omniharmonicUpward Spiral Economics
This piece is inspired by and dedicated to my peers in the applied theory of regenerative economics: Gregory Wendt, Kaitlin Archambault, Samantha Power, John Fullerton, Indy Johar, Gregory Landua, Austin Wade Smith, Stuart Cowan, Ferananda Ibarra, Scott Morris, Pete Corke, Kevin Owocki, Michel Bauwens, and others.
There is a clear way in which the recursive acceleration of artificial intelligence is, in many respects, the last stage of late-stage capitalism. Everything gets turned all the way up. All of the extractive dynamics, all of the consolidation and centralization, amplified to a pitch that reveals the underlying logic of the system with terrible clarity. We are approaching a threshold where we no longer live in a market economy so much as a new feudalism, where ownership of the means of computation replaces ownership of the means of production, and the distance between those who control capital and those who labor within its gravitational field stretches beyond any pretense of shared prosperity.
That trajectory is horrifying but perceivable. As people increasingly have less and less, as survival itself becomes harder and harder, leaders will face a stark choice: institute some form of authoritarianism to keep people from revolting, or allow the legitimacy of the entire system to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The history of concentrated power suggests which option most will choose.
And yet. Within this compression, within the very forces that threaten to foreclose our future, lies a structural opening. As AI accelerates capitalism’s endgame, it simultaneously destabilizes the foundations of legitimacy upon which the entire extractive economy rests. Into that opening, that liminal space between the world that is dying and the world struggling to be born, we can offer something more than critique. We can offer architecture.
This essay is about that architecture: the cooperative, the network, the upward spiral. It is about re-embedding economic activity in the relational fabric from which it was torn, and doing so at a scale and velocity that can actually compete with the forces of extraction. Not through reform. Reform is too easily captured. Through the construction of parallel systems with their own logic, their own compounding momentum, their own gravitational pull.
The Suicidal Logic of Extraction
To understand why alternatives are urgent, we need to be precise about what we’re replacing.
The fundamental logic of capitalism is straightforward, even elegant in its brutality. Value is generated by extracting it: from the earth, from human labor, from attention, from care. That value is consolidated through the corporation into the ownership class. The winner is whoever can take the most and consolidate the most. Pay workers the least. Return the maximum to shareholders. This is not a corruption of capitalism. This is its operating system.
The game theory of our current economy is built on winner-take-all, zero-sum dynamics. And those dynamics drive extraction as surely as gravity drives water downhill. An economy that sees the Earth as a store of value and frames prosperity as a zero-sum race to extract that store is, by definition, fundamentally suicidal on a finite planet. There’s no way around that. Not through better regulation, not through greener branding, not through ESG metrics that paper over structural contradictions. The orientation itself, the basic posture of the economy toward the living world, is what must change.
Karl Polanyi diagnosed this nearly a century ago: capitalism’s tendency to “disembed” economic activity from social life, to treat labor, land, and money as commodities when they are nothing of the kind. What we’re living through now is the terminal phase of that disembedding, an economy so abstracted from its ecological and relational foundations that it can no longer sustain the conditions for its own reproduction.
Value Is Relational
If extraction is the disease, what is the cure? It begins with a recognition so simple it’s almost embarrassing: value is relational.
Not value as Wall Street defines it: the price at which an asset can be liquidated. Value as in the genuine wealth that emerges when human beings coordinate, create, care, build, teach, feed, and tend. This kind of value doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in the space between people, between a community and its watershed, between a worker and the meaning they find in their labor. Value, understood at the level of first principles, is a property of relationships.
There are ethical ways to create value and to share in the benefits of that value. Ways that don’t require someone to lose for someone else to win. Ways that don’t treat the biosphere as a balance sheet to be drawn down. The entire field of regenerative economics has spent decades articulating these principles. What this essay aims to add to that discourse is the synthesis of regenerative economics and bioregional economic re-localization, advocating for the networked cooperative as the primary structural mechanism capable of operationalizing relational value at the scale required to compete with extraction.
The networked cooperative is a series of cooperatives federated into solidarity economies that generate recursive, self-reinforcing dynamics through network effects. Whereas capitalism reinforces accumulation, networked cooperativism reinforces mutual benefit.
