The amazing ways we are adapting locally, connected globally, to ensure our mutual survival from Covid-19

Hospitals are running out of supplies, tests, says the WAPO

But, under the media radar, a mutual aid response already up and running is a git hub sharing node for hospitals source code with the sharing done on an hospital sharing site that’s popped up.

This is a smart tool for mutual aid networks turning our obsession with our survival into a tool to make all of us Safer

The news, as usual is missing the collective response that’s already happening. They are looking to the institutions, not to mutual aid network type activity people are doing locally, and in their professional groups. This is a big story and I have not seen it covered other than in anecdotal features; it’s actually the biggest new beat that some reporter needs to dedicate themselves to, create a newsletter and freelance practice around.

This the best directory I have seen. Anarchists are behind this; they have been playing out societal collapse in their heads for decades. The apocalypse is their friend. 

One of the people on a mutual aid software demo yesterday said he felt like he was a fish who was finally in water. Doomsday scenario people now delivering food safely to senior apartments as the economy and government shuts down with grins on their faces they can’t exactly explain. Its the future they’ve been expecting since they first started reading Stephen King in Junior High. Using NextDoor local mutual aid facebook groups and text as their organizing tools.

Someone from the Faith+Finance conference which is trying to reimagine God’s economy in light of a growing wave of church closures and innovative solutions arising to keep the ministry alive as the real estate assets transition, asked what people of faith could do. I told them I like the example of Beloved Asheville, which has worked in for years with on the street, to the shelter homeless relief and then moved to development with tiny transitional houses when a church that believes in justice gave them two acres (they have a business plan; two are under construction, with formerly homeless doing a lot of the building) have now shifted to safe food delivery to elderly apartments where the people are afraid to come out of their doors. They do safe pickup from whole foods and other groceries of donations into big plastic boxes, with gloves, only one person doing pickup, then carry them to the apartment, where staying a safe distance, two people unpack them and deliver them to the apartments doors and call to tell the people to come out.

Because shelters are no longer safe (close quarters, shared showers) they with some activists and one member of our tourism board, which has a huge tax are asking hotels to open their rooms because the homeless whose health is already compromised need private baths sinks and beds. The tourism board said no this morning, fiduciary responsibility. They and others are trying to change the rules, which is system change, mounting a campaign. Beloved got asked to be part of the county and city’s disaster and steering committee yesterday because. 

Being on the front lines in relief in a disaster is where you see how the system needs to change; alter the rules, bring in new kinds of capital (tourism dollars) to unblock the system. Our field guide to transformation outlines how we analyze and approach these situations.

Local small organic food producers in Asheville are banding together into a virtual marketplace linked to safe food delivery emerging from the mutual aid networks as industrial agriculture threatens to grind to a halt as pickers decline to be crammed together into trucks and being taken to the fields. The organizer, Sunil Patel, has run a distributed patchwork farm for years (we’ve rented him a couple of acres but we are too far to be a regular provider) and has the social capital and trust to make this happen.

The evolution of DIY mask making in our community’s mutual aid network Facebook group Survival Asheville has been extraordinary to watch. The nurses and aids at our local hospital (a non profit recently bought by HCA with a union forming and HCA actively trying to bust it) asked on NextDoor for masks; HCA was not giving them personal protection equipment in the ER. Aids and nurses at local nursing homes also asked that way. Local needs assessment and requests come in from Next Door to the mutual aid facebook in cities across the country; like Zoom this is existing technology infrastructure being used in new ways. Crews of women with sewing machines and fabric swatches started to work; downloading how to videos and mini manuals. They gathered now many bolts of unused muslin from the local theater groups normally used to build the painted flats of sets. A local upholstery business also got on board.

The initiative kept evolving. They found another mutual aid network who was inserting coffee filters inside the cotton to make it protect even more. New techniques came in from mutual aid facebook groups in Seattle and rural towns like Burnsville, NC, where one woman created a now replicated modification around how to use elastic that was quickly adopted by people in Asheville and Minneapolis and beyond. Then a physician in Asheville seeing the grassroots initiative all around her, designed a Hepa compliant mask design that can be produced by the emergent mask making network. She is crowdfunding the materials needed for that design which can be replicated anywhere.

I am also in more tech oriented mutual aid network in Minneapolis, where our Somali-led housing startup cooperative is operating (neighbors investing in neighbors, no interest). They and others around the world are working with the Singapore government to open source a really promising app called Trace Together to track the exposure your friends and family that aggregates up to help whole cities respond to infection vectors.

