Not All Resource Pools Are Created Equitable
2026-09-14
Of all the systems of provisioning that we are spellbound to, few are as pervasive as resource pooling.
Resource pooling is the act of combining any lot of objects from multiple sources into a shared container. It’s done with the intention of achieving greater distribution efficiency, reducing isolated vulnerabilities, and/or accomplishing any number of goals that would be difficult for individuals acting alone.
Resource pooling is often associated with mutualistic structures like cooperatives and presented as a frugal, prosocial foil to zero-sum flavors of contemporary capitalism — a way for the common man to stand up against the big man. Examples of resource pooling that fit this bill include the ticketed “rent parties” thrown by Black residents of 1920s Harlem to raise funds that helped cover discriminately high rents. Endeavors like labor unions also come to mind, as do variations of informal lending clubs (dubbed hui in East Asian communities, susu in Africa and the Caribbean, and tanda in Latin America).
But resource pooling is a practice far broader and more ubiquitous than its horizontal interpretations. Pooling resources is one of the most basic economic acts. It is so basic, in fact, that implying that it’s a leftist construction belies the frequency with which resource pooling is also wielded by self-interested entities like insurance companies.
Calling resource pooling a neutral economic behavior akin to trading would be more accurate than filing it away as an exclusive tactic of mutual aid societies. Further illustrating its impartial appeal is the rate at which the act of pooling resources occurs when there are no humans around. Animals like honeybees and the acorn woodpecker have instinctively learned to pool food resources for no other reason than the competitive advantage it provides.
Resource pooling can be found everywhere if you look for it: banking, cities, carpooling, warehouses, and even nation states all exist under the premise that pooling resources increases said resources’ accessibility. It is because of this ubiquity that we can easily lose track of how exactly a given resource pool is constructed and maintained. A certain degree of illegibility towards resource pools is to be expected; many resource pools dovetail with infrastructure, and infrastructure is by definition invisible. It’s through centralizing management costs that resource pools give us freedom to do other things. In addition to being less resilient, our lives would be much fussier if we had to store all our own food, fetch all our own water, or safekeep our own money. However, as is often the case with acts of economic centralization, the sacrifice of individual agency for ease can imperceptibly turn something fair into something sour.
To better understand the more ubiquitous variety of the resource pool, picture the quotidian bank. Most of us have bank accounts where we keep our money safe and accessible. In exchange for this safety and accessibility, banks use our money to go make more of it for themselves, mainly through investing. The historical origins of this exchange were in the straightforward value banks provided to safely store precious money and materials during eras when physical security was relatively precarious. As time passed and banks evolved, they moved away from solely being safe deposit keepers. For many, the advantage of a modern bank is convenience more so than protection. Their service is undoubtedly still valuable, but considering what the bank gets in return — access to an endless stream of low-cost credit — banking is not exactly an act of resource pooling that benefits all participants symmetrically.
Where resource pools like banks don’t guarantee equity, others are outright predatory. A stark example of this was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the mid-20th Century. What began as a legitimate pooling of worker resources for collective bargaining power became a vehicle for both genuine worker advocacy and systematic corruption. The union’s pension funds grew to hold billions of dollars, giving the union tremendous leverage that allowed it to negotiate better wages and working conditions for its members. Yet the same vast resources that empowered workers also created opportunities for leaders to loan pension money to organized crime figures or invest in schemes that primarily benefited union leadership. The larger the Teamsters grew, the more opaque its operations became to rank-and-file members, and the easier it became for those managing the resource pool to extract value for themselves while maintaining the facade of collective benefit.
The Lure of Resource Pools
By offering such a clear value proposition, resource pools have an easy time, well, pooling resources. But a resource pool’s intake function is not the same as its output function. Unless a given pool is explicitly designed to uphold equity, there’s nothing about it that is necessarily equitable.
Predatory actors gravitate towards resource pools because they can be used as a tool for wealth extraction, all while luring prey with the promise of material security. It is precisely their supposed positive-sum nature that makes resource pools so ripe for abuse. Some members might feel like they’re winning (and to varying extents they might be) while other members make out like bandits.
Many of those who bite on the lure of resource pools are actually aware of and accept their poor underlying deal. Fees and forgone opportunities are seen as the cost of doing business. Insurance companies call these premiums and banks pointedly call them “management fees.” In some cases, these management fees are fair as the costs of managing resource pools can be steep. In many other cases, these costs devolve into rent-seeking behavior.
The larger a resource pool gets, the more value it provides and the harder it becomes to manage. In the book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky writes:
Every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma — because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.
Shirky’s dilemma no doubt applies to institutions whose main occupation is resource pooling. For these institutions, increased difficulty often becomes an avenue for justifying asymmetric benefit, and in some cases, outright predation.
Adding fuel to the fire is an additional contradiction that can be placed on top of Shirky’s dilemma: the larger and more infrastructural an institution gets, the harder it is for individuals to understand how it works. When even highly transparent and democratic institutions take on great complexity, it creates vacuums of accountability that managers can wield to transfer additional powers to themselves. This leaves us with both a challenge and an opportunity: Can there be such a thing as a large, powerful resource pool that doesn’t devolve into rent-seeking? Are there any tools or practices that can get us there?
When Resource Pools are Clear
There are a handful of fundamental questions you should be able to answer about any resource pool: What is the resource? How is it pooled? Who gets access, and how is that access distributed? Who creates and manages the pool? And what jobs need to be done to maintain and operate it?
