Myceloom: The Coalition Substrate
A Digital Archaeological Investigation
Protocol Specification — The Political Architecture of Networked Solidarity
Josie Jefferson & Felix Velasco
Digital Archaeologists, Unearth Heritage Foundry
with Technical Collaboration from:
Claude 4.5 (Opus & Sonnet) & Gemini (2.5 & 3 Pro)
(Synthetic Intelligence Systems)
Date: January 2026
Version: 1.0
Publication Type: Protocol Specification / Working Paper
Series: The Myceloom Protocol (Part 6 of 8)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18344283
Keywords: Myceloom, Coalition Formation, Political Economy, Collective Action, Platform Cooperativism, Federated Governance, Biological Markets, Free-Rider Problem, Multi-Stakeholder Alliances, Digital Solidarity
Abstract
Myceloom serves as infrastructure for coalition formation, drawing on political science theory, biological market dynamics, and commons-based peer production to articulate principles for multi-stakeholder digital alliances. Where previous analyses addressed myceloom's philosophical foundations, community governance, collective intelligence, network architecture, and interface design, this investigation fills a critical gap: the political economy of coalition—how heterogeneous actors with divergent interests find common ground, overcome free-rider problems, and sustain collective action within distributed digital systems. By synthesizing Mancur Olson's logic of collective action, William Riker's coalition formation theory, Robert Axelrod's evolution of cooperation, and biological market theory with platform cooperativism and federated governance innovations, this analysis reveals myceloom not merely as technical infrastructure but as coalition substrate: the political architecture enabling genuinely multi-stakeholder alliances in the digital age. This establishes the Coalition layer of the Myceloom Protocol, defining how diverse stakeholders can form and sustain collaborative alliances.
I. Introduction: The Coalition Problem
The digital age has revealed a fundamental contradiction: technologies promising to connect humanity have instead concentrated power in unprecedented ways. The great Web2 platforms—ostensibly neutral conduits for human connection—became the most valuable corporations in history precisely because they are not neutral, but extractive intermediaries capturing value from every interaction they mediate.1 This concentration reflects not technological inevitability but political failure; digital citizens' inability to form durable coalitions capable of building and sustaining alternatives.
The challenge is not merely technical but political. Mancur Olson demonstrated that rational individuals pursuing common interests will not automatically organize to achieve those interests.2 The free-rider problem—whereby individuals benefit from collective goods without contributing to their provision—undermines cooperation even when cooperation would benefit everyone. This insight transformed political science and economics, explaining why platform monopolies persist despite widespread dissatisfaction: organizing alternatives costs activists while benefits diffuse across all users.
Myceloom confronts this coalition problem directly. As digital infrastructure enabling genuinely multi-stakeholder alliances, it must address political questions technical solutions alone cannot answer: How do coalitions form among actors with different interests? What sustains cooperation when defection offers short-term advantages? How can power be distributed without being dissolved? This essay examines myceloom through coalition theory to articulate principles for political architecture enabling networked solidarity.3
The Unearth Heritage Foundry's framework positions myceloom as "the living network": infrastructure operating according to fungal principles of distributed intelligence, reciprocal resource sharing, and coalition substrate.4 This biological metaphor is not merely poetic; mycorrhizal networks demonstrate precisely the multi-stakeholder coordination digital coalitions require: multiple species with different needs sharing resources through protocols preventing free-riding while enabling collective flourishing.
Understanding myceloom as coalition infrastructure requires synthesizing insights from multiple disciplines: political science on collective action and coalition formation, evolutionary biology on cooperation and biological markets, economics on platform cooperativism, and sociology on social movement coalition building. Together, these frameworks reveal the political architecture necessary for digital systems serving all participants rather than extracting value for distant shareholders.
