Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.
A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)
Leveraging and Deleveraging Toward Thick Sovereignty
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
From Mutual Aid In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a … Continued
Involuntary collaboration: a strategy for decentralized science
How your best co-worker, might be someone you’ll never meet
More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks
Part 3 of a series. See If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next and Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere for previous installments and a reading list. "Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning
A Multiscale Logic of Collective Intelligence" by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash
Think Like a Commoner | A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition was published by New Society Publishers. The print and audiobook versions are both published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm | David Bollier
Every so often I am invited to write a piece that in effect answers the question, “Why the commons?” I invariably find new answers to that question each time that I re-engage with it. My latest attempt is an essay, “Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm,” which I wrote for the Next System Project as part of its series of proposals for systemic alternatives.
Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism
“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.
Commoning as Relational Provisioning & Governance | David Bollier
This is the second section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining three sections of the essay will be published in the remaining days of this week. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here.
mutuals == consent to archive clusters of mutuals == p2p archive mesh prototyped here. non destructive, just posts+saves. tangled.org/burrito.space/p2pds
burrito.space/p2pds
tangled.org
Tom
@burrito.space was talking about an interesting PDS modification where trusted friends would replicate posts to their own PDS as a form of distributed resilience. Multi-DID spaces would be interesting too, although might be difficult to implement ECMH (still need to read up more on this)
Mutual intelligibility for schema idiolects.
GitHub - idiolect-dev/idiolect: Mutual intelligibility for schema idiolects.
github.com"Teams working across organizational boundaries, sharing structured data, and building on each other’s work with ease." I know it's called "adversarial interop", but it actually feels like "community interop", at least right now
Toni Schneider
Conference Takeaways I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I'm processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. ... toni.org/2026/04/03/conference-takeawa…
@interleave.love asked me to make this make sense, and I owe Dio a real thread. interleave.love pitches itself as a "relationship operating system" — a coach in your pocket, covering match to marriage to heartbreak. In a crowded category. Worth unpacking why.
