Engineering Mutuality
Why freedom will depend on what we build together next.
Modern societies are built on a story of independence as strength: the self-sufficient worker, the solo founder, the person who “doesn’t need anyone.”
Yet the more we chase that story, the more our lives rely on hidden forms of dependence on infrastructure, care work, and digital coordination whose fragility we ignore until it fails.
The challenge now is not to escape dependence but to design it well.
The Myth of Autonomy
Autonomy was once meant to protect people from domination. In recent decades it has been reinterpreted as separation: the idea that maturity means managing life alone. Institutions and technologies have reinforced this shift, rewarding individual optimization over collective stability.
We've measured worth1 by self-management: the ability to finance, schedule, and regulate oneself without visible help. Policy, architecture, and software have turned isolation into the default setting of modern life through single-person households, individualized apps, and privatized safety nets.
That model is failing.
Climate disruption, public health crises, and the erosion of stable employment have revealed that what we call independence rests on contingent systems such as power grids, caregivers, content moderators, logistics networks, and servers. When any of these fail, so does the illusion of autonomy. The same infrastructures that made personal freedom feel expansive now reveal how conditional it always was.
Dependence as Design
Dependence is not a failure of civilization. It is how great societies function. The problem is not that we rely on others but that our systems make those dependencies invisible, unequal, extractive, and disposable.
Gig economies shift risk onto workers.
Health systems transfer costs onto patients.
Higher education transforms students into long-term debtors.
Each of these is a design choice that hides interdependence to preserve the appearance of individual control.2
When insecurity becomes personal, exploitation reads as failure of character rather than design. The neoliberal project reframed collective security as individual responsibility, expanding opportunities for profit while dismantling the shared protections that made autonomy possible in the first place.
Dependence can alternatively be constructed as infrastructure that is reciprocal, transparent, and durable.3 When it is visible, it can be governed. When it is shared, it can be distributed fairly.
Building Reciprocal Systems
Redesigning dependence means exposing who absorbs risk, who performs maintenance, and who decides when support ends. It means treating interdependence as a design parameter, not a moral afterthought.
Make care count. Economies that can price carbon can also account for care. Unpaid and underpaid maintenance work sustains every productive system. Treating it as an invisible resource rather than a cost to be minimized makes exploitation appear efficient.
Redistribute risk. Finance and employment can be structured to absorb collective shocks rather than isolate individual ones. Cooperative insurance, credit unions, and income-pooling initiatives already demonstrate this principle: risk as a shared commons instead of a privatized liability.
Embed reversibility. Healthy dependence includes the ability to withdraw without collapse. Systems such as workplaces, leases, and platforms should allow for exit without punishment or ruin. The right to stop is the foundation of ethical connection.
Design for maintenance, not scale. Scale maximizes throughput; maintenance preserves continuity. Systems that prioritize care—cooperatives, local clouds, modular supply chains—redefine growth as the capacity to remain livable under strain.
Dependence is Freeing
Dependence is not the antithesis of freedom. It is what makes freedom possible. A trustworthy network doesn't restrict your freedom, it actually grounds it in how much you can rely on each other.
You're freest when the stuff around you is solid enough that you can lean on it without being scared.
The ideology of independence has produced predictable outcomes:
atomized housing,
endless self-optimization, and
workplaces that reward endurance over care.
Redesigning dependence requires rebuilding what those systems hollowed out by making support visible, redistributable, and optional rather than compulsory.
The next phase of freedom will not focus on detachment. It will focus on engineering mutuality by making care infrastructural, exit survivable, and maintenance a shared right.
The goal is not to need less from one another. It is to need more justly.
Or, if you're my Dad, respectability.
This pattern expresses capital’s structural need to individualize risk as a method of accumulation.
The mutual-aid networks that mobilized during the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires were not acts of charity but examples of distributed engineering. Groups such as Ktown for All, Water Drop LA, and Mutual Aid LA Network built temporary systems for logistics, housing, and medical support that outperformed official relief within hours of the fires starting.
They built power through coordination rather than ownership, using shared spreadsheets, decentralized dispatch, and trust built from prior organizing.