II. The Logic of Collective Action: Olson's Problem and Myceloom's Response
Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965) established the theoretical foundation for understanding why groups with common interests often fail to pursue those interests collectively. His central insight remains unsettling: "Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests."5
The mechanism is straightforward. When a group seeks a collective good—clean air, functional infrastructure, a user-governed platform—each member can enjoy that good whether or not they contribute to its provision. Rational actors therefore have incentive to let others bear the costs while they enjoy the benefits. As group size increases, this incentive intensifies: individual contributions matter less while contribution costs remain constant. The result, Olson argued, is systematic underproduction of collective goods and systematic overrepresentation of concentrated interests that can overcome collective action problems through size, coercion, or selective incentives.6
Implications for digital platforms are profound. Extractive platform users share common interests in privacy protection, fair algorithmic treatment, reasonable pricing, and democratic governance. Yet these diffuse interests consistently lose to concentrated platform owner interests. The free-rider problem operates at massive scale: any individual user's decision to switch to an alternative imposes high personal costs (losing network connections, learning new interfaces) while providing negligible collective benefit (one departure makes no difference to platform behavior).
Olson identified two primary mechanisms for overcoming collective action problems. First, small groups may succeed where large groups fail because individual contributions remain noticeable and social pressure operates more effectively. Second, organizations may provide "selective incentives"—private goods available only to contributors—thereby changing participation calculus.7
Myceloom's architecture addresses Olson's problem structurally rather than merely exhortatively. The framework creates conditions under which cooperation becomes individually rational rather than requiring continuous sacrifice of individual interest to collective good. Several design principles emerge from this analysis.
The first principle concerns nested scale. Rather than attempting to organize millions of users into a single collective actor, myceloom enables nested coalitions at multiple scales: from intimate working groups to federated networks of networks.8 This architectural choice draws directly from Olson's recognition that small groups face fewer collective action problems. Each myceloom network node is small enough for individual contributions to matter and for social pressure to function, even as nodes combine into networks with aggregate power.
The second principle involves selective incentives embedded in infrastructure. Participation in myceloom networks provides access to resources, connections, and capabilities unavailable to non-participants—not through exclusion for its own sake, but through the nature of networked goods requiring participation to function. A node withdrawing from reciprocal exchange cannot access the collective intelligence, resource flows, and coordination capabilities the network provides.9
The third principle concerns transparency and attribution. Olson's analysis assumes contributions are difficult to observe and attribute. Myceloom's transparency infrastructure makes contributions visible, enabling reputation systems rewarding cooperation and identifying defection. When contributions are observable, participation calculus shifts: free-riding becomes reputationally costly while contribution builds social capital.10
These structural features transform collective action without requiring either coercion or continuous altruism. Cooperation becomes sustainable not because participants are saints but because architecture makes cooperation individually rational while making defection costly.
III. Coalition Formation: From Minimum Winning to Maximum Sustaining
If Olson explained why collective action often fails, William Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962) examined how coalitions form when they do succeed. Riker's size principle—that "in social situations similar to n-person, zero-sum games with side-payments, participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger"11—has profoundly influenced understanding of political coalition dynamics.
The logic is intuitive: coalition members must share victory spoils. Adding unnecessary members dilutes each participant's share. Rational coalition builders therefore seek minimum winning coalitions: coalitions large enough to prevail but no larger than necessary. Empirical studies of parliamentary government formation, legislative voting, and political party dynamics have found substantial support for this principle, with important qualifications regarding information, policy preferences, and institutional constraints.12
Applied to digital platform governance, Riker's analysis suggests why platform owners prefer vertical integration over coalition building. Coalition maintenance is costly; adding stakeholders means sharing decision-making power and distributing value more broadly. Platform capitalism's characteristic move—absorbing functions partners might otherwise perform—reflects minimum winning coalition logic: maintain only relationships necessary to capture value, vertically integrate everything else.13
Riker's analysis applies most directly to zero-sum situations where winners' gains equal losers' losses. Digital infrastructure is not inherently zero-sum. Network effects mean larger, more inclusive networks can generate more value than smaller exclusive ones. The question becomes whether institutional arrangements can capture these positive-sum possibilities.
