Regenerative Debt, Coercive Debt

Two spirals, one coordination cell

Content note: This essay discusses coercion and exploitation in high power networks.
Summary: Debt can be regenerative when it strengthens reciprocity and repair. The same coordination “cell” can become coercive when governance, valuation, and limits are bent toward domination.

When I hear stories about Ubuntu (Ubu-Ntu) I hear something simple and profound. Ubuntu is often translated as “I am because we are” (a view that personhood is formed through relationship, responsibility, and repair). We become people through our relationship with other people. Our personhood is not a private possession. It is a living fabric made from promises, presence, care, and repair. Ubuntu also includes boundary and accountability (repair is not possible without truth, consent, and consequences).

In this light, debt is not merely a financial instrument. Debt is relational (a record of what we have received, what we still owe in care or contribution, and what repair may be needed). It is what forms when someone reaches toward you and you receive that reaching. It is the quiet gravity that pulls us back into reciprocity. But that gravity is shaped by rules (what counts as a commitment, how it is valued, what limits apply, and how enforcement works). Change the rules, and the meaning of “owing” changes too.

Regenerative debt (debt that increases capacity)

I often speak about debt in its brighter form (as counterpoint). In many communities there are traditions like Mweria (rotational mutual aid and labor sharing in parts of Kenya), where people help you (in a positive way) and you are indebted to help them. You give your word and are honor-bound to fulfill your commitments. Those who are helped often feel an obligation to help others, and they project that support into their environment. The debt does not feel like a chain. It feels like belonging.

It becomes a regenerative spiral. Commitment leads to fulfillment. Fulfillment deepens trust. Trust increases exchange. Exchange builds safety. Safety makes abundance possible. Not abundance as luxury, but abundance as resilience and mutual capacity.

Coercive debt (debt that enforces domination)

But to be honest, debt has another face (one we are sadly too familiar with). One familiar modern form is interest-bearing debt, especially where compounding and collateral convert short-term help into long-term dependence. It is one financial expression of the enclosure logic described below.

What about enclosures, extortion, and coercive networks where obligations are enforced through fear, secrecy, and exploitation (including the dynamics documented around human trafficking networks). What about the downward spirals, where people help you (in a negative way, by hurting others) and you are indebted to help them. You give your word and are honor-bound to fulfill your commitments, no matter the harm done. And those who are hurt by others may feel an obligation to hurt them back, or to project that pain into their environment.

oof. such a history of pain.

When we talk about Ubuntu and Mweria, it is tempting to sugarcoat ancient practices and speak as if the old ways were always uplifting spirals. I do not want to do that. There are stories I have read and been told firsthand of traditions where the goodwill of Mweria is enclosed and directed by an elite cadre of elders, and maintained through coercive rites and sacrificial logics that concentrate power. These stories are hard and in many cases horrific. They are deeply part of our human history, living alongside the beautiful and life-giving spirals of shared care. Details vary by place and time, and I offer these accounts to name a pattern rather than to flatten many cultures into one story.

When I hold these two realities together, patterns emerge. Even in ancient contexts, long before the internet and long before modern money, something about power-over (as opposed to power-with and power-among) could mutate a healthy ecosystem into a parasitic one. These parasitic structures appear again and again. Different masks. Same moral chemistry.

This proverb keeps returning to me:

“The child that is not loved will burn the village to feel warm.”

It points to unmet belonging needs, status injury, revenge dynamics, and the lure of power-over as a substitute for real connection and safety. When these forces scale, the result is not always a literal fire. Sometimes it becomes an institution, a network, or a regime. The village does not burn. It gets captured and enclosed.

The point is not to psychoanalyze any one person. The point is to notice a repeated social pattern: when people can convert harm into leverage, and leverage into protection, coercion becomes a kind of cooperation that can scale horribly well.

We have to ask the question anyway, because it is too repetitive to ignore.

How do patterns of scapegoating and ritualized violence recur over thousands of years?

How do we keep reinventing arrangements where a small group extracts safety and status by manufacturing fear, debt, and silence?

