The Underground Economy Your Neighbors Are Already Building
How mutual aid pods and decentralized economics create real alternatives
The system is breaking.
Not with fireworks or collapse headlines. More like a quiet rot. Institutions continue their rituals, but the life has drained out of them. Budgets grow, but nothing works better. We hear the words, but the meaning doesn’t land.
You’ve felt it already. Groceries cost more, but your paycheck doesn’t stretch as far. Your city talks about justice but quietly closes public restrooms and adds more surveillance. Leadership has hollowed out—visible during photo ops, absent when real decisions hit the ground.
Still, people are building. Not always visibly. Not always successfully. But they’re building.
Three recent models speak to this moment in different ways: The People’s Community (TPC) and
' Game of Trust. Read about it here and ’s podcast here's the plan to end thisDifferent strategies, similar goals. Some lead with mutual aid and care. Others with decentralized economics and gamified coordination.
Taken together, they offer more than either can provide alone. With some translation work, they start to feel like blueprints.
Where care already lives
TPC starts with pods. Not a brand name or clever acronym. Just small groups of real people—three to seven—who know and trust each other. Friends, coworkers, neighbors. Folks who already share food or favors or the occasional late-night phone call.
These pods don’t exist to perform community. They exist to practice it. That might mean a shared grocery run system. It might mean planning how to support someone after a layoff or a bad diagnosis. The pod decides. The point is mutual reliance, not formality.
From there, pods link into what TPC calls Focus Pods. These hold the projects and themes: housing support, mental health, street medicine, mesh networks, digital tools, arts funding. They don’t function like departments with fixed roles. They open space for people to contribute in ways that feel natural and needed.
The structure assumes your context is unique—and invites you to shape it accordingly.
What money might make possible
The Game of Trust is louder in its ambition. It imagines a decentralized economy coordinated like a game. People pay in monthly. That money pools. Then it gets deployed toward real-world projects: buying corrupt businesses to remake them, starting new services, hiring transparent teams. All tracked in online public ledgers, all guided by group intelligence.
It proposes a kind of DIY civic infrastructure. One that doesn’t rely on government reform or billionaire conscience. It treats collective spending like a voting tool. Where your subscription doesn’t just fund the game—it becomes a mechanism for shaping power.
There’s power in this model. And also risk.
The biggest strength is its clarity about capital: we might not control government, but we still control where we spend. And if enough of us coordinate that spending, something new opens up.
The hardest part is what it asks of people who may not have anything extra to give. Not just money, but attention, energy, emotional bandwidth. For many, survival doesn’t leave room for experimentation.
That’s why the care has to come first.
What happens when you combine them
Start with pods. Quietly. Locally. No press release. Just people who say, "we’ll check on each other and keep each other fed."
Next, map resources. What exists. What’s missing. What’s free. Start sharing that with people nearby. Not to create the next big tool, but to ground each other in what’s real and available.
Focus pods come online as needed. A mental health group starts when three people want to learn de-escalation. A mesh network pod forms when someone has the equipment. The work grows with trust, not scale.
Economic tools enter only when useful. That might be TimeOverflow to track labor hours. Snapshot to organize votes. Maybe even NFT-based art sales to fund the treasury. But none of it replaces the relationships already built. It just moves them with more reach.
The Game of Trust can plug into this structure. Its economic coordination model is strong. But it needs a base. Not just adopters, but neighbors who already rely on each other.
What it offers under pressure
You won’t see it on a billboard. It shows up when someone shares a meal, offers a spare room, or helps fix a neighbor’s router at 10 p.m. It’s the kind of system that doesn’t need to be flashy to matter—it just has to hold.
Not a resistance campaign. More like the connective tissue of survival. Something that activates when the official systems recede.
Under a fascist regime or a collapsed market, the prettiest apps and best pitch decks won’t carry you. What will matter is whether someone nearby knows how to get your meds when the chain pharmacy shutters. Whether someone nearby knows how to help when you’re evicted, arrested, or need a document explained but can’t Google it. Whether someone notices if you don’t show up to the next meeting.
Those kinds of networks don’t form in a crisis. They come from meals shared, stories traded, trust earned over time. They emerge from practice, not planning.
How it unfolds in time
Phase One: Groundwork
Start pods with people you already know.
Create resource maps.
Build focus pods around needs already showing up.
Phase Two: Light Infrastructure
Set up shared communication channels (Hylo, Matrix, etc).
Track time or labor with TimeOverflow (already online).
Pool small funds when needed. Start funding Treasury.
Phase Three: Larger Coordination
Connect with other pods in your region (easy on Hylo).
Host skillshares or teach-ins (easy to build on Hylo).
Begin voting on local funding priorities (in Hylo).
Phase Four: Parallel Institutions
Solidarity Marketplace: community-based trade and service networks using TimeOverflow.
Mutual Health Circles: pods with basic care training and resource directories.
Pod-Based Housing Networks: shared housing, crash spaces, and cooperative support.
Tool Libraries and Repair Hubs: shared infrastructure for fixing, building, and learning.
Culture Treasury: creative mutual aid through time-tracked art and community NFT projects.
The People’s Library: decentralized archive of survival guides, legal help, and cultural memory.
Hope Pod: care spaces for grief, meditation, reflection, and interfaith connection.
Idea Incubator: peer-supported pod for developing community businesses or tools.
Shadow Systems Pod: research and reporting on surveillance, corporate overreach, and local threats.
Develop pod-based housing co-ops or tool libraries.
Launch pod-supported worker projects or microbusinesses.
Participate in wider-scale collective intelligence games if desired.
There’s no singular platform or protocol waiting to rescue us. But people are already stitching together fragments of something more resilient.
Consensus isn’t always the goal. What matters more is how parallel efforts begin to overlap—how consistent local practices slowly redraw the map beneath our feet.
If you’re building something like this—start a conversation. If you’re not sure where to begin—look for someone nearby who already is.
No one blueprint fits everyone. But we may be closer than we think to building what we’ll need next.
And maybe, just maybe, something worth keeping after.
This sounds incredible and is so very close to what I believe and care about -- I almost want to ask, Where have you been all my life? Thank you for the beautifully thought out and well written community agreement -- I signed on with gusto!
Let's go!