From Company Scrip to Digital Chains: Finding Our Collective Exit Strategy

This morning, before the sun fully cleared the ridge, I took a long walk through the crunching late-October leaves and came home to simmer a big pot of groats. There is something deeply grounding about blueberries, cinnamon and groats on a crisp autumn morning. After almost four decades of staring at monitors in cubicles and windowed offices, I’ve learned that our bodies need simple, honest fuel and eight hours of solid sleep just to process the world we live in. When we take care of our physical hardware, our minds are much clearer to debug the messy software of society.

And today, on October 28, my mind is chewing on a massive historical bug that we still haven't patched. On this exact date in 1913, Mahatma Gandhi led hundreds of indentured Indian coal miners out of Newcastle in South Africa. They were bound to the pits by a cruel three-pound annual tax, beaten if they stopped digging, and trapped in a system designed to make leaving impossible.

Not long after, in 1921, thousands of miners right here in the American mountains marched toward Blair Mountain to break a similar trap. Nearly eighty percent of those families lived in company towns. The coal operators owned the houses, the churches, and the roads, paying workers in "company scrip" that only worked at the company store. In 1942, coal miners in São Pedro da Cova, Portugal, walked off the job for the same reason: they were starving under a police state and owned no exit from their labor.

As a retired software engineer and a fellow traveler facing today's traumatic reality, I recognize this pattern immediately. In recovery, we talk a lot about feeling trapped in old family systems where we couldn't speak up or leave without losing our safety. When I talk to younger workers today, especially here in the States, I hear that exact same despair. Unions have been gutted, healthcare is tied to your boss, and rent eats your whole paycheck. We have traded coal dust and company scrip for gig-economy apps and what we in the tech world call the "digital double bind".

The modern company town is built out of algorithms. You have to log into the corporate network just to survive and buy groceries, yet that very same infrastructure tracks your productivity, suppresses wages, and isolates you from your coworkers. When people in France or Serbia flood the streets to protect their pensions or communities, our media uses the oldest playbook in the corporate manual. They chuckle and say, "Oh, those French just love to protest," hoping to convince us that standing up for ourselves is silly or pointless. They want us to believe there is no exit.

But here is where my inner geek gets excited, because there is always an exit if you understand how the system is wired. This is the heart of being a Liberation Technologist. Today, workers and activists are practicing "algorithmic resistance". Delivery drivers are coordinating mass logouts to trick unfair pay algorithms. Organizers are leaving billionaire-owned social media platforms—where outrage algorithms divide us—and moving to decentralized protocols like Bluesky and Nostr, where no corporate boss can silence a strike fund or shadowban a labor drive. When authorities try to shut down communication, people use cheap, off-grid radio tools like Meshtastic to create underground networks that function just like the mycelium beneath the forest floor, passing vital messages from node to node without a central server.

Gandhi’s miners used nonviolent refusal; the mountain miners of 1921 used solidarity; the Portuguese miners withheld their labor. None of them had an easy exit, so they built one together.

We don't have to accept the digital company store. Start small today: cook a real meal, get some rest, talk to your neighbors offline, and remember that no system—whether made of coal, bad family history, or Silicon Valley code—is stronger than people who decide to walk out of the pit together.