The Collective Action Problem
The concentration of power in Web2 platforms is not a technological inevitability but a political failure. As Mancur Olson demonstrated, large groups with common interests (users desiring privacy, fairness, and autonomy) usually fail to organize because of the free-rider problem. Rational individuals will not incur the costs of organizing a public good if they can benefit from it without contributing.
Platform monopolies persist because they exploit this dynamic. They impose high coordination costs on anyone trying to leave, while capturing the value of the network for a small group of shareholders.
Coalition Substrate
Myceloom conceptualizes infrastructure as Coalition Substrate: the underlying layer on which political and economic alliances are built. Technical decisions—protocols, identity systems, data portability—are never neutral; they determine what kinds of coalitions are possible.
Is your infrastructure designed to extract value from users, or to enable users to build power together?
Coalition Substrate embeds the values of distributed power and reciprocal exchange into the code itself, making cooperation individually rational rather than requiring constant altruism.
Minimum Winning vs. Maximum Sustaining
Traditional political theory (Riker) suggests actors form Minimum Winning Coalitions: the smallest group necessary to seize power, maximizing the spoils for each member. This is the logic of the VC-backed startup: capture the market, exclude competitors, extract rents.
Myceloom proposes the Maximum Sustaining Coalition: an alliance that includes every stakeholder who adds value to the network. Like a mycorrhizal network connecting diverse plant species, these coalitions are resilient precisely because they are broad. They trade short-term concentration of profit for long-term sustainability and collective defense.
Principles of Coalition Architecture
- Nested Scale: Coalitions form at the level of the small group (the node) and federate into larger networks, preserving local autonomy while enabling global coordination.
- Selective Incentives: Participation grants access to networked goods (shared intelligence, resource flows) that free-riders cannot access.
- Visible Contribution: Transparency makes cooperation and defection observable, allowing reputation systems to function without central authority.
- Exit Rights: The freedom to leave without losing one's data or identity forces the coalition to continuously earn the loyalty of its members.