AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
The dichotomy he set up still resonates; I find myself more noticing conflict as such and my attitudes toward it. Something in me likes to pick fights; for better or worse, even if peaceful cooperation is obviously better.
The vision it painted of a society where cooperation was the norm and competition frowned upon was so attractive to me. Probably it was somewhat harmful – I had to retrain myself for reality, and in a certain sense still am. My later attempts to take in thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Latour are in part attempts to get out from under the spell it wove. Power is too powerful to be wished away, as idealistic communards throughout history have discovered.
There's a just-so story about evolution of cooperation between cells using PD, but it ignores genetics which is probably wrong. It implies cells are self-interested, they really are communists.
There's a lot of fascination with this term; it seems a bit overused to me. Everybody wants to achieve cooperation, and everybody goes ga-ga over simplified models of cooperation like the work on iterated prisoner's dilemma games. Instead I want to look at group agency, which is the consequence of cooperation and perhaps its goal.