This is where myceloom's coalition architecture differs fundamentally from both platform capitalism and conventional coalition theory. Myceloom is designed for "maximum sustaining coalitions": coalitions including all stakeholders whose participation adds network value, governed through structures distributing power and benefits in ways sustaining long-term cooperation.14
The biological foundation illuminates this alternative. Mycorrhizal networks do not form minimum winning coalitions; they form extensive alliances connecting multiple plant species with multiple fungal partners. These alliances persist not despite their inclusiveness but because of it. Larger networks provide greater resilience, more diverse resources, and enhanced collective intelligence.15 Plants connected to larger fungal networks demonstrate improved survival, stress tolerance, and reproductive success compared to those in smaller networks.
Research on common mycorrhizal networks reveals sophisticated mechanisms for sustaining broad coalitions. Fungi preferentially allocate nutrients to plant partners providing more carbon; a form of reciprocity-based resource distribution preventing free-riding without excluding potential partners.16 Plants contributing less receive less but are not expelled. This graduated response maintains coalition breadth while ensuring contribution correlates with benefit.
Myceloom translates these biological principles into political architecture. Coalition membership remains open to any participant willing to accept network protocols, but benefits flow preferentially to contributors. The result is maximum sustaining coalitions: networks as inclusive as possible while maintaining reciprocity structures preventing exploitation.17
Several institutional mechanisms support this coalition architecture. First, graduated membership tiers recognize that different participants bring different capacities and make different contributions. Rather than treating all members identically (creating free-rider opportunities) or requiring identical contributions (excluding those with less capacity), graduated structures match benefits to contributions across multiple dimensions.18
Second, multi-stakeholder governance ensures no single interest can capture the coalition for exclusive benefit. Platform cooperativism research demonstrates that worker-owned platforms can successfully compete with extractive alternatives when governance structures effectively balance diverse stakeholder interests.19 Myceloom extends this principle to networks of networks, creating federated governance respecting local autonomy while enabling collective action at larger scales.
Third, exit rights and portable identity ensure coalition members are not locked in despite deteriorating terms. The threat of exit disciplines coalition leaders and prevents the drift toward extraction characterizing many platform lifecycles.20 When participants can leave without losing their data, connections, or reputation, coalitions must continuously earn participation.
IV. The Evolution of Cooperation: Reciprocity, Reputation, and Network Structure
Robert Axelrod's work on the evolution of cooperation demonstrated how cooperative strategies can emerge and stabilize in populations of self-interested actors. His famous computer tournaments, conducted with evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton, showed that the simple strategy "tit for tat"—cooperate on the first move, then reciprocate whatever the partner did on the previous move—consistently outperformed more complex or exploitative strategies.21
Implications extend far beyond the iterated prisoner's dilemma structuring Axelrod's tournaments. Cooperation, Axelrod argued, requires three conditions: ongoing relationships (the "shadow of the future"), ability to identify partners and remember their behavior, and sufficiently frequent interactions for reciprocity to operate.22 When these conditions hold, cooperation can emerge "in a world of egoists without central authority."
Axelrod's framework illuminates both platform capitalism's failures and myceloom's possibilities. Extractive platforms systematically undermine cooperation conditions. They intermediate relationships, preventing users from building direct connections and reputations. They obscure behavior behind algorithmic opacity, making identifying and responding to defection impossible. They capture user cooperation benefits while externalizing its costs. Under these conditions, cooperative strategies cannot stabilize; exploitation prevails.23
Myceloom's architecture consciously reinstates cooperation conditions. Persistent identity enables reputation functioning across interactions and contexts. Transparent protocols make cooperation and defection visible and attributable. Network structure creates ongoing relationships within which reciprocity operates. These are not incidental features but core design principles derived from understanding what cooperation requires.
Biological market theory extends Axelrod's insights by examining how partner choice shapes cooperative dynamics. Ronald Noë and Peter Hammerstein demonstrated that when individuals can choose among multiple potential partners, cooperation stabilizes more readily than when partnerships are forced or random.24 The mere possibility of partner switching disciplines behavior; partners who defect or offer poor terms find themselves abandoned for more cooperative alternatives.
Research on mycorrhizal markets reveals precisely these dynamics. Plants and fungi engage in "biological trade," with exchange rates responsive to supply and demand.25 When a plant provides more carbon, it receives more nutrients. When alternative fungal partners are available, exchange terms become more favorable to plants. This market logic does not preclude cooperation; it structures cooperation through mutually beneficial exchange.
