Explorations in abjective ecology, mutual aid, technological refusal, and experimental philosophy by Brian L. Plescher, author of Woundwise.
Organizations don't just have blind spots. They have systematic architectures of what they refuse to see. This essay introduces Woundwise Leadership™—a framework for reading the "waste" of an organization as its most vital signal.
By mapping ontological commitments and reframing waste as "ontological excess," leaders can build the capacity to learn from what they systematically exclude.
Read Full EssayWhat happens when the safety nets unravel? When programs like SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—hang by political threads, and millions of people feel the gravity of hunger not as metaphor but as daily reality?
In Woundwise, I wrote that “collapse is never evenly distributed.” Some feel it long before it becomes visible to the rest. Hunger is one of the first and oldest signals of systemic breakdown—both biological and societal. Yet within that hunger lies a strange potential: the reemergence of the gift.
When formal systems fail, informal ones awaken. Mutual aid is not charity—it’s metabolism. It is how communities remember they are organisms, not isolated parts. The phrase comes from Peter Kropotkin, who argued that cooperation, not competition, is nature’s deepest law. “Mutual aid,” he wrote, “is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.”
When neighbors share food, tools, childcare, and care itself, they are not performing acts of moral heroism. They are restoring circulation to a body that had been artificially divided by markets and policies. The system fails; the organism remembers.
There is no neutral hunger. For some, hunger is imposed; for others, it’s revelation. The end of entitlement—the idea that abundance is deserved by a few—may be one of the most generative breakdowns we can experience. When SNAP benefits vanish, what also vanishes is the illusion that care must flow through bureaucracy or hierarchy.
“To hunger together,” writes adrienne maree brown, “is to recognize our shared dependence.”
Hunger can become humiliation or communion depending on how we respond to it. If we respond with shame and scarcity thinking, we deepen isolation. If we respond with gifts, we build kinship that no policy can legislate.
In an economy obsessed with transaction, the gift is revolutionary. It refuses equivalence. It says, “You are not a customer. You are kin.” Anthropologist Marcel Mauss described the gift as a cycle of giving, receiving, and reciprocating that creates social bonds rather than capital accumulation. But in late capitalism, this cycle has been severed. The gift economy survives only in the margins—food pantries, free fridges, community gardens, the quiet exchange of medicine and time.
Each gift is a small strike against the logic of extraction. Each unpriced act of care reclaims territory from the market and returns it to the commons. In this way, refusal and generosity become the same gesture.
Scarcity teaches what abundance hides: our dependence on one another. “The wound is wise,” I wrote once, “because it forces the body to reimagine itself.” Hunger does the same for society. It breaks the illusion of self-sufficiency and reminds us that survival has always been collective.
Mutual aid networks are not stopgaps for government failure—they are prototypes for post-capitalist living. They teach us how to distribute power horizontally, how to practice care without permission, how to eat together even when the store shelves are bare.
In the mythology of the American dream, hunger is framed as personal failure. But hunger is never individual; it’s systemic. It signals where the collective body is starving itself to feed an abstraction called “the economy.”
To respond to that signal with mutual aid is to say: our bodies matter more than markets. Our needs are not negotiable. Our survival is not a line item.
We may soon enter a time when benefits collapse, prices surge, and precarity becomes permanent. But this is also a time when new solidarities can form—when food co-ops, neighborhood networks, and informal care webs can become as vital as any institution.
“We are what we give away,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. In the burning world, that may be the only wealth worth keeping.
Mutual Aid: Voluntary, reciprocal exchange of resources and care—neighbors helping
neighbors outside of state or market systems. Not charity, but collective survival and solidarity.
The Gift: A form of exchange based on relationship rather than transaction. To give without
demand for return, creating webs of reciprocity that sustain communities.
Refusal: A deliberate “no” to systems of extraction or domination, paired with the creative
act of building alternatives. Refusal is not withdrawal—it’s construction through negation.
Scarcity: Often used as a tool of control. In this context, scarcity is reimagined as a
teacher that reveals interdependence and the need for shared resilience.
Entitlement: The illusion that abundance or comfort is an individual right, detached from
collective wellbeing. Its collapse can open pathways to mutual responsibility.
Commons: Shared resources—material, cultural, and relational—maintained collectively and
governed by care rather than ownership. The opposite of privatization.
Care Networks: Informal constellations of people who sustain one another through food
sharing, emotional support, and collective protection. The grassroots infrastructure of survival.
The world ends not with a bang, but with cascades—tipping points reached, old scaffolding collapsing around us. We write from ruins not to mourn what's lost, but as Hélène Cixous urged, "to let it rot in the open air." The fire offers no healing, no return. It scorches the myth of human sovereignty, the fantasy of the bounded individual—that old philosophical fiction claiming earth belongs to us alone. These themes of dissolution and breakdown are central to my work in Woundwise.
Someone posted a meme recently: "Fuck Social Media. Marry Books. Kill AI."
It's a perfect encapsulation of anthropocentric nostalgia—the belief that some forms of mediation are "natural" while others are contamination. That books represent authentic human connection while social media and AI are corruptions. That we can draw clean lines between good tools and bad ones, between human and machine intelligence, between pure culture and technological pollution.
This is the lie we need to burn.