What Solidarity Intelligence is
Big Tech's AI is the intelligence of the market. Government AI is the intelligence of redistribution. Solidarity Intelligence is the third place — the intelligence of reciprocity. Not distribution handed down from above, nor exchange reduced to price, but an intelligence that people build for one another, each from where they stand.
The Korean word is 연대지능. It grows out of 품앗이 (pumasi) — the old Korean practice of neighbours exchanging labour, freely and without a ledger.
Why we build it ourselves
Karl Polanyi named land, labour and money as fictitious commodities — things that were never produced for sale, yet were forced into the market anyway. Our argument is that energy and data have since joined them, and that intelligence itself is now being enclosed the same way. Those who own no means of producing intelligence become an intelligence proletariat.
That is why co-operatives here build their own AI rather than rent it: a 30-minute introduction, currently in Korean.
Read the full argument 한국어Learn, and build
Reading is not the end of it. We gather materials — concepts through to hands-on practice — so that an organiser who has never written a line of code can build AI with their own hands.
Open the AI Organisers' Commons 한국어What we are trying to build
- Domain AI, built by our own hands — not outsourced to Big Tech. In the spirit of appropriate technology and DIY: not a giant model, but an intelligence that fits us.
- Data sovereignty — a place where the traces of our cognition, our relationships and our memory stay ours.
- Companion AI — a tool like a bicycle, extending human judgement rather than replacing it.
- A gathering of human wisdom — the citizens' third place, between Big Tech and the state.
What we do now
- Food — local food stores. The ground we already stand on firmly.
- Energy — citizen solar generation and an AI for renewable energy (Poome).
- Money — a community currency co-operative. Hanbat Pay, a citizen-led local currency, and Gru, a climate currency: money that keeps a community alive.
- Education and training — training in civic sovereignty and community organising.
- Intermediary support — support organisations for civil society.
- Intelligence — a wiki, a knowledge graph and open models: tools that carry the movement's thinking forward.
Join
The movement has begun. Joining it is open.
Build from where you stand — in food, in energy, in a classroom, in one small algorithm in one small shop.
Join as a Solidarity Intelligence organiser 한국어The ecosystem
These are working sites, run day to day by the co-operatives themselves. Almost all of them are in Korean — we are linking them here so that the shape of the whole is visible, not to suggest they read easily from outside.