A Long Shot Worth Taking: Why I’m Building Cooperatives in a Country That Forgets Its Own History
On growth as the rare path, hegemony as the constant pressure, and the Filipino bet that someone among us breaks through.
The thesis, stated plainly
I am building toward worker cooperatives, open-source industrial tooling, and federated technical infrastructure in the Philippines because I believe growth — real growth, the kind that funds space programs, renewable transitions, and civilizational-scale projects — requires productivity gains to be distributed across a population, and because I believe almost nothing in the Philippine political economy currently distributes anything across the population.
I also believe that what I am attempting is a long shot. The stars have to align. The saints have to be martyred. Most of the people doing this work, including me, will lose more than we win. The realistic outcome for any individual cooperative, any individual open-source project, any individual reform attempt, is that it gets captured, hollowed out, starved of capital, smeared, or quietly absorbed back into the patronage system that produced the conditions it was trying to escape.
I am still doing it because the alternative — waiting — has a worse expected value, and because the work only succeeds statistically. Enough of us have to try, in enough places, with enough variation in approach, that some non-trivial fraction breaks through. The breakthroughs will not be evenly distributed. Most of us will be the failed cases that the eventual winners learn from. That is acceptable to me as a structural fact about how movements like this actually progress, and it is the framing I want to be honest about up front.
The rest of this post is about why I think this particular long shot is worth taking, what the actual obstacles look like from the Philippines, and what realistic success looks like in a generational time horizon.
Growth requires distribution. Hegemony requires concentration. These cannot coexist.
The cleanest analytical frame I have for what I am trying to do is this. Societies that genuinely grow — that build new capacity, fund frontier work, sustain large infrastructure, increase the median citizen’s productive output — distribute their productivity gains across the population. The mechanism is not idealism. It is that distributed gains compound through housing formation, education, small business creation, and broad consumer demand, all of which feed back into further productive capacity. Concentrated gains do not compound the productive base. They flow into financial assets, real estate speculation, and political capture, which preserve the holder’s position without expanding the system.
The United States since roughly 1980 is the cleanest natural experiment for what happens when a society stops distributing. Productivity has roughly doubled. Median wages have crawled. The country that put humans on the moon in 1969 cannot reliably build high-speed rail in 2026. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of forty years of concentrated productivity gains, and the political effects — the surveillance-state pivot, the concentration of platform power, the openly stated managed-decline strategies coming out of major defense-and-intelligence-aligned firms — are downstream consequences, not causes.
I name Palantir specifically because their leadership has been unusually clear about what they want, and because their pitch is the cleanest available example of what concentrated power looks like when it stops pretending it is interested in growth. The “Technological Republic” framing, Karp’s published positions, the company’s pitch to defense and intelligence buyers — none of this is hidden. The argument, condensed, is that Western civilizational primacy is in danger, that Silicon Valley should re-ally with the national security state, and that the resulting capabilities should be deployed without squeamishness. What is missing from the pitch, structurally, is any plausible growth story. There is a theory for how this concentration produces security, framed as defense against China and against internal disorder. There is no theory for how it produces broad productivity gains for the populations it claims to defend. The verbs in the manifesto — identify, predict, neutralize — give away which strategy is actually being pursued. You do not pursue growth with those verbs. You pursue containment.
But Palantir is one example. The structural argument applies more broadly: any concentrated entity, whether a US defense contractor, a Chinese state enterprise, a European industrial conglomerate, or a Philippine oligarchic family, has the same incentives once it stops growing — to defend its position by ensuring that no one else grows past it either. From the perspective of someone in the Philippines, the relevant fact is not that Palantir specifically is the threat. The relevant fact is that the Philippines sits at the receiving end of these strategies from every direction at once. The United States needs us as a labour buffer and a treaty ally. China needs us as a market and a logistics node. The EU needs us as a source of OFW remittance flows that stabilize their care economies. Each of these powers will support whichever Philippine domestic arrangement keeps us useful in the role they assign us, and will tolerate, fund, or actively engineer the suppression of any Philippine arrangement that would change that role.
This is what makes the Philippine fight for growth a long shot. It is not just that we have to overcome our own elites, although we do. It is that any successful internal reform creates immediate external pressure from larger players whose interests depend on us not changing.
The Filipino daily condition: surrendering autonomy to elites who do not represent us
The hardest part of the argument I am making is not the international one. It is the domestic one. Most Filipinos go through their daily lives surrendering autonomy to elites who do not represent their interests, because the alternative — sustained collective political action against those elites — is exhausting, dangerous, and historically unsuccessful enough that the rational individual response is to accept the conditions and try to provide for one’s family within them.