Myceloom implements market dynamics supporting rather than undermining cooperation. Participants can choose among multiple network nodes, service providers, and governance arrangements. This choice disciplines providers without requiring central authority. Nodes failing to serve participants well lose them to alternatives. The result is cooperation enforced through exit rather than voice or loyalty: a structure particularly suited to digital contexts where switching costs can be architecturally minimized.26
Axelrod's work also reveals simple reciprocity limitations. "Tit for tat" is vulnerable to noise; a single misperceived defection can trigger destructive retaliation spirals. More forgiving strategies occasionally cooperating despite defection prove more resilient in noisy environments.27 Simple reciprocity cannot address situations where partners have genuinely different capacities or where cooperation costs and benefits are asymmetric.
Myceloom addresses these complexities through differentiated reciprocity. Rather than identical exchange, network protocols enable proportional contribution and graduated defection response. Small violations trigger small consequences; persistent patterns trigger escalating responses.28 This graduated approach prevents spiraling conflicts while maintaining accountability, drawing on Elinor Ostrom's research on commons governance demonstrating graduated sanctions' importance in sustaining collective resource management.29
Network structure itself shapes cooperation evolution. Simulations demonstrate that spatial structure—particularly networks where interactions occur primarily among neighbors—facilitates cooperation emergence and maintenance.30 Cooperators can form clusters protecting themselves from defector exploitation. These clusters can then expand through success, eventually dominating.
Myceloom's federated architecture creates precisely this structured environment. Individual nodes are small enough for direct reciprocity to function. Connections between nodes create extended networks through which cooperation can spread. Nested structure allows local adaptation while maintaining network-wide coordination. This architecture does not impose cooperation; it creates conditions under which cooperation naturally evolves and stabilizes.
V. Platform Cooperativism: Toward Democratic Digital Infrastructure
Trebor Scholz's concept of platform cooperativism offers a direct challenge to extractive platform capitalism. Defined as "cooperatively owned, democratically governed businesses that establish a two-sided market via a computing platform," platform cooperatives demonstrate that alternative ownership and governance structures are practically achievable.31 From driver-owned ride-sharing services to worker-owned cleaning platforms, these enterprises show digital infrastructure need not concentrate value in shareholder hands.
Platform cooperativism addresses a fundamental question: who should own and control digital infrastructure on which social and economic life increasingly depends? The cooperative answer—those who depend on it most—contrasts sharply with the platform capitalist answer of venture capital investors seeking exponential returns.32 This ownership difference translates into different incentive structures, different governance dynamics, and different value distributions.
Research on platform cooperatives reveals several advantages over extractive alternatives. Worker-owners report higher wages, better working conditions, and greater job satisfaction.33 Users experience more responsive governance and more aligned incentives. Communities benefit from locally-rooted enterprises circulating value rather than extracting it. These advantages flow directly from ownership structure; cooperative members capture the value their participation creates rather than surrendering it to distant shareholders.
Platform cooperativism faces challenges myceloom's coalition architecture addresses. Individual platform cooperatives struggle achieving scale and network effects making extractive platforms viable. Venture-backed competitors can sustain losses indefinitely while cooperatives must remain financially sustainable from the outset. The result has been that platform cooperatives, while successful in specific niches, have not fundamentally disrupted the platform capitalist model.34
Myceloom addresses the scale problem through federation rather than centralization. Instead of building single massive platforms to compete with extractive incumbents, myceloom enables cooperative networks achieving collective scale while maintaining local ownership and governance.35 Each node remains small enough for democratic governance to function effectively; the network as a whole achieves scale necessary for viable competition with centralized platforms.
The Mondragon cooperative federation in Spain demonstrates this federated model in the physical economy. Beginning as a single worker cooperative in 1956, Mondragon has grown into a federation of over 100 cooperatives employing more than 80,000 workers.36 Member cooperatives maintain day-to-day operational autonomy while benefiting from shared services, intercooperative trade, and collective institutions for education, finance, and research. This federated structure achieves scale without sacrificing democratic governance.
