(2020-08-19) Shorin Squad Wealth

Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti on Squad Wealth. Squads are both a product of—and a response to—contemporary social atomization. The trope of "getting a place upstate" signifies young city-dwellers' desire for new kinds of squad-based homesteading. HOMESQUADING is a modern day back-to-the-land movement (CoOp?)

Squad culture is the antithesis of neoliberal individualism. Millennials are healing from decades of irony poisoning, rediscovering what it's like to have generative, exploratory relationships with one another.

Younger generations are already imbued with extremely powerful squad energy, equipped with formative experiences in Minecraft, DOTA 2, and Fortnite parties.

Distance is no longer a barrier with the closeness of network space—soon vital culture will be predominantly enacted by fictive kin. (network society)

While ancient squads were brought together by the struggle for survival, always-on group communication sets the scene for contemporary squad culture.

One necessary condition of the squad is this sense of persistence: co-presence and continuous availability to one another.

But the squad is more than a loose network of affiliations, it's a coherent body. A second prerequisite of squad formation is self-recognition. It's not you or me. It's Us. (self awareness)

For the squad to understand itself as a whole, it maintains boundaries circumscribing strong group norms. Fuck a Dunbar number—the ideal squad count is no more than 12. (creative network)

As SQUAD VIBES grow, so does the possibility of interdependence and resource sharing—social, emotional, financial.

Squad culture is downstream of squad space, and the digital places squads inhabit are only getting more advanced. The Discord can suddenly be on calls together. The Keybase can now use Git.

Squad space is where market-moving trades are planned, conspiracies are conceived, and memes are spawned

The squad doesn't need its own micro-currency (grunt fund, LETS): images, art, music, takes, shitposts, and, indeed, roasts are the native medium of exchange. Likewise squads have little use for internal financial incentives. Instead, playful exchanges produce trust, reciprocity, and VIBES—the ineffable group energy that squads value most.

Memeing produces "assets" that cannot be traditionally valued, but are capable of commanding cultural and economic movements.

Group identity. Shared space. Vibes. These not only enable the creation of social capital, but strengthen the squad's capacity to organize, minimizing transaction costs and leading to greater productive capacities and resilience; this is "the nature of the squad." But while squads can be viewed as a "nexus of contracts", unlike the Coasean firm, they are without legal structure.

SQUAD PRODUCTION begins with the creation of processes and interfaces to convert creative labor into units that can be transmitted by global network participants

Some believe new software can liberate "individual creators." But this kind of thinking inevitably leads to Uberized platform-mediated wage labor. We want to liberate squads. The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society

SQUAD WEALTH

Individuals may have limited access to compounding returns, but groups have greater flexibility to move along the risk-reward curve.

By risking together, a scrappy group can gain access to multiplicative yields—the path to SQUAD WEALTH.

The point is clear: access to finance and the creation of capital assets is crucial. What squads need now is the technical infrastructure to capture and compound jointly produced value.

Though dollars keep squads afloat, dialing up the financial infrastructure too soon can kill the vibe. The squad economy primarily yields non-monetary forms of value.

Squads are woke to the empty neoliberal promises of gig-economy "employment" and para-social personal brands. Squads value self-determination, not through individualism, but through collective maintenance and care for one another.

But can squads scale? Squads are first and foremost cultures, not businesses.

Squads will be as important as companies in the years to come. And as the micro-structure of our social and economic fabric changes, strong vibes and sustainability will become the new metric of success. Squads don't need to scale. They can just spread the big squad energy.