Solidarity AI

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What would it mean to design artificial intelligence in service of climate justice, communal care, and local values?

The 2026 Solidarity AI conference at the prestigious Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok brings together movement builders, researchers, AI developers, policymakers, union organizers, and digital rights advocates to confront this question. Co-convened by PCC Global and PCC Thailand, in partnership with Chulalongkorn University and regional allies, the gathering extends last year’s conversation in Istanbul, which explored the relationship between cooperatives and AI. That event asked how shared ownership and democratic governance might reshape not just the use of AI, but its underlying infrastructures.

Now, the conversation turns to Asia. In regions long positioned on the receiving end of global tech flows, digital systems increasingly restructure labor, determining who is paid, tracked, replaced, and rendered invisible. Through plenaries, participatory workshops, sector-focused breakouts, and strategy sessions, the conference creates space for scholarship that emerges from and remains accountable to lived experience.

At this moment, Solidarity AI names a choice: whether AI will be shaped by distant systems of power or by the communities who live with its consequences. It is a commitment to imagining and building technologies with, by, and for the communities they affect. It insists that those who build, maintain, and are governed by AI systems must shape them, not merely through symbolic input, but through meaningful control from the extraction of raw materials to the design of algorithms. At stake are the systems that decide whether a farmer gets a fair price, whether a care worker’s schedule makes sense, and whether a community’s language appears online at all. Either power remains accountable to those affected by it, or it is absorbed into distant systems optimized for scale rather than shared governance. The conference also seeks to examine the diverse meanings and dimensions of solidarity, as expressed through governance structures, business models, infrastructures, and transnational collaborations.

These ideas take shape through “solidarity stacks,” namely interconnected layers of technology, governance, and labor systems that are collectively owned, locally governed, and designed to serve social rather than extractive ends. Built from the ground up by communities, cooperatives, and public institutions, they offer a way to meet real needs while preserving autonomy, equity, and care.

This vision is already taking shape. From farmer-led data cooperatives in India to Vietnam’s national AI stack; from multilingual systems in Indonesia and Malaysia to worker organizing in the Philippines and platform cooperatives in Spain, each example offers a concrete glimpse of what is possible.

This vision does not arrive from elsewhere. It draws on intellectual and political traditions that have long resisted extractive and techno-solutionist models. Buddhist ethics foreground compassion and interdependence, while Thailand’s sufficiency economy questions growth-at-all-costs. Gandhian thought champions decentralization and restraint, and Ambedkarite critique insists on justice by asking who is excluded and whose voices are missing. Together, these traditions move the conversation beyond Western-centric debates and open space for regional imagination about how technology should be shaped.

In Thailand, these values already take concrete form in solidarity-economy initiatives: SAFETist Farm, an urban farming collective promoting food security and environmental learning; Zero Baht Plus Shop, where residents exchange sorted waste for goods in a circular community economy; Dignity Returns, a worker-owned garment factory founded by laid-off workers; TechTransThai, a community-driven technology initiative supporting transgender people through free software, decentralized data tools, and public-interest digital projects; and the Credit Union League of Thailand (CULT), a national federation representing over one million members in community-based financial cooperatives.

Solidarity AI is not just a space for critique. It is where experiments connect, where strategies are shared, and where fragments of a different technological future begin to cohere. Now is the moment to commit; to build together, to imagine boldly, and to move beyond what we were told was inevitable.

Conference Advisory Board (in progress):
Mark Graham, Evren Aydogan, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, Rafael Grohmann, Giuseppe Guerini, Veronyka Gimenes, Antonio Casilli, Kaya Genç, Malavika Jayaram, Luca Cominassi, Gustavo Mendes