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Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures

By ICDE

An ICDE event inspired by ICDE fellow Melike Kaplan.

Workshop 1:
Friday, September 11, 9:00–10:20 AM EDT (Online)
Register

Workshop 2:
Friday, September 25, 9:00–10:50 AM EDT (Online)
Register

Workshop 3:
November 2026, Solidarity AI Conference, Bangkok (In Person)

About the Series

Billionaires sell visions of the future. But the future was never theirs to sell.

Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures invites participants to reclaim the future through radical imagination grounded in real-world alternatives. Inspired by Melike Kaplan and Max Haiven’s Worker as Futurist project, this ICDE event explores how democratic ownership, cooperative economies, and collective governance can shape technological futures beyond Big Tech and extractive capitalism.

Rather than imagining distant utopias, participants begin with cooperative practices already taking root today: platform cooperatives, community-owned digital infrastructure, data cooperatives, feminist tech projects, community land trusts, and other experiments in democratic technology. The premise is simple: the futures we seek already exist in fragments. Our task is to recognize them, connect them, and imagine where they might lead.

Workshop 1
Mapping the Seeds of Tomorrow

Participants identify and discuss existing cooperative and solidarity economy initiatives that challenge dominant technological models. Drawing on these examples, they create short speculative stories set in the worlds these projects could grow into over the coming decades.

Workshop 2
Writing Cooperative Futures

Participants share, refine, and expand their stories collectively. The resulting works become contributions to a collaborative zine, Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures. Contributions may take the form of text, audio, images, video, or other creative formats. Each piece is accompanied by a note linking the imagined future to the real-world practice that inspired it.

Workshop 3
Futures in Dialogue — Bangkok

The completed zine travels to the Solidarity AI Conference in Bangkok, where conference participants engage with, perform, and critically discuss the stories. Together, they will ask: Where do these futures already exist? What conditions allow them to flourish? And how can isolated experiments become interconnected movements for democratic technological futures?

Co-Facilitators

Max Haiven
Melike Kaplan (ICDE)
Alessandro Longo
+ 2 ICDE Fellows