Myceloom extends the Mondragon model to digital infrastructure. Individual nodes govern themselves according to members' preferences while participating in federated networks providing shared services, interoperable protocols, and collective coordination.37 Coalition substrate enables cooperation among cooperatives: meta-level collective action addressing individual cooperative enterprise scale limitations.
Several institutional innovations support this federated cooperation. Common protocols enable interoperability without requiring organizational merger. Shared identity infrastructure allows participants moving among federated nodes while maintaining data, connections, and reputation. Collective institutions—similar to Mondragon's educational and financial services—provide capabilities individual cooperatives could not achieve alone.38
The political dimension is crucial. Platform cooperativism is not merely an alternative business model but a challenge to platform capitalism's concentration of economic and political power. Digital infrastructure shapes possibilities for expression, organization, and collective action.39 Infrastructure owned and governed by those who depend on it supports democratic participation; infrastructure owned by shareholders maximizes value extraction. The choice between these models is political as much as economic.
VI. Federated Governance: Multi-Stakeholder Coordination at Scale
The Fediverse—the network of interconnected social media platforms using the ActivityPub protocol—demonstrates both possibilities and challenges of federated governance.40 Unlike centralized platforms controlled by single corporations, the Fediverse consists of thousands of independently operated servers, each establishing its own rules and governance while maintaining interoperability with the broader network.
This federated structure creates a natural experiment in multi-stakeholder coordination. Each server (or "instance") represents a distinct community with its own values, policies, and governance arrangements. Instances can choose which other instances to federate with, enabling "defederation" when an instance's behavior becomes incompatible with community standards.41 This structure distributes power without dissolving it, creating governance at multiple scales.
Research on Fediverse governance reveals important patterns for myceloom's coalition architecture. Successful instances typically combine clear community guidelines, active moderation, and transparent decision-making.42 Defederation threat disciplines behavior across the network; instances failing to address harmful content risk losing connections to the broader federation. This creates accountability without central authority.
The Fediverse also demonstrates challenges myceloom must address. Moderation burden falls heavily on volunteer administrators, creating sustainability concerns. Scaling governance to larger instances proves difficult, as intimate community dynamics enabling effective self-governance break down at larger scales.43 Interoperability enables connection but also allows problematic content flowing across instance boundaries.
Myceloom's multi-stakeholder framework builds on Fediverse successes while addressing these limitations. Rather than treating federation purely as technical interoperability, myceloom conceptualizes it as political infrastructure: the substrate through which coalitions form, coordinate, and sustain collective action.44 This political framing implies institutional arrangements technical protocols alone cannot provide.
Multi-stakeholder governance in myceloom requires balancing several considerations. First, stakeholders have genuinely different interests that cannot dissolve into fictitious common good. Workers, users, community members, and technical maintainers bring distinct perspectives and priorities. Effective governance must represent and balance these interests rather than privileging any single stakeholder group.45
Second, governance must operate effectively at multiple scales. What works for a small cooperative may fail at network scale; what works for network coordination may suppress local adaptation. Federated governance addresses this through subsidiarity: decisions made at the lowest level capable of effective action, with higher-level coordination reserved for genuinely collective concerns.46
Third, governance must maintain participant legitimacy. Research on collaborative governance demonstrates legitimacy depends on both procedural fairness (how decisions are made) and outcome effectiveness (whether governance actually improves conditions).47 Myceloom's transparency infrastructure supports procedural legitimacy by making governance processes visible; its coalition structure supports outcome effectiveness by enabling collective action.
The Internet's own governance provides instructive precedents. Organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have developed multi-stakeholder governance processes for technical standards shaping the digital world.48 These organizations demonstrate that diverse stakeholder coordination is possible without either central authority or chaos, but also that such coordination requires carefully designed institutional arrangements.
Myceloom extends these precedents from technical standards to social and economic governance. Protocols enabling interoperability are social as well as technical: agreements about how to treat one another, distribute resources, and resolve conflicts.49 Coalition substrate means infrastructure for making and keeping these agreements across boundaries separating distinct communities.
