Galt’s Gulch was a story about people withdrawing from a system that exploited them, going to build their own thing. The politics were a particular politics. Withdraw because you’re better than them. Build parallel because they don’t deserve what you make. Wait for them to beg.
I want to write about the same architectural move with the opposite politics.
The system that’s chewing people up right now isn’t extracting from creators while ignoring the strugglers. It’s chewing through both. The cooperative-builder move I see forming is: withdraw because the extraction system stopped working for everyone but the top, and build parallel because the people the system left behind deserve something better than what’s on offer.
Same shape. Different reason. Different population. Different politics. Same architecture.
What I’ve been noticing
I’ve talked to about half a dozen people in the last year who are doing some version of this. Burnt-out hackers who got leveled up by AI. We’re all of the same mindset of like, let’s put the power in the people’s hands. And let the people that actually produce make money, not the people that were lucky enough to buy something or have a law passed that favors them.
I’m a 20-year offensive-security operator. In early 2025 I had a traumatic brain injury — mountain bike crash, ~25 mph from a 6-7 foot drop, bleeding on the brain — that rebooted my operating system. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, I got fired. I used AI to heal me and build things, and I documented it.
I’m writing a memoir about that. The book is the process. But the bigger thing — the thing I want to write about here — is what happens after you come out the other side.
You don’t go back. You can’t. You go looking for the people who also came out the other side. And it turns out they’re already there.
The convergence I keep noticing
This week I had a long call with a peer working on the same family of agent-coordination problems from a different stack in a different country. We hit it off in five minutes. Different stacks — open-source-enterprise on his own hardware on his side, Cloudflare-substrate on mine. Different geographies, different employers, different surfaces. Same architecture. We arrived at the same conclusions about substrate, sovereignty, mutual aid, and who the cooperative is for.
Two men, searching for meaning in life, and we both landed on a cooperative type idea of helping people. I think it’s just a bigger message of what’s coming in the world.
That same week a neurologist working on healthcare-decentralization surfaced through a different doorway. Different lineage entirely. Same direction. Outreach is drafted; the conversation hasn’t happened yet.
I notice this and ask what are the odds of that. The honest answer is: smaller than I’d guess. The cohort is small. Once you’re in it, recognition is the default. People in it find each other from the architectural shape alone.
That’s the thing I want to name. The cohort.
What the cohort is
Two things have to be true. Either alone doesn’t get you in.
A rupture from the corporate-extraction system. Got fired, quit on principle, broke under the load, had a body event — TBI, breakdown, illness — that forced the exit, or walked away with eyes open after seeing what the system actually was. The rupture is the ticket.
A reframe toward cooperative-helping as the answer to what now. Bitter ex-corporate people who just want to take the system down are not in this cohort. The reframe — I’m going to help build something better, with other people, for people who need it — is the second half of the ticket.
Without both, you’re either still inside, or just burned out.
The cohort is small. It’s also growing. Every quarter the corporate-extraction model produces more ruptures, and the people coming out the other side are converging on the same family of answers. The wave is real. I can see it from inside because I’m in it.
What the cooperative could look like
I don’t know yet. That’s the honest answer.
What I think I know:
The economics is the inversion of the extraction model. Billionaires need the people and the people’s money. The cooperative withdraws participation and spend and attention and data from the system that extracts, and steers those flows into a parallel structure where if you help you might be paid.
Might is the honest word. Not guaranteed. Not entitled. The cooperative pays contributors when there’s surplus to share. The structure is something like a credit union or a mutual insurance company — both have worked for over a hundred years, both are owned by the members, both keep surplus inside the community rather than feeding it to a small group of shareholders. We’re not inventing the model. We’re applying a worked model to the AI-substrate era.
It shouldn’t get that big. Maybe there’s a Wisconsin one, a Minnesota one, an Azure-cloud-hosted one, a Chinese one. All able to talk to each other through connections, with reputation and trust measured the same way. Different cultures. Different governance. Same protocol. Federation, not consolidation.
The point is to make enough to be happy and have the time to do what you love. Beyond that is possible but not the goal or thrust of the community.
Yes the system can be gamed. But we may never get that big.
What I haven’t figured out
The honest list. This is where I need the cohort’s help.
How the cooperative actually pays people. If you help you might be paid is the principle. The mechanism — rev-share rule, capital-allocation body, settlement layer between cooperatives — I don’t have a worked proposal yet. The cohort gets to shape this.
How governance works. Protocol is not governance. Trust math is not a bylaw. The credit union model has a hundred years of NCUA structure behind it. The mutual insurance model has policyholder governance. Our version will look like something. I don’t know what yet. The cohort gets to shape this too.
What about resistance from the existing system. The extraction economy doesn’t go quietly. Boycotts of attention or spend don’t immediately starve it. The pattern is slower — fewer people available to extract from, fewer hours of attention, fewer dollars in. The point isn’t to win the withdrawal war. It’s to build the parallel structure that catches the people who leave. Both can be true.
What about scale. At 100 contributors the cooperative is fair. At 10,000 governance gets hard. At 1 million it starts looking like a corporation again. I don’t know how to solve this except by not scaling past sufficiency, federating instead, capping each cooperative deliberately. We might decide to stay small on purpose.
What about co-optation. If this works, the existing system will try to absorb it. There’s a long history of cooperative experiments getting bought out or watered down. I don’t know how we resist this. We probably learn the hard way.
These are the load-bearing open questions. I’m not pretending to have answered them. The cohort gets to.
What I’m offering and what I’m asking
You’re talking to a dyslexic colorblind ADHD guy who got chewed up by corporate tech and rewired by a brain injury. If I’m load-bearing in this cooperative, you can be too. There’s probably significant things you can teach me. There’s probably skills you have that I could use.
The cooperative is for people like that. Not just for credentialed experts. Not just for technical folks. Farmers, motorcycle mechanics, music instructors, writers — people who think differently than I do. I want to gather people that think differently than me, have different perspective, have different ways of coming at things.
If you came out the other side of the rupture and you’re looking for what’s next, come find me. I’m publishing this so you can. If you have ideas about any of the open questions above, I want to hear them. If you’re already in the cohort and doing some version of this, I want to know about it.
Two men in different countries, with different stacks, arrived at the same architecture in the same week without knowing each other’s work. I noticed it. I’m naming the cohort because I think there’s a wave forming and I want the wave to know itself.
I’ll be here. Come think out loud with me.