The Cooperative as Structural Inversion
Cooperatives are one of the most underutilized structural change mechanisms available to the regenerative movement. Cooperatives don’t just redistribute profit more fairly. They perform a fundamental inversion of the extractive logic at the heart of corporate capitalism.
In a conventional corporation, value flows upward. Workers create it; shareholders capture it. The distance between creation and capture is the source of profit, and that distance is maximized by design: lower wages, fewer benefits, externalized costs, automated labor, offshored production. Every efficiency gain accrues to capital. Every risk is borne by workers.
In a cooperative, that flow is reversed. The people who create value are the same people who share in its benefits. The cooperative re-embeds the creation of economic value into relationships: real, accountable, reciprocal relationships between the people whose labor generates that value.
In this way, cooperatives function as micro solidarity economies. They are, in some ways, small instances of what genuine mutual aid looks like when it’s given an economic structure: communities where people actually care about each other, actually want each other to succeed. Where the governing ethos is not a zero-sum race to the bottom of trying to get as much as you can, but a positive-sum commitment to supporting each other and using the mutuality of shared effort to create more abundance for everyone involved.
This isn’t utopian sentimentality. It’s structural design. And the most compelling proof is not theoretical but operational, a seventy-year experiment in the Basque Country that reveals exactly how cooperative mutualization works at scale. The Mondragón Corporation, over 80 cooperatives, more than 80,000 workers, revenues exceeding €12 billion, is routinely cited for its scale. But what makes Mondragón genuinely instructive is not its size. It is the architecture of mutualization: the specific mechanisms through which individual cooperatives are woven into a networked organism far more resilient than the sum of its parts. That architecture rests on what Mondragón calls its “three-in-one” model: productive enterprises in the first line, supported by cooperative finance and cooperative education in the second. Most cooperative movements have the first. Almost none have built the second. Mondragón’s genius was understanding that cooperatives without their own financial and educational infrastructure would remain dependent on extractive institutions, and that this dependency would eventually erode their cooperative character from within.
The keystone is the cooperative bank. Caja Laboral Popular, the Workers’ Credit Union, founded in 1959, was created not as a conventional bank that happens to serve cooperatives, but as a cooperative institution whose entire purpose is to channel capital toward cooperative development. Member cooperatives deposit their funds in Caja Laboral, which pools them with local savings to finance new ventures, conducting feasibility studies, assigning experienced “godfather” mentors to fledgling enterprises, and structuring startup capital so that risk is distributed across founders, existing cooperatives, and the bank itself. Capital circulates internally, from cooperative profits to bank deposits to startup loans to new cooperative profits, in a self-reinforcing loop that compounds over decades. There are no shares in Mondragón. Instead, each worker-member maintains an individualized capital account into which seventy percent of their cooperative’s profit flows annually, credited by a formula based on pay and hours worked. The capital belongs to the workers, repaid at retirement. The cooperatives are, structurally, not for sale. There is no equity to trade, no hostile takeover to execute. Ownership and labor are the same thing.
What transforms this from a collection of good businesses into a genuine economic ecosystem is the inter-cooperative solidarity infrastructure. Cooperatives contribute roughly ten percent of their profits to central funds, one of which functions as a revolving venture capital pool that preferentially funds joint ventures between cooperatives, structurally incentivizing collaboration over internal competition. When demand drops in one cooperative, workers transfer to others without loss of rights or seniority. During the 1980s recession, when Basque heavy industry shed half its jobs, Mondragón created community-wide mechanisms for transferring labor and capital, and only 0.6 percent of members received unemployment payments. Cooperative groups share services in personnel, marketing, R&D, and financial management. Lagun Aro manages a social welfare system with assets exceeding €5.5 billion. Mondragón University trains the next generation through programs that produce “junior cooperatives” as student startups. Wage solidarity caps pay ratios at roughly 6.5 to 1, compared to over 300 to 1 in US corporations, keeping capital circulating within the community rather than pooling at the top.
The result: over sixty years, fewer than five percent of Mondragón’s cooperatives have faced bankruptcy. Unemployment in the Basque region runs roughly ten points below the Spanish national average. When COVID-19 triggered mass layoffs worldwide, Mondragón deployed solidarity funds, income-scaled pay adjustments, and worker redeployment. They avoided layoffs almost entirely, recovered faster, retained talent, and preserved the purchasing power of their communities.