In this relief phase of a disaster, everything is being given away; it’s a time of individual and neighborhood scale collective philanthropy, linked to innovation from around the world by people responding to the same life threatening crisis and sharing freely. And sometimes a government has the right answer at the right time. Responding to a problem every parent understands this week, the Polish government has set up a Minecraft server for kids to work together while homebound. A game that lets you build worlds, alone and with others, Minecraft has 112 million users a month.

From what I’ve been observing, from Singapore to Seattle to Minneapolis to Asheville, NC. groups of people are adapting collectively and rapidly to a global crisis, responding locally, and safely to ensure our mutual survival. There is something new emerging that is very encouraging in light of what is also a terrible disaster.

If the market shuts down its not the end of the world

 I think we are looking at a global halt of production and a market shut down.

While mutual aid societies are arising spontaneously in every community to handle the relief stage of this crisis, after the disaster comes rebuilding. What arises after that is that capital no longer controls the means of production. Coops arise to gather the excess; farmers create silos to make their grain sufficient for trains to carry them to people in the Northeast who can’t make enough food.

Mutual insurance companies arise to pool and share your risk, like Thrivent did, crop insurance, health insurance, property insurance, done collectively because in both cases the markets have failed. It’s what happened in Argentina, when it defaulted to the International Monetary Fund. Workers took over factories and a deeply local economy emerged, with lots of alternative currencies popping up. People still found a way to buy and sell and trade when the central bank was in default. In that case, gathering together to take over the means of production was not a death sentence, as it is in March, 2020. Michel Bauwens puts this in context of the commons movement.

Local food production will have to become local and regenerative, restoring the soil and sequestering carbon, which also makes it less prone to flooding because the roots are deeper and able to absorb far more. This both a return to indigenous land practices, and new science, too. Daniel Christian Wahl writes frequently and well about the systems view behind regeneration.

In America this how the midwest was settled, isolated from markets in the northeast. I owe everything I know about that history to a late night text this week from Chris Kopka, who has worked in and taught about cooperative business models for much of his career.

who is writing a substantive piece on this same topic, but not going as are as I am, to speculate about the what happens if that is followed by the fall of the nation state.

Production halting is of course great for climate change. And we could probably do bioregional climate insurance within the watersheds on a long river, like the French Broad from Asheville to Chattanooga, always managing for downstream impact. 

This scenario also works if the nation state fails and we have city states with lawless, warlord-dominated regions between. It works in the city states. Star Financial Solutions, our neighbors investing in neighbors to solve housing without interest, hybrid cooperative (we can take in investor dollars but not let them be in control) works both if markets shut down and if the nation state collapses into city states.

Eliminating interest next time around is crucial. Interest, or the sin of usury as Moses said in the law delivered to the Jews, Muslims and Christians, gives an edge to people who already have money over those with labor or intellectual property. Interest lets capital holders demand growth, endlessly, and lets them set the rules to let them foreclose on your assets.

Interest is a way for the wealthy to turn their neighbors into beggars. It’s been against the law many times in history. Interest, as an operating system principle, is most responsible for the current rapacious capitalism we suffer under. I confess I never thought about interest until I started following the lead of Said Sheikh-Abdi in the housing and business finance cooperative we are launching in Minneapolis. But I have come to see interest is a deeper structural distortion to benefit those who already have money at the expense of those who don’t, even more important than Andrew Carnegies’ social Darwinism that enshrined into law around 1905 the idea that the market was a force of nature and that you can’t question the source of wealth, but only help distribute its excess.

The non profits that arose were dependent on tax exempt institutions set up by the robber barons that only distribute five percent of their total amount of money under management. The revolution will not come through a grant and system change will only sneak in around the edge of philanthropy, given that is dependent on the benevolence of those who made their money through the social Darwinist view of the business.

With impact investing flocking to think they should focus most on those deals that can do good while offering market rate return, it has lost its ability to be a critical counter weight to the market. You can use business to address systemic injustice, as Star is doing; offering observant Muslims a faith compliant path to home ownership and business expansion. But you can’t do it at market rate. There is a cost to doing good.

So Star, our Somali-led startup coop that is an evolution of immigrant led savings circles, could work when the market economy shuts down, and if the nation state fails and we go to city states. It doesn’t work in warlord situations where production is stolen and you need to recruit seven samurai to make the farming village safe.

Imagine Argentina, or what we do if it all breaks down

Somebody asked me where you will go, if it all comes down. I responded with this.

