Resilience by Design
A curated collection of decentralized projects preserving truth, memory, and autonomy in an age of disruption. From global archives and mesh networks to censorship-resistant platforms and open knowledge protocols, this collection is designed for those building memory that lasts. These aren’t just tools. They’re infrastructure for the future.
Resources
A curated guide to tools, technologies, and networks preserving knowledge, autonomy, and access in the digital age.
Knowledge Preservation & Archives
Internet Archive: A massive digital library of books, software, websites, and media. Facing legal pressure but remains a vital public memory vault.
Project Gutenberg: Over 70,000 free public domain e-books in multiple languages. A global literary archive for anyone, anywhere.
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System): A peer-to-peer file storage network used to preserve data in hostile or unstable environments, including Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Arweave: A permanent decentralized storage protocol designed for archiving journalism, art, and documents that must outlive regimes.
Open Index Protocol / Alexandria: Decentralized publishing infrastructure built on blockchain. Helps creators and archivists store metadata and media permanently.
Communication & Connectivity
Briar Project: A messaging app that works without internet, using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Trusted by activists in Iran, Myanmar, and Cuba.
goTenna: Enables off-grid mesh networking in areas without service—useful for protest zones, disaster areas, and shutdowns.
Mastodon: Part of the decentralized “Fediverse.” A censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter/X, used by journalists and communities worldwide.
Digital Rights & Governance
Democracy Earth: Tools for borderless governance, digital identity, and decentralized voting. Reimagining democracy beyond nation-states.
Access Now / Keep It On: Global advocacy group fighting internet shutdowns. Supports policy, technical, and legal responses to digital censorship.
Open Technology Fund (OTF): Funds open-source tools like Signal, Tor, and Psiphon—used by millions to bypass surveillance and stay connected.
Culture & Media
Libraria: An academic and activist-led effort to create open, decentralized archives for indigenous and marginalized knowledge systems.
OpenStreetMap: Crowd-sourced, decentralized mapping used in war zones and underserved regions to track roads, resources, and crises in real time.
Open-access and Decentralized Learning
Kiwix: Offline access to Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan Academy, and more. Built for regions without stable internet—education without a connection.
EdX: University courses from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, etc. You can audit most classes for free (no certificate). Topics include AI, ethics, law, and beyond.
Coursera: Similar to EdX. Many top-level courses are free in audit mode. Includes professional certificates, Google/IBM programs, and more.
The Public Domain Review: Curated essays and open access content from the public domain.
Internet Archive Education Collection: Massive repository of educational media, lectures, textbooks, and more. Includes entire university textbook collections.
Wikibooks: Open-source textbooks written and edited by volunteers. Subjects include computing, math, history, and languages.
Suggested Reading
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
A foundational text on how we think, decide, and misjudge reality. Essential for anyone interested in mental models, bias, and systems of perception.
The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver
Why so many predictions fail and what actually works. Key for understanding data literacy in a noise-saturated world.
Chaos: Making a New Science – James Gleick
A brilliant, readable deep dive into chaos theory. Shows how small changes lead to complex, unpredictable systems.
The Social Construction of Reality – Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann
A cornerstone of sociological theory. Explores how knowledge and reality are created through shared narratives.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies – Nick Bostrom
A serious philosophical look at AI, existential risk, and who gets to shape the future.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff
How Big Tech extracts and weaponizes human experience.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software – Charles Petzold
A technical but highly readable walkthrough of how computers work from the ground up.
Designing Freedom – Stafford Beer
A visionary systems thinker applying cybernetics to politics and society.
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values – Brian Christian
A deep, accessible look at the ethics of AI, algorithmic bias, and how we train machines to reflect (or distort) our values.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – Janelle Shane
A witty and weird exploration of how neural networks learn, fail, and surprise us.
Atlas of AI – Kate Crawford
A sweeping interdisciplinary critique of how AI systems exploit labor, energy, and political power.
Weapons of Math Destruction – Cathy O’Neil
How big data and algorithms reinforce inequality and erode democracy.
The Coming Wave – Mustafa Suleyman
Co-founder of DeepMind breaks down the geopolitical and ethical upheaval that’s just getting started with AI and synthetic biology.
The Sovereign Individual – James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
Controversial but fascinating. Predicts digital autonomy, decentralized states, and power shifts in the information age.
A Hacker Manifesto – McKenzie Wark
A sharp and critical text on the politics of information, labor, and networks.
Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents – Lisa Gitelman
A media archaeology of paper and documentation; how records shape memory and authority.
Digital Memory and the Archive – Wolfgang Ernst
Explores how digital technologies challenge traditional concepts of memory and historiography.
The Library at Night – Alberto Manguel
A poetic meditation on the meaning of libraries as memory structures, physical and philosophical.
The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter
A systems-based exploration of why societies collapse.
Seeing Like a State – James C. Scott
How bureaucratic logic reshapes the world, often badly. A classic in anti-centralization thinking.
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States – James C. Scott
A deep (and readable) dive into the history of early state formation, resistance, and control.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline – Andreas Malm
Radical climate theory meets direct action ethics. Not for the faint of heart, but important in conversations about systems disruption.
Misbehaving – Richard H. Thaler
Behavioral economics with a punchy narrative. Shows how real humans defy economic theory.
Irrational Exuberance – Robert Shiller
A powerful critique of market psychology and speculative bubbles.
Nudge: The Final Edition – Richard H. Thaler & Cass Sunstein
Updated version of the behavioral economics classic. Explores how subtle choices shape behavior.
The Molecule of More – Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael Long
A fascinating look at dopamine’s role in motivation, addiction, love, and modern society’s overstimulation.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – Johann Hari
A sharp cultural critique of the attention economy, tech addiction, and what’s being lost in the process.
The Age of Influence – Brittany Hennessy
Especially relevant in your node theory/algorithmic manipulation work. Looks at how the influencer economy reshapes perception, value, and communication.
The Cashless Revolution – Martin Chorzempa
A sharp look at China’s digital payment infrastructure and what it reveals about centralized tech and social control.
Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault
A foundational work on surveillance, social control, and how systems manufacture "truth."
How Democracies Die – Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
A practical and sobering study of how democratic norms erode from the inside.
Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
A sweeping macro-historical explanation of inequality across civilizations.
Against the Grain – James C. Scott
A deep history of state formation, control, and resistance.
It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis
A fictional warning from the 1930s about American fascism that feels uncomfortably real in 2025.
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Not just a novel but a philosophical treatise on history, memory, and the role of individual agency within massive systems.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty
A data-driven epic on wealth concentration, inequality, and global economic history.
The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson (fiction, but highly systems-focused)
A climate fiction novel that reads like a geopolitical simulation. Explores institutional breakdown, decentralized activism, and techno-utopianism.
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty – Benjamin H. Bratton
Dense but brilliant systems theory on the relationship between software, government, and global power.
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires – Douglas Rushkoff
A scathing and smart takedown of Silicon Valley’s obsession with escaping the systems they helped break.
Post-Truth – Lee McIntyre
A sharp little book on how truth gets deconstructed in political and digital environments.
Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake
A psychedelic and poetic exploration of fungi as a metaphor for interdependence, networks, and unseen systems.
Humankind: A Hopeful History – Rutger Bregman
A counterpoint to Hobbesian collapse narratives. Argues that human cooperation, not selfishness, is our default.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – David Graeber & David Wengrow
A major rethinking of early civilization, freedom, and social complexity.
Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies Through Critical Race Theory – Edited by Sofia Y. Leung & Jorge R. López-McKnight
Applies critical theory to the question of who gets to store and shape knowledge.