This is not a moral failure of the population. It is a rational response to a long historical record. Filipinos who have organized, in any sustained way, against the dominant economic and political arrangements have had a remarkably consistent set of outcomes: red-tagging, surveillance, harassment, displacement, imprisonment, and in a non-trivial number of cases, death. The martial law era documented this most thoroughly — Amnesty International records approximately three thousand two hundred extrajudicial killings, thirty-five thousand documented tortures, and seventy thousand incarcerations between 1972 and 1981. The drug war documented it again from 2016 onward, with human rights organizations and the ICC estimating twelve to thirty thousand killed. Activists, union organizers, indigenous leaders, journalists, and rural cooperative organizers continue to be killed in the Philippines at rates that, while smaller in raw numbers, send a sustained signal to anyone considering organized resistance.
When I say the daily Filipino condition is surrender, I mean it descriptively, not pejoratively. The surrender is rational at the individual level. The cost is that it is collectively suicidal. A population that has individually opted out of collective political agency cannot, by definition, change the conditions that made the surrender rational in the first place. The elites who benefit from this arrangement are aware of the dynamic and structure their political and media operations around maintaining it. The standard tools — patronage politics, dynastic local rule, vote-buying, control of media narratives, selective enforcement of laws against opposition figures, occasional violence against those who would not be deterred otherwise — are not unique to the Philippines, but they are unusually well-developed here, in part because the institutional weakness of the post-colonial state never gave any countervailing structure time to consolidate.
The corruption is not a side effect of this arrangement. It is the arrangement. Public funds flow through political networks that keep the networks intact. Procurement is structured to deliver kickbacks to the people who control which projects get approved. Regulatory bodies exist to provide selective enforcement that benefits those connected to the regulators. None of this is hidden. It is the openly understood operating logic of a non-trivial fraction of Philippine governance, and the population knows it, and the population has largely concluded that fighting it is a losing proposition for any individual.
This is what we are actually up against. Not Palantir. Not American hegemony. Not Chinese encirclement. Those external pressures are real, but they are not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is that the population has correctly assessed the cost of organized resistance against domestic elites and has rationally chosen survival over agency. Any growth-oriented reform program in the Philippines has to find a way to make organized collective action survivable enough that ordinary people can participate without becoming martyrs.
The forgotten history is the deeper version of the same problem
The Philippine-American War killed somewhere between two hundred thousand and a million Filipinos out of a population of seven to eight million. By the low scholarly estimate it killed Filipinos at the same proportional rate as Japanese occupation in World War II. By the high estimate it killed proportionally more Filipinos than Spanish flu, COVID, martial law, and the drug war combined and multiplied. It is the largest mass-death event in modern Philippine history, and it is also the event that Filipino schoolchildren learn least about. Filipino historians have the records. The general population does not.
I bring this up not to litigate the war again but to make a structural point. The reason organized political agency is so hard to build in the Philippines is connected to the reason this particular history has been allowed to fade. A population that does not remember the largest mass-death event in its own modern history will also not remember why its current political and economic arrangements look the way they do. The arrangements appear natural. The elites who benefit from them appear inevitable. The external powers that enforce them appear benevolent or, at worst, distantly relevant. None of this is the case, but the analytical framework that would let a population see it clearly has been systematically dismantled — first by Spain, then by the United States, then by post-independence Filipino elites who found themselves with no particular incentive to restore what their predecessors had erased.
This is the deeper version of the rational-surrender problem. People who do not remember their history cannot draw on its lessons. People who cannot draw on its lessons must rediscover them, painfully, every generation. The Marcos era should have inoculated the country against authoritarianism for at least a hundred years. It inoculated us for about thirty. The same dynastic family is now back in the presidency, and a substantial fraction of the population either does not remember the original martial law or has been told, through sustained social media operations, that the previous account was exaggerated or false.
The work of remembering is not separate from the work of building. It is a precondition for the work of building. People will not invest their lives in cooperatives, in long-horizon technical infrastructure, in collective economic alternatives, if they do not understand why the current arrangements need replacing. The history is the case for the work. The erasure of the history is the principal rhetorical advantage of the people benefiting from the current arrangements. The first line of defense for any growth-oriented Philippine reform movement is therefore historical literacy, not policy expertise, because without the former, the policy expertise has no audience.
What “fixing things” actually looks like, statistically
There are people in the Philippines doing this work. I am one of them. We are not unusually heroic. We are operations directors, engineers, teachers, agricultural cooperative organizers, open-source developers, civil-society lawyers, mid-career professionals who have decided to spend the back half of our working lives building things that the current arrangements would prefer we did not build. We are visible to each other. We are not, individually, very powerful.