One answer is that coercive debt is a spiral that feeds itself. Harm creates leverage. Leverage produces silence. Silence protects impunity. Impunity enables more harm. More harm increases scarcity (scarcity of safety, of trust, of belonging, of honest opportunity). Scarcity is then used to justify more control.

That is the enclosure spiral. And in the human trafficking network context, it is painfully recognizable. The network is not only individuals doing harm. It is a coordination cell that converts exploitation into leverage, leverage into silence, and silence into protection. It is a mutated form of social cooperation that eats the commons.

The shared cell (CPP)

Here is a simple claim. Both spirals (regenerative and coercive) can run on the same basic coordination cell, described functionally as the Commitment Pooling Protocol (CPP).

That may sound technical, but it is actually very ancient and very human. A pool is any shared space where commitments are registered, valued, limited, and exchanged. Villages and families do this. Institutions do this. Mutual aid networks do this. So do cartels and extortion rings. The cell is not new. What is new (sometimes) is the machinery we use to express it, including digital ledgers.

This is why the protocol is both promising and dangerous.

In its simplest form, the cell has four functions:

1. Curation: what commitments are recognized and allowed in the pool.

2. Valuation: how commitments are priced, weighted, and trusted.

3. Limitation: caps and windows that prevent runs and abuse.

4. Exchange and settlement: custody, fees, swap receipts, enforcement, and redemptions.

These functions shape what ‘owing’ means in practice, and who can enforce it. Both spirals use these same functions. What changes is the values, the governance, and the incentive gradient inside the cell.

In a regenerative debt pool, curation is a form of care. The community lists what it can stand behind. Commitments are tied to real needs (food, care, transport, shelter, learning) and to real capacity to fulfill. In this kind of pool, valuation is not only price. Value becomes reliability, wellbeing, and continuity. A fulfilled promise increases the worth of future promises. Limits exist to protect life, to prevent extraction, to stop runs, to expand access gradually with demonstrated fulfillment. Exchange and settlement emphasize transparent receipts and clear redemption pathways, so commitments are real, not symbolic. Fees, where they exist, can fund resilience (repair, insurance, victim support, public goods). This is how a community can turn promises into safety, and safety into abundance.

In a coercive debt pool, the same four functions still operate, but they are bent toward domination. Curation becomes gatekeeping. The listed commitments are not life-affirming promises but instruments of dependence. Introductions become a currency. Protection becomes a toll. Secrecy becomes a condition of membership. In this world, valuation is not about wellbeing but about leverage. Scarcity is manufactured because scarcity increases dependence. Fear becomes a metric. Limits do not protect the vulnerable. Limits protect the cartel. Rules are applied selectively, waived for insiders, and weaponized against outsiders. Exchange and settlement drift into ambiguity and plausible deniability. Enforcement is asymmetric. Outsiders pay. Insiders are forgiven. The pool functions like a protection racket. It settles commitments, but the settlement reproduces scarcity and silence.

Same machinery. Different moral chemistry.

If we return to human trafficking networks with this lens, the shape is not mysterious. It is a commitment pool corrupted into an enclosure. There is curation (selective access, who is in, who is vulnerable, who is protected). There is valuation (status and leverage, who can be controlled, who can shield whom). There are limits (silence enforcement, punishment for defection, blocked exits). There is settlement (favors, money flows, protection, plausible deniability). It feels parasitic because it is a coordination cell that feeds on secrecy and vulnerability.

It is important to widen the lens one more step, because this is not only social. It is ecological. The same coordination logic that shapes social obligations also shapes how we treat land, labor, and future generations.

The same downward spiral that harms people also harms land. Ecocide is not separate from coercive debt. These negative social spirals are connected to negative ecological spirals because both are feedback systems. Every harm we inflict on our ecosystems, our soil, biodiversity, we are inflicting on ourselves. Any excuse given for social or ecological harm aside, that harm compounds.

We can see this clearly in positive spirals too. In syntropic agroforestry, life builds life. More biomass leads to better water infiltration. Better infiltration supports more roots, more shade, more fertility. The system becomes more resilient the more it is cared for. Regenerative debt looks like that. It is a social version of soil restoration.

Coercive debt looks like erosion. It is not only extraction of value from people. It is extraction from the future.