VII. Social Movement Coalitions: Identity, Strategy, and Sustaining Commitment
Social movement scholarship offers crucial insights for understanding myceloom as coalition infrastructure. Movements succeed or fail substantially based on their ability to build and maintain coalitions: alliances among organizations and communities with overlapping but not identical interests.50 This coalition work involves navigating differences, building trust, and sustaining commitment through inevitable conflicts and disappointments.
Research identifies five factors critical to coalition formation: social ties among participants, conducive organizational structures, compatible ideologies and identities, favorable institutional environments, and adequate resources.51 These factors help explain why some movements succeed building durable coalitions while others fragment before achieving goals.
Collective identity proves particularly important. People participate in movements not merely as rational actors calculating costs and benefits but as members of groups whose identity is bound up with movement success.52 When participation becomes part of who one is rather than merely what one does, the free-rider problem Olson identified largely dissolves; contribution becomes internally motivated rather than externally enforced.
Myceloom's capacity to support collective identity construction represents a crucial dimension of its coalition function. Shared vocabulary, common practices, and collective rituals sustaining movement solidarity require infrastructure to operate at scale.53 Extractive platforms fragment communities, algorithmically segregate perspectives, and undermine shared experiences through which collective identity forms. Myceloom provides alternative infrastructure oriented toward connection rather than fragmentation.
Social movement research also reveals tensions inherent in coalition work. Coalitions bring together groups with different priorities, cultures, and strategies. These differences can generate creative tension strengthening movements, but they can also generate destructive conflict tearing coalitions apart.54 Effective coalition infrastructure must help navigate difference without suppressing it.
Myceloom addresses these tensions through several mechanisms. First, federated structure allows coalition members maintaining distinct identities and governance while cooperating on shared concerns. This addresses the common coalition challenge where smaller groups fear absorption by larger partners.55 Second, transparent decision-making builds trust by making power dynamics visible and accountable. Third, graduated commitment allows participants engaging at levels appropriate to their capacity and interest, reducing all-or-nothing dynamics often straining coalition relationships.
The concept of "free spaces"—settings apart from dominant institutions where activists develop alternative ideas and practices—illuminates another myceloom coalition function dimension.56 Effective movements require spaces where participants can build relationships, develop analysis, and prepare for collective action away from adversary surveillance and disruption. Myceloom nodes can function as such spaces: autonomous zones where coalition work proceeds on participants' own terms.
Digital technology has transformed social movement coalition building in ways creating both opportunities and challenges. Networked communication enables coordination at unprecedented scale and speed; movements can form virtually overnight and connect activists across vast distances.57 Platform intermediation makes movements dependent on infrastructure controlled by corporations with no commitment to movement success and considerable incentive to suppress movements threatening established interests.
Myceloom offers infrastructure for digitally-enabled coalition building not depending on extractive platforms. This independence matters not merely for privacy or data sovereignty but for movement durability.58 Coalitions built on infrastructure their members control can sustain themselves through inevitable cycles of attention and neglect, support and suppression, characterizing movement lifecycles. Coalitions built on borrowed infrastructure remain vulnerable to platform decisions undermining movement capacity at crucial moments.
VIII. The Political Economy of Coalition Substrate
The preceding analysis reveals myceloom as infrastructure for a distinct political economy: one organized around coalition rather than competition, distributed power rather than concentrated control, collective flourishing rather than value extraction. This political economy requires articulating the relationship between technical architecture and political possibility, between protocol design and power distribution.
The term "coalition substrate" captures this relationship. In materials science, substrate refers to the underlying layer on which something is built or deposited. Coalition substrate is the foundation on which coalitions form, develop, and sustain themselves.59 This foundation is simultaneously technical (protocols, interfaces, data structures) and political (governance arrangements, reciprocity norms, power distributions).
Understanding myceloom as coalition substrate has several implications. First, technical decisions are political decisions. Choices about data ownership, interoperability, identity management, and algorithmic design shape what coalitions are possible and how power flows within them.60 Protocol design is constitutional design; it establishes fundamental rules within which coalition politics operates.