Resource pools that best fend off predation have clear, known answers to these questions, and those answers emphasize fairness. This should remain true even for resource pools that are not perfectly lacking managerial hierarchy.
Cooperatives represent one of the most successful historical approaches to equitable resource pooling. From the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 to modern credit unions, these institutions create legal scaffolding that distributes ownership and control among all participants. Credit unions — financial resource pools where members are also owners — show how the managerial class of a resource pool doesn’t necessarily need to be the sole ownership class. As such, credit unions have much smaller surface area for exploitation. In modern banking, where operations are largely handled by software and the base services offered between banks are essentially the same, credit unions demonstrate that the only thing standing in the way of a fundamentally more equitable style of resource pooling is the shape of its legal and technical scaffolding.
Resource pools also work best when the pooled resource is legible and measurable. Synthetic CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and other murky credit pooling instruments that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis show what happens when resource pools become deliberately opaque, allowing owner-managers to extract value on the basis of concealed risk. Interestingly, the same banks that operate predatory lending pools maintain exclusive trading networks amongst themselves called “dark pools.” These demonstrate how resource pools take on completely different characteristics depending on who is granted access.
Money pools differently than data, which pools differently than attention. Some resources may be fundamentally unsuited to pooling, particularly those where scarcity creates value or where individual ownership is essential to function. There is a reason why agricultural, energy, and labor pools are amongst the healthiest around today. They all center around a resource that is easily traceable and reasonably fungible.
Technological Promises
The holy grail of resource pools is one whose management is automated; whose resources are collectively owned, freely accessed, and maximally secure; and whose distributions are entirely equitable. For as long as resource pools have existed, humans acting alone have never been able to fulfill this tall order. Thus, technology, particularly computers and the internet, have always been conceived of as a solution for bringing about more equitable resource pools.
The early web promised peer-to-peer networks where resources could be shared directly between individuals without institutional intermediaries. File-sharing protocols and early collaborative platforms suggested that technology could eliminate the management layer entirely. While these systems automated the distribution of resources, they left questions around who is seeding these resources, and where they’re coming from in the first place. Ultimately the ‘peer-to-peer’ movement fell out of favor for more convenient platform-based alternatives, despite their additional costs to end users.
Platforms of the 2010s illustrated the power of mass aggregation of resources. Pools of content and data, hidden and out in the open, grew to unprecedented size. What first yielded a serendipity akin to one’s first visit to a shopping mall eventually grew in a disdain akin to one’s 1000th visit to a shopping mall. Users discovered that the convenience of their platforms came at a cost. One example is Venmo, PayPal, and various other “neo-banks” offering seemingly free banking. Although they provide legitimately easy ways to send money between peers, they also found ways to embed fees that extract away potential wealth gains. Poetically, the name for the interest generated by reserves held by digital banks is called “float” — it’s the most valuable aspect of this kind of resource pool, which Venmo and the like retain 100 percent of.
The subsequent, blockchain-pilled era of the internet in the late 2010s and early 2020s gave way to a renewed enthusiasm for permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions as a structural solution to the previous era’s lapses in platform accountability. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), protocols, “smart contracts,” and the aptly named “liquidity pools” all offered affordances for automatically managing resource pools. As was seen with the internet’s platform era though, human greed and frailty ensured that the conditions of hardcoded fairness could still give way to the same power asymmetries that came before.
These eras all point toward a recurring pattern: each technological revolution promises democratization but underestimates just how hard this is. Part of the blame can be placed on humans. After all, collectivist desires are far from the cultural norm. Responsibility can also be placed on underlying technology that’s less structurally fair than its bright-eyed marketers let on. As it turns out, constructing resource pooling systems and machines is difficult, and those who build them have little incentive to design them equitably. Even in some hypothetical era of AI superintelligence, complex machines still require complex skills to create them, and those who control the means of producing these machines tend to want to retain power. Shirky’s dilemma of institutional management returns.
Productive Tension
I maintain realistic expectations that, even at their best, resource pools in the human world will continue to follow the patterns of resource pools in the natural world — a constant wavering arrangement that bounces between positive- and zero-sum relationships. I see the goal of resource pools as not to eliminate the tension between collective benefit and individual interest, but to design systems that make that tension productive rather than destructive, ensuring that even when someone must manage the pool, the arrangement serves all participants rather than just those who hold the keys.
What does it look like when a resource pool meets its full, pragmatic potential? Personally, I always return to the example set by Anarres, the fictional planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed. On Anarres, an intelligent (but not impossibly so) labor computer automatically allocates work based on individual preferences and what jobs are most pertinent to the welfare of its planet and people. What makes this labor pool so functional is not just the technology that underpins it — it’s the collective buy-in to its definition of equity, even when it hands out jobs that are less than desirable. Le Guin wisely reveals that, at least for the inevitable future, there will be no such thing as a resource pool that is truly automated, which is to say, easy.
Despite the lessons afforded by Anarres, I still find myself susceptible to utopian conspiracies offered by the notion of a holy-grail, maximally equitable resource pool. For those that are in on the joke, Fully Automated Luxury Communism is equally a cursed meme as it is a closeted aspiration. I reserve hope for technology to, despite its past trajectories, eventually reach a point where it is in fact so accessible and sophisticated that the standard configuration for managing resources is that of a cooperative. Until then, all I can offer is a plea to better understand the spell that contemporary resource pools hold over our lives.
This essay appears in Are.na Annual Vol. 7, “Pool”, which can be purchased here. A companion channel of references for the piece lives on Are.na.