Solidarity AI

Format: Provocation (30 min)

Speaker: Trebor Scholz

We keep hearing that AI is coming whether we like it or not. This talk calls that bluff. It proposes seeing today’s emerging alternatives as one ecosystem, Solidarity AI. That means AI built, owned and democratically run by the people who do its work and live with its fallout: the annotator, the delivery rider, the night-shift nurse and the kid with the cracked screen. And yes, they get a veto.

Cooperatives can’t pull this off alone, so they bring unions, city halls, public institutions and social movements along. The ideas come from everywhere: Buddhist interdependence, Catholic social teaching, the Islamic waqf, Thailand’s sufficiency economy, the commons, and feminist, queer and decolonial critique. The reason is simple. AI’s costs don’t land on everyone equally. Neither should the power to shape it.

AI is a stack of land, energy, data, models and labor, and every layer now answers to a few AI companies. A solidarity stack puts each layer under democratic control. Scholz shows where and how parts of it already exist. A council near Manchester turned a Victorian bathhouse into a public data center and rents its spare space through a cooperative. Rubber farmers in Thailand govern their own data through Origins Co-op. Content moderators in Kenya formed their own cooperative. Delivery riders in Mexico City own the app they ride for.

These projects belong together, yet few of them are connected. The talk takes on the hardest open question: what could bind them into a mutually supporting ecosystem? Then it hands three questions to the room. What will you refuse? What will you share? What will you build?

Community notes

Reporter 1: Melike Kaplan
Reporter 2:

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