Second, coalition substrate must be neutral among coalitions while enabling coalition formation. Unlike platforms seeking to capture value from all activity on them, coalition substrate provides common infrastructure various coalitions can use for distinct purposes.61 This neutrality does not mean valuelessness; distributed power, reciprocal exchange, and multi-stakeholder governance values are built into substrate architecture. But it means not privileging particular coalitions over others.
Third, sustaining coalition substrate requires addressing its own collective action problems. Who maintains shared infrastructure? Who pays development and operation costs? How are substrate evolution decisions made? These meta-level governance questions require their own coalition formation: coalitions among those building and maintaining the substrate on which other coalitions depend.62
Commons-based peer production provides models for addressing these questions. Yochai Benkler's analysis of how Wikipedia, Linux, and similar projects coordinate large-scale production without market pricing or managerial hierarchy demonstrates alternative coordination mechanisms can function effectively.63 These projects succeed through "modularity and granularity": dividing tasks into components contributors can complete independently, with integration mechanisms combining individual contributions into collective products.
Myceloom's architecture embodies these principles. Individual contributions—maintaining nodes, developing code, facilitating governance, creating documentation—remain modular enough for distributed participation.64 Integration mechanisms—shared protocols, federated coordination, collective institutions—combine contributions into functional infrastructure. The result is substrate production not requiring either massive capital concentration or centralized command.
Commons-based peer production also demonstrates purely voluntary contribution limits. Core maintainers often burn out; projects struggle funding necessary but unglamorous work; power accumulates around those with time and resources to participate intensively.65 Sustainable coalition substrate requires mechanisms compensating contribution that complement rather than replace intrinsic motivation.
Platform cooperativism research suggests mechanisms for sustainable substrate funding. Cooperative federations fund shared services through member contributions scaled to capacity and benefit.66 This model can apply to coalition substrate; nodes deriving more network value contribute proportionally more to substrate maintenance. Such mechanisms recognize substrate is not free to produce while avoiding platform capitalism's extractive dynamics.
Coalition substrate political economy also requires addressing power dynamics pure technical design cannot resolve. Even with distributed architecture, power may concentrate around those controlling key nodes, maintaining critical code, or dominating governance processes.67 Coalition substrate must include mechanisms for monitoring, challenging, and redistributing power accumulating despite architectural design.
IX. Implementation Principles: Building Coalition Infrastructure
Drawing together insights from collective action theory, coalition formation research, evolutionary cooperation, platform cooperativism, federated governance, and social movement studies, we can articulate design principles for myceloom as coalition infrastructure. These principles translate theoretical understanding into practical architecture.
Principle 1: Nested scale for collective action. Coalition infrastructure must enable collective action at multiple scales without forcing premature aggregation.68 Individual nodes remain small enough for direct reciprocity and social accountability to function. Networks of nodes achieve collective scale for purposes requiring it. Nested structure allows decisions at appropriate levels: local matters locally, network matters collectively.
Principle 2: Selective incentives through participation benefits. Rather than relying on altruism or coercion, coalition infrastructure provides benefits available only through participation.69 Access to network resources, coordination capabilities, collective intelligence, and reputation infrastructure creates positive contribution incentives. Free-riding becomes self-limiting because non-contributors cannot access what makes the network valuable.
Principle 3: Visible contribution and graduated reciprocity. Transparency infrastructure makes contributions observable and attributable.70 Reputation systems reward cooperation and identify defection. Responses to defection are graduated rather than binary: small violations trigger small consequences while persistent patterns trigger escalating responses. This approach prevents spiraling conflicts while maintaining accountability.
Principle 4: Maximum sustaining coalitions through inclusive architecture. Rather than minimum winning coalitions excluding unnecessary members, coalition infrastructure aims for maximum sustaining coalitions including all who add value.71 Open protocols enable broad participation; graduated membership accommodates different capacities; exit rights ensure inclusion does not become entrapment.
Principle 5: Partner choice through federated plurality. Participants can choose among multiple nodes, service providers, and governance arrangements.72 This choice disciplines providers without requiring central authority. Competition for participants creates accountability; interoperability prevents lock-in. Market dynamics support rather than undermine cooperation.
