Cooperating Under Bad Faith
Operating cooperatively under intentional adversarial pressure — recognizing trust mining, weaponized good faith, and capture patterns, and knowing the conditions under which exclusion becomes necessary to protect the cooperative system.
Bond
The Work
Cooperative systems attract actors who study them in order to exploit them. The work of this category is to keep cooperation functioning under that pressure: recognizing when trust is being mined, when good faith is being weaponized, and when protective exclusion has become necessary. The hardest part is that the Bond's own practices become attack surfaces when one party operates in bad faith.
The Tools
Adversarial Dynamics. The lens that makes predation, capture, and exploitation legible inside cooperative systems — naming the intentional adversary who exploits cooperation for gain and the structural adversary, the environment that rewards defection regardless of intent.
Trust Mining. Accumulating trust capital through demonstrated alignment, then redirecting the institution's resources once authority is sufficient.
The Cooperative Vulnerability. How the Bond's own practices — good faith as default, the steelman requirement, connection before correction — become exploitable surfaces when one party is not practicing in good faith.
Sabotage Diagnostics. Recognizing the deliberate degradation of a cooperative system from inside it, distinct from ordinary friction or honest disagreement.
The Exclusion Problem. The conditions under which exclusion becomes necessary to protect the cooperative system, and how to exclude without becoming the thing being excluded.