response to—contemporary social atomization. The trope of "getting a place upstate" signifies young city-dwellers' desire for new kinds of squad-based homesteading. HOMESQUADING is a modern day back-to-the-land movement—swap Whole Earth-inspired post-war communes with post-internet surf clubs microblogging the virtues of cooperative housing, permaculture gardening, and solar-powered mesh networks.
Squad culture is the antithesis of neoliberal individualism. Millennials are healing from decades of irony poisoning, rediscovering what it's like to have generative, exploratory relationships with one another. Younger generations are already imbued with extremely powerful squad energy, equipped with formative experiences in Minecraft, DOTA 2, and Fortnite parties."
(https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/)
Characteristics
Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti:
1.
"While ancient squads were brought together by the struggle for survival, always-on group communication sets the scene for contemporary squad culture. Group chats and adapted team workspaces create shared context and institutional memory. One necessary condition of the squad is this sense of persistence: co-presence and continuous availability to one another.
But the squad is more than a loose network of affiliations, it's a coherent body. A second prerequisite of squad formation is self-recognition. It's not you or me. It's Us. We. Ours. This pillar often follows from the first. Squads may start as one-off Telegram channels, but they soon become "The Group Chat," a metonym for the squad itself.
For the squad to understand itself as a whole, it maintains boundaries circumscribing strong group norms. Fuck a Dunbar number—the ideal squad count is no more than 12. How can you really be present with more than a dozen people? Small groups are crucial for tight coordination. A greater network may surround the squad, making it appear big and fuzzy from the outside. But for the core crew, an invisible circle binds and protects a space of group identity.
As SQUAD VIBES grow, so does the possibility of interdependence and resource sharing—social, emotional, financial. Trust brought by consistent socialization and self-recognition is a foundation for exploring what the squad is capable of together."
2.
"The team toolkit defines its capabilities, and different platforms enable different modes of squad thought. Squad space is more than environment, it's a collective body, a shared cognition layer. Squad space is where market-moving trades are planned, conspiracies are conceived, and memes are spawned. Members of the squad may live in different geographies—but within this space, everyone is on SQUAD TIME. The founding of a new group DM is year zero."
(https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/)
Infrastructure
Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti:
"Some digital tools are public interfaces, while others are used to coordinate internally. Today this SQUAD INFRASTRUCTURE is comprised of simple software primitives: Venmo, Splitwise, Cash App. These apps are financial plumbing that facilitate internal coordination between squad members by minimizing the awkwardness of asking your friends for money. Despite the strong demand for SQUAD RESILIENCY, the social stigma of group finances is still a major barrier to economic exchange among friends.
In-app mechanics like budget trackers, polls, and coin-flips offer a half-way point between social agreements and technical solutions. For instance Splitwise relies heavily on the social norms to ensure expenses are entered accurately. By allowing individuals to opt-in to a set of rules for retroactive settlement the group's social friction and coordination costs are reduced. Civilization advances by extending the number of important functions squads can perform without thinking.
Some believe new software can liberate "individual creators." But this kind of thinking inevitably leads to Uberized platform-mediated wage labor. We want to liberate squads. The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society, yet few pieces of software allow the squad as a whole to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together. To fully realize SQUAD CULTURE this must change."