Design stance and guardrails

So what does it mean to propagate commitment pooling in the world (whether through something like a CosmoLocal.Credit DAO, or through any other mechanism). It means we are propagating power. And we have to be honest about that.

CPP concentrates and routes power (the power to coordinate, include, exclude, and enforce). That power can be used to heal or to harm.

A knife can cut food or cut flesh. Math can model ecosystems or optimize extraction. Commitment pooling can build Ubuntu spirals or it can build enclosures, rackets, and horrors. And it already has. There is no guarantee layer thick enough to remove that risk entirely, because the danger is not only technical. It is social, political, and spiritual.

So the mature stance is not “CPP will save us.”

It is this. CPP is a coordination instrument. Coordination instruments amplify intention and capacity. That amplification is dangerous.

Guardrails help. Training helps. Transparent ledgers help. Limits help. But none of those replace the central truth that human beings and institutions can corrupt any protocol when incentives reward domination. We cannot make commitment pooling safe by stopping pooling. That would be like solving knife violence by banning kitchens, or solving propaganda by banning language. People will coordinate. They will pool. They will promise. The question is whether those pools are opaque and coercive or legible and accountable. Whether exit is possible. Whether abuse is easier or harder. Whether power concentrates silently or meets friction.

Why transparency, routing, and clearing can still be abused

Even when CPP is deployed in a transparent system, with open routing and clearing between many pools, coercive debt can still form. The reason is that enclosure does not only happen inside the ledger. It also happens around it (through intimidation, dependency, reputation capture, and off-ledger enforcement).

A transparent protocol can even accelerate harm if a coercive actor learns to use it well. They can (a) issue commitments that look normal on-chain but are backed by threats off-chain, (b) manipulate valuation and limits through steward capture, (c) concentrate liquidity to create chokepoints, (d) capture routing interfaces so most people only “see” the paths that benefit the enclosure, and (e) use clearing to launder legitimacy (moving toxic obligations through many hops until origin accountability is blurred).

So openness reduces some forms of abuse (hidden accounting and invisible extraction), but it does not remove coercion as a social technology.

Transparency mainly weakens abuses that depend on secrecy. Pluralism and exit mainly weaken abuses that depend on chokepoints. Neither one eliminates coercion entirely, but together they reduce its rewards and shorten its half-life.

So the aim becomes not guaranteed goodness, but reduced harm, faster detection, and credible exit.

And we should expect enclosure attempts to shift layers (from the pool itself to the interfaces, routers, identity systems, liquidity chokepoints, and governance capture across many pools).

If enclosure is the core abuse, then the core defense is pluralism and exit. A Cambrian explosion of interoperable pools (with open routing and transparent clearing) makes enclosure harder to maintain, because it multiplies alternatives. When value and commitments can route across many pools, no single gatekeeper can easily own the on-ramps, the exits, and the prices all at once.

This is the wager of CosmoLocal.credit. More precisely, it is a commitment to exit-first infrastructure (standard interfaces, visible indices and limits, auditable settlement, and routing that can route around capture). If we make CPP easy to use in the open, and we standardize how pools expose registries, indices, limits, and settlement, then enclosure has to work much harder. It must compete against visible alternatives, and it must survive under the pressure of credible exit (people can route around it, fork away from it, or refuse its terms without losing access to all exchange).

Practically, this means designing for four things: visibility (so harm is harder to hide), limits (so runs and extraction are throttled), accountability (so governance capture is costly), and exit (so no one must submit to a single enclosure to participate in exchange).

A deeper aim is cultural. To move societies from power-over pooling (enclosure) toward power-with pooling (commons). That is not a technical guarantee. It is a moral practice supported by design.

CPP is not a cure. It is a tool that can become a weapon. We cannot make it safe by stopping pooling. We can only make it safer by making abuse harder to hide, easier to exit, and less rewarded.

That is how we keep faith with Ubuntu without pretending away human history. That is how we honor the beauty of regenerative debt without denying the reality of coercive debt. That is how we interrupt parasitic loops where we can, and also change the conditions that keep feeding them.

I am holding care for survivors and for everyone working to choose accountability over numbness, and repair over revenge.