Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures

This workshop series is inspired by the Worker as Futurist project that supported rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction.

These ICDE events explore how democratic ownership, cooperative economies, and collective governance can shape technological futures beyond Big Tech and extractive capitalism.

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

It feels like we are already living in a dystopian dream — one conjured up by the imaginaries of tech billionaires and sold back to us as the only viable future. The billionaire imagination has colonized our collective future, and reclaiming it is going to take more than critique. It requires the practice of radical imagination. The future is ours, if only we dare to dream it into being.

Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures invites participants to do precisely that. We start with a perceptual shift: away from technology as extractive and destructive infrastructure, and toward technology as something closer to magic so we can be re-enchanted with what technology could be, infrastructure and manifestations of collective intelligence that can help us achieve our most utopian dreams. How we imagine technology shapes how we design it. The limits of our collective imagination become the limits of what we build. By harnessing radical imagination, we open up the possibilities of what future technology can hold and the worlds it can make possible.

We gather instances from the present that give us hope and make visible the movement that’s already underway toward utopia: platform cooperatives, community-owned digital infrastructure, cooperative AI models, data cooperatives, feminist tech projects, community land trusts, and other experiments in democratic technology. Grounded in these presents, we dream together of enchanted technological futures within a cooperative digital economy, collectively worldbuilding a utopia and telling stories that live inside it, letting our individual imaginations intertwine into a world where many worlds fit.

Workshop 1
Collaborative World-building

Participants identify and discuss existing cooperative and solidarity economy initiatives that challenge dominant technological models. Through a series of imagination exercises grounded in these prefigurative practices, we collectively worldbuild a utopia: a shared future these seeds could grow into over the coming decades.

Workshop 2
Writing Cooperative Futures

Participants return to the utopia built together in Workshop 1 to write, revise, and expand stories from within it both individually and collaboratively. These stories are shared and refined as a group, and participants are encouraged to keep developing their contributions after the workshop, towards a collaborative zine, Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures. Contributions may take the form of text, audio, images, video, or other creative formats, each accompanied by a note linking the imagined future to a real-world practice that inspired it.

Workshop 3
Futures in Dialogue — Bangkok

The completed zine travels to the Solidarity AI Conference in Bangkok, where it comes alive as a game: participants embody the utopia itself, stepping into its roles, tensions, and wonders together. With an international audience bringing their own contexts into the room, the game becomes a way of grounding the utopia further, stress-testing these futures against different lived realities. Through play, participants will explore what these futures offer, what they demand, and what it might take to get there.

Co-Facilitators

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