Glenn Stovall

Squads

This note was inspired by Other Internet's Essay Squad Wealth. Squads are people who have come together to worked towards a shared goal without a formalized structure like a corporation.

The informal nature of these peer-to-peer institutions, often composed of neighbors and friends, reveals the central role that trust plays in squad logic. Whether housemates or friends sharing a Discord group, squads allow social currency and financial capital to inter-convert, creating opportunities and group resiliency that would have been impossible to achieve alone.

Squads are not a new archetype. Squads have been around for thousands of years.

In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna J. Haraway reminds us that relatives in British English meant “logical relations” until the seventeenth century, when they became “family members.” Haraway is less interested in individuals and genealogical families than in symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care—asking us to “make kin, not babies!” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

Squads = autonomy + community + equity

Squad Benefits

  • "Contributions to the squad are positive sum. You help the squad, the squad helps you more because you build social capital. "
  • "Squads = autonomy + community + equity"
  • Shared resources - for example, when my mastermind had a "little free library" on Dropbox.
  • Shared promotion / WebRing 3.0 - people to help you promote your work to their audiences, upvote on Reddit, etc.
  • Emotional Support someone to help you avoid common failure types, provide advice, help you get unstuck.

10 Ways Squads Help Each Other

  1. Create a Little free library – When I was in a mastermind group, we had a shared Dropbox folder of documents and ebooks that we were happy to share but couldn’t do so publicly.
  2. Shared knowledge base – You could maintain a blog, wiki, knowledge graph, or Github repo. It could either be a private resource or a public digital garden.
  1. Collected Works – curate everyone’s works for cross-promotion into a blog or newsletter. The Yak Collective has a good example.
  2. Directory – Create a shared listing of everyone that you can all point towards. Some coworking spaces do this.
  3. Take a gig, leave a gig – Refer people to work where you aren’t a good fit—handoff work when you’re booked solid.
  4. Shared subcontracting – A subcontractor isn’t always someone more junior than the contractor. It just means they aren’t the lead. I’ve been a sub on a friend’s project, turned around, and hired them to be a sub on mine.
  5. Weekly hangouts – These can be organized (mastermind calls) or unstructured (virtual happy hours).
  6. Avengers, Assemble Projects – Work together on more extensive, collaborative projects.
  7. Shared promotion, aka WebRing 3.0 – Promote each other’s work on social media, Reddit, HN, etc.
  8. Emotional Support – Be there for one another, help each other avoid common failure types, provide advice, and help you get unstuck.

Also from Other Internet, see Learning Gardens, a practice they used for groups of researchers to share findings and experiments

Squad Archetypes

  • Room mates
  • Hype houses
  • Coworking clubs
  • Mastermind groups
  • DAOs
  • Open source projects

Examples of Squads

Resources

Older writing

Backlinks