This is what Polanyi meant by re-embedding the economy in social relations, not metaphorically but operationally as real architectures of solidarity. Mondragón demonstrates that the cooperative is not simply an alternative business structure. It is, when fully realized, an alternative economic infrastructure, one whose internal mechanics generate precisely the kind of upward spiral that extractive capitalism is structurally incapable of creating.
The Straw and the Circulatory System
In stark contrast, when a multinational corporation like Walmart or Target enters a community, it functions like a straw, sucking value out of that community and channeling it back to distant shareholders. None of that value recirculates locally. The profits don’t stay. The wages are minimized. The supply chains are global. The community becomes a site of extraction, not a site of wealth creation.
This is the beauty of local businesses and, in their fullest expression, local cooperative economies. Value generated locally stays local. It circulates. It compounds.
But local small businesses have been systematically undermined. The COVID-19 relief architecture in the US, both by design and by structural bias, disproportionately channeled resources to large corporations while Main Street suffocated. Many communities now find themselves in a landscape where only big box retailers remain, where the local economic system has been hollowed out, where the circulatory system of the community economy has been replaced by a one-way extraction pipeline.
And now AI is arriving into this already-depleted landscape. As large corporations automate and restructure, as entire categories of employment dissolve, as the job market contracts in ways that may prove structural rather than cyclical, millions of people will find themselves outside the formal economy. The question is whether they will be abandoned to precarity—or whether we will seize this moment to reimagine our economy from first principles.
The Upward Spiral
Here is the thesis at the heart of this essay: solidarity economies built on cooperative networks don’t just resist extraction. They generate upward spirals, self-reinforcing cycles of mutual benefit that actually lift people out of precarity. Not through get-rich-quick schemes. Not through the fantasy of solo entrepreneurship in a rigged marketplace. Not through extractive drop-shipping websites and hustle culture. Through relationships.
Through the positive-sum relationships that become possible when we cease to see each other as rational economic actors competing for zero-sum benefit at each other’s expense and start to see the people around us as potential collaborators capable of generating mutual benefit. Benefit that is shared holistically and governed democratically.
The upward spiral works like this: cooperative enterprises generate revenue. That revenue is distributed to worker-owners, increasing household prosperity. Some portion returns to the cooperative network, capitalizing new ventures. New cooperatives create new employment, new goods, new services, expanding the local economy. As network density increases, more value circulates internally rather than leaking to external shareholders. This circulation multiplies effective wealth. Communities become more resilient. People become more invested, literally and figuratively, in each other’s success.
Each turn of the spiral compounds the last. More connections mean more circulation. More circulation means more effective wealth. More effective wealth means more capacity to launch new cooperative ventures, which creates more connections. The spiral feeds itself.
This is the same recursive logic that makes capitalism so potent: compounding returns, network effects, positive feedback loops, but pointed in the opposite direction. Where extractive capitalism spirals toward consolidation and collapse, cooperative solidarity spirals toward distribution and resilience. Where extraction concentrates, mutualism distributes. Where extraction depletes, mutualism regenerates.
Local Currency as Buffer
As these solidarity economies mature, they develop another crucial capacity: resilience against macroeconomic instability. Communities with dense cooperative networks can even issue their own local currencies, complementary currencies that continue to facilitate exchange even when the national currency falters.
This isn’t speculative. During the 2008 financial crisis, communities with established local currencies like Ithaca HOURS in New York and BerkShares in Massachusetts maintained economic activity while credit froze and dollars became scarce. These systems functioned as economic firewalls, insulating local exchange from the cascading failures of global finance.
As the US dollar faces ongoing devaluation through monetary policy, through the architectures of modern monetary theory that artificially inflate currency supply while real productive capacity stagnates, local currencies become more than a charming experiment. They become critical infrastructure. A community with a functioning local currency, backed by the real productive capacity of its cooperative enterprises, possesses a degree of monetary sovereignty that can buffer it against the worst shocks of a destabilizing global economy.
The cooperative network becomes, in effect, the backing for the currency. Not gold. Not government debt. Productive relationships. Real goods and services created by people who know and trust each other. This is money re-embedded in social reality, exchange media grounded in the actual capacity of a community rather than the abstract promises of distant institutions.