I will stay on my farm. 21 flat acres, on a river with a well. We have tents we were setting up for glamping…… water is abundant, the summer is cooler at 2200 feet. Kids and grandkids live here or next door. We are also building a couple of rental houses and, if things continue three air bnbs..or that was the plan before…..we are finishing the two houses. One will be for my daughter and her family. My son and his family already live on the farm and their house is nearly complete.

When Argentina defaulted and was outside the financial system, 30 something alternative currencies sprang up. The evolutionary model was mutual aid societies during the disaster relief portion; delivering food, things like diy teams in Asheville now making masks out of spare fabric from a how to they downloaded off the internet, other distributed teams are working on diy respirators. Lots of antibody research, which is easier than vaccines. A clever infection mapping app out of Singapore we are trying to make open source…. etc. We are in the situation like my Somali-American business partners have known for decades; where we realize nobody else is going to rescue us. We only have each other, so we are giving to each other during the disaster relief stage; you give away the ropes you sell to pull in the people drowning in the river, at no charge or even any thought to cost during the relief phase. The value of money fades before the need for mutual service and cooperation and emergent coordination. A video about mutual aid networks pre Covid-19

After relief, comes development, rebuilding. That often means the rise of coops and mutual companies. Coops are made to do something that needs doing and has to be done collectively with everybody owning it. Mutual organizations are similarly collectively owned,; to stop something happening, like creating your own insurance companies or health care systems, like Thrivent. Coops and mutual companies arise when the market fails. Mutual companies are where you pool and share your risk, making all the members safer. Benjamin Franklin started the first mutual insurance company, after a fire burned down his print shop and two surrounding blocks in Philadelphia. It formed the first fire department, performed the first fire audits (don’t put oily rags next to a furnace). Technology played a supporting role; he invented the lightning rod.

When there was a food shortage in the 19th century in the Northeast, midwestern farmers couldn’t get the new railroads to pick up their grain. Their solution: form a cooperative, collectively buy silos on railway sidings. With enough volume to lure them, trains stopped to pick up the grain. Food shortage averted. Coops share the collectively produced abundance, mutual companies (also a form of cooperative) pool and share risks in order to make them smaller.

I think adding in a citizen funded financial coop; neighbors investing in neighbors without interest, paid back by some form of revenue sharing, is an essential complement. It’s what I’ve been working on for 13 months with Star Financial Solutions, which just launched. In the post Covid-19 economy I’d like to eliminate interest throughout the economy, which gives an edge to people who already have money over people with labor or ideas. It also lets them demand more growth and unsustainable returns.

Interest gives the people charging the ability to demand more growth. There was a reason the law Moses delivered to Christians, Jews and Muslims, called usury, or interest, a sin; it’s a way to beggar your neighbor.

I learned about that history of coops and mutuals from Chris Kopka. He’s working on an article about why coops and mutuals now, because they are the first things to come back. They arise when relief moves into development, rebuilding after the devastation that is being ameliorated now by the anarchist influenced, pop up mutual aid societies, which fragment into working groups for particular tasks but most often have no central management or organization structure.

The first phase of disaster relief, emergent mutual aid societies everywhere are the most important thing that’s happening now, far more than the confusion of Washington and your local government starting to triage and limit services. I will edit and clean up that post today, I promise. It’s Saturday.

So I will keep working on star financial solutions; neighbors investing in neighbors houses being paid over time what they can pay (a hybrid financial coop)will still work if the economy goes to hell and the financial system doesn’t come back. So will revenue share, no interest business financing.What people pay or have to pay might change and it will work with any currency that arises if we are in an Argentina scenario. 

 We will survive with a new interdependency and new definition of who is our neighbor. Or we won’t survive.

Metcalfe’s law for our collective survival #Covid-19

The anthropology of this “trace the spread in your network” app by the Singapore government was, I think spot on. It mirrors and gives you a tool to make sense of and take action about what you all already obsessing about. And I hear the data security is good. It only works in Singapore, says my friend from there. Trace

A lot of software is great, and would work if people were different. Take excel. Just kidding.

This seems to be software that serves our current survival, connection, contagion obsession and is designed to put that to good use. Giving people software tools to do what they are already doing, but better, and feeling less afraid and less powerless while they do it, will drive high usage, if done well, I think. And maybe collectively, your obsession with your own friends and family’s survival could even save lives across the country. This is the power of Metcalfe’s law for collective survival based on mirroring existing terrified and obsessive behavior. That is a good way to build software, I think.

This is a great tool for Mutual Aid Networks, which are arising around the world as government and our economy shuts down. I continue to track the spread of those networks here. Ht @_eam Ariel Muller.