How to Live in a World on Fire: Algorithmic Exploitation, Mutual Aid, and the Struggle for Resilient Futures

As climate disasters intensify, the intersection of computing and crisis response reveals how algorithmic systems routinely exacerbate inequality. Failures such as surge pricing during Hurricane Helene, Starlink’s restricted access in disaster zones, and the collapse of Texas’s power grid during Winter Storm Uri are not aberrations but constitutive features of infrastructures optimized for efficiency and profit. These systems translate vulnerability into market opportunity, reproducing disaster capitalism while neglecting human well-being. In contrast, mutual aid networks rooted in solidarity and community care provided vital support where formal institutions and computational systems fell short. We contribute to CSCW by advancing infrastructures of mutuality—a critical lens that links critique of algorithmic exploitation with design orientations inspired by mutual aid. We argue that infrastructures of mutuality are not ad hoc stopgaps but generative counter-logics that reorient computing toward relationality, transparency, and reciprocity. Extending critical and reflective traditions in CSCW, the notion of infrastructures of mutuality emphasizes the design and maintenance of systems that both meet immediate needs and enact alternative social relations. Drawing on practices of care and commoning, this approach highlights how computing might support solidarity, redundancy, and collective governance, moving beyond descriptive critiques of market-driven crisis informatics toward design futures that sustain just and resilient infrastructures.