The Bioregional Transition
What I’m describing, when you follow the logic far enough, is the emergence of the bioregional economy. An economy rooted in place. An economy where value creation, value circulation, and value governance all happen at scales where people can see and know each other, where accountability is relational rather than regulatory, where the feedback loops between economic activity and ecological health are short enough to be felt and responded to.
This is the transition: from an economy of extraction organized at global scale to an economy of regeneration organized at bioregional scale. From an economy that treats places as interchangeable sites of resource extraction to one that recognizes each watershed, each ecosystem, each community as a unique context requiring unique economic relationships.
Cooperatives are the cellular structure of this bioregional economy. Cooperative networks are its circulatory system. Local currencies are its lifeblood. And the upward spiral—the recursive compounding of mutual benefit through dense relational networks—is its growth mechanism.
But this transition won’t happen spontaneously. It requires deliberate infrastructure.
Solidarity Squads
So where does this begin? Not with policy. Not with a master plan. 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.
The Case for Cooperative Incubation
We need incubators and accelerators that can support this kind of economic transition. Not the Silicon Valley variety, designed to produce venture-scale returns through monopolistic platform capture. Cooperative incubators—institutions designed to do two things simultaneously.
First, to fund and support initial cooperatives with business models that can actually generate revenue. This is critical. Solidarity economics cannot run on idealism alone. Cooperatives must be viable enterprises—competitive in quality, responsive to real market needs, capable of generating the surplus that funds the network’s expansion. The romantic fantasy of the commune must give way to the disciplined craft of building businesses that work, that people want to buy from, that create genuine value in the marketplace.
Second, and equally critical, cooperative incubators must operate at a scale where those cooperatives can begin to see the network effects and mutual benefits of their mutualization. A single cooperative in isolation is a good business. A hundred cooperatives in a federation is a movement. The difference is not additive, it’s exponential. It’s the difference between a single node and a network, between a trickle and a current, between surviving and thriving.
This means incubating not just individual enterprises but the connective infrastructure between them: shared back-office services, cooperative supply chains, mutual insurance pools, shared governance platforms, and the cultural practices of solidarity that make federation feel like belonging rather than bureaucracy.
Amazing work has already been done in this area by the BioFi Project and the Open Future Coalition’s cultivator and regional resilience fellowship programs respectively. These programs are foundational to the development of bioregional economic resilience, but I believe they require deeper systemic philanthropy and investing to achieve their longterm goals. We don’t just need to nurture individual projects, we need to nurture entire cooperative ecosystems. This process is more capital intensive and requires funders who understand that bioregional economies will require significant investment before the positive sum feedback loops become active, but, ultimately, it is only through whole systems economic re-localization that individual cooperatives and community-led projects will be able to succeed in creating an entirely new economic system. Without that level of investment, projects are likely to fail before they are able to reach self-sustainability. Only through networked cooperativism can bioregional economies even hope to outcompete the extractive market pressure that they will inevitably face. This is by no means a critique of others’ efforts. They are necessary and important. This essay merely offers an additional perspective with the hope that it catalyzes the success of our broader movement, beyond individual projects, brands, or labels.
The Window
The convergence of AI disruption and cooperative possibility creates a window that may not stay open long. As AI restructures the corporate economy, as millions of workers are displaced, as the legitimacy of the current system erodes under the weight of its own contradictions, there is a brief interval in which new economic architectures can take root. Once authoritarian responses consolidate, once surveillance capitalism merges with state power to manage the displaced population through control rather than liberation, the window narrows.
But right now, while the old economy trembles and the new one has not yet been captured, we can build. We can build cooperatives that restore true democratic participation to our workplaces. We can build networks that create closed-loop local economies that actually thrive. We can build solidarity economies that function as upward spirals, lifting communities out of precarity through the radical, ancient, profoundly practical strategy of genuinely caring about each other’s prosperity.
The extractive economy is a downward spiral. Everyone knows it, even if they can’t name it. The alternative is not charity, not redistribution, not reform. It is the construction of parallel systems with their own compounding logic—systems where value is relational, governance is democratic, circulation is local, and the spiral goes up.
This work begins with the deceptively simple act of choosing to build wealth together rather than alone.
If you’d like to learn more about my process writing with AI, my commitment to you as a reader, and my intention for this publication, please read this essay or my about statement.