Principle 6: Multi-stakeholder governance with subsidiarity principle. Governance structures represent and balance genuinely different stakeholder interests rather than privileging any single group.73 Decisions occur at the lowest level capable of effective action, with higher-level coordination for genuinely collective concerns. Legitimacy requires both procedural fairness and outcome effectiveness.
Principle 7: Coalition substrate neutrality with embedded values. Common infrastructure supports various coalitions without capturing value from all of them.74 Substrate architecture embeds distributed power, reciprocal exchange, and democratic governance values. Neutrality among coalitions coexists with commitment to coalition-enabling values.
Principle 8: Sustainable substrate through scaled contribution. Coalition substrate production requires mechanisms compensating contribution without requiring massive capital concentration or centralized command.75 Contributions scaled to capacity and benefit fund shared services. Commons-based peer production complements funded coordination.
These principles are not abstract ideals but practical design guides. Each implies specific architectural choices, governance arrangements, and operational practices. Together, they describe coalition infrastructure capable of enabling multi-stakeholder coordination that extractive platforms systematically undermine.
X. Conclusion: The Politics of Networked Solidarity
Political architecture for networked solidarity finds its clearest expression when myceloom is viewed through coalition theory. The free-rider problems Olson identified, coalition dynamics Riker analyzed, cooperation conditions Axelrod demonstrated, market mechanisms Noë and Hammerstein described all find expression in myceloom's design and operation.
The convergence is not coincidental. Coalition formation is the fundamental political problem, and infrastructure shapes what coalitions are possible.76 Platforms currently dominating digital life are not neutral pipes but political architectures concentrating power and undermining collective action. Myceloom offers alternative architecture: coalition substrate designed to enable multi-stakeholder alliances extractive platforms systematically prevent.
Myceloom's biological foundation illuminates this political function. Mycorrhizal networks are not merely metaphors for digital systems; they are proven solutions to the same coordination problems digital coalitions face. Plants and fungi with different needs, capabilities, and life strategies nonetheless form durable alliances through which all partners flourish.77 Protocols governing these alliances—preferential allocation to contributors, graduated response to defection, resilient network structure—translate directly into digital coalition infrastructure principles.
Biological inspiration requires political translation. Networks do not govern themselves; infrastructure does not determine outcomes. Choices about who controls myceloom infrastructure, how decisions are made, and how benefits are distributed remain fundamentally political.78 Coalition substrate enables coalition formation; it cannot replace the political work of actually building coalitions.
This work is ongoing. Platform cooperatives experiment with alternative ownership and governance. Federated social networks test decentralized coordination. Social movements build coalitions across dividing boundaries.79 These experiments generate knowledge about what works, what fails, and what possibilities remain unexplored.
Myceloom synthesizes insights from these experiments into coherent infrastructure for coalition politics. The logic of coalition—how heterogeneous actors find common ground, overcome free-rider problems, and sustain collective action—becomes not merely theoretical understanding but practical capability. Coalition substrate makes coalition formation possible; what coalitions form remains for participants to determine.
The stakes are high. Digital power concentration in platform monopolies threatens democratic governance, economic fairness, and collective self-determination.80 Alternative infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient; infrastructure must be animated by political will, organized by collective action, and sustained by ongoing coalition work. Myceloom provides the substrate; networked solidarity provides the politics.
Myceloom's coalition function completes the theoretical arc begun in previous analyses. Philosophy provides conceptual foundation.81 Community structures enable local self-governance. Collective intelligence emerges from distributed coordination. Network architecture carries signals and resources. Interface design enables connection and exchange. Coalition infrastructure enables the political work of building and sustaining alliances through which all these capabilities serve human flourishing.
The living network lives through the coalitions it sustains, and coalitions sustain themselves through the living network. This recursive relationship between infrastructure and politics, between architecture and action, defines myceloom's distinctive contribution. Not merely technical innovation, not merely organizational experiment, but political architecture for a digital age that might yet serve genuinely democratic purposes.