The honest assessment of our collective position is this: we are statistical samples. We are betting that across enough of us, in enough sectors, with enough variation in tactics, some non-trivial fraction will break through to produce institutions that survive their founders, scale beyond their initial communities, and accumulate enough independent capacity to resist the standard capture and absorption mechanisms. The fraction that does not break through — which will be the majority of us — will produce data, lessons, partial successes, and inspiring case studies that the next generation of attempts can learn from. Some of us will be genuinely martyred, in the literal sense that the standard Philippine response to organized economic alternatives includes physical danger to the organizers. Most of us will be martyred only in the softer sense of having spent careers on projects that did not succeed in our lifetimes.
This framing is uncomfortable to write because it is uncomfortable to live, but it is the realistic picture. Cooperatives in the Philippines have a long history of being captured by the people they were intended to liberate from — manpower cooperatives weaponized as labour-arbitrage vehicles to suppress wages, agricultural cooperatives captured at formation by the original landowners or by political patrons, credit cooperatives starved of capital because the banking system has no incentive to fund them at scale. The cooperative form is the right tool. It has also been systematically misused here for decades, and any new cooperative initiative starts with a population that has already learned, with good evidence, to distrust the form.
Mondragon, in the Basque Country, is the working proof that the form scales — seventy thousand workers, sixty-eight years of operation, industrial complexity, bounded pay ratios, member-elected leadership, federation-level capital and audit functions. It is also the working proof that getting the form right requires deliberate technical and organizational choices that constrain capture, not just good intentions. The reason Mondragon works and the average Philippine manpower cooperative does not is not that the Basques are morally superior. It is that Mondragon’s governance structures were established with the specific purpose of preventing capture, and its founders had a few decades of relative external stability — Franco’s Spain, while brutal, was not actively dismantling Basque cooperative institutions — to consolidate before they had to scale.
We do not have that external stability. Any Philippine cooperative federation that started to consolidate at scale would attract attention from domestic patronage networks that would prefer it absorbed, from foreign capital that would prefer it dependent, and from political actors who would prefer it red-tagged. This is the reason the realistic timeline for the work I am doing is decades and the realistic outcome for any individual project is, more likely than not, failure.
The case for doing it anyway is that the alternative — accepting the current arrangements as permanent — has a worse expected value across the population, even if it has a better expected value for any individual who decides to opt out of the work. Enough individuals have to make the irrational individual choice, often enough, in enough sectors, that the statistical aggregate produces a non-zero number of breakthroughs. That is the actual mechanism by which long-shot reform movements succeed historically. They do not succeed because every participant wins. They succeed because enough participants are willing to play despite knowing most of them will not.
What this requires from people doing the work, and what it requires from the population
For the people doing the work, the requirement is to keep going while expecting to lose. This is harder than it sounds. The standard psychological pattern for reformers in environments like the Philippines is initial enthusiasm, mid-career disillusionment when the first major capture or failure occurs, and either bitter exit or reduced-expectations persistence. The persistence path is what produces eventual breakthroughs, and it is uncomfortable because it requires accepting that one’s individual contribution is most likely going to be a learning input for someone else’s eventual success rather than a personal triumph.
For the population, the requirement is more modest but actually harder to produce: a critical mass of ordinary people who are educated enough in their own history and game theory to recognize when external and internal actors are playing them against their own interests, and who can form fast coalitions when those moments arrive. We do not need a population of saints. We do not need everyone to organize. We need enough people to recognize the pattern when it appears that the pattern can no longer be reliably executed against them.
This is what I think the realistic success condition looks like at twenty-to-thirty year horizons. Not a Philippine Mondragon, although that would be wonderful. Not an end to oligarchic dynastic politics, which is probably outside the achievable window. A Philippine population in which, when the next major external pressure arrives — and it will arrive, because we sit at the intersection of every great-power competition and every climate stress vector — a meaningful fraction of the population can correctly identify whose interests are being served by which proposed response, and can organize fast enough to produce a different response. Combined with a thin layer of institutional alternatives — cooperative federations, open-source technical infrastructure, civil-society legal capacity — that thin layer becomes the difference between a population that gets played again and a population that does not.
That is what I am trying to contribute to. Not as the person who wins the breakthrough. As one of the statistical samples whose work, whether it succeeds individually or not, becomes part of the substrate that the eventual breakthroughs are built on. The people who come after will not necessarily know my name, and they should not have to. What they should have is a Philippines where the work I am doing now was, in retrospect, one of the early signals that the current arrangements were not going to be permanent.
When I am sixty-plus, I want to look at the open-source projects, cooperatives, and technical infrastructure I have helped seed and see them as self-sustaining — debating their differences, shifting alliances among themselves, but well-educated enough in history and game theory to recognize the larger threats and form fast coalitions when they need to. That is the success condition. It is not a guarantee. It is a long shot worth taking.
— Justin
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