Building a solidarity ecosystem for AI ⊗ Dawn of the electric world order

Building a solidarity ecosystem for AI

I’ve mentioned the Holly Herndon interview where she uses the term “collective intelligence.” She uses it more as a lens on AI, a way of considering what’s in there and, to a certain degree, how one might interact with LLMs. In this piece by R. Trebor Scholz and Mark Esposito however, we have a well put framework to actually build collective intelligence, in the sense LLMs built with alternative infrastructure, ownership, and democratic governance. They remind us that AI’s harms are structural, not incidental. The current AI economy operates as a vertically integrated “extraction stack”—hardware, cloud infrastructure, models, labour, and applications—controlled by a handful of corporations whose ownership models and technical architectures make ethical guidelines largely irrelevant. Regulation of dominant platforms is necessary but insufficient; as long as the underlying infrastructure remains privately held, democratic AI is impossible. The alternative they propose is reclaiming that stack layer by layer through cooperatives, public institutions, and social movements—reframing AI not as an autonomous force but as something built on human labour and communal knowledge.

The authors identify three shifts required to make the solidarity stack durable rather than merely aspirational. The first is public-cooperative partnerships that give alternative models real-world testing environments—municipalities working with cooperatives to trial community-governed AI services before broader deployment. The second is investment in federated learning and open models, so cooperatives can train algorithms locally without centralising data, and shared protocols can let community-owned platforms interoperate at scale without a corporate intermediary. The third is cross-movement alliance-building, connecting councils, civil society groups, and technologists around shared political commitments that can actually shape procurement standards and policy agendas.

The Melon Husks and the Scam Altmans are strident and have access to huge platforms, including media taking their spiel for granted (they’ll be critical, but take the predictions as givens). Near the end, Scholz and Esposito write that “the dominant AI narrative falsely suggests that centralized corporate control is inevitable.” The technical possibilities are intriguing, the potential for curtailing—or at least building options to—the tech giants is enticing, but alongside the hard challenges of projects of that scale and complexity, it’s also worth noting another potent example of inventing and talking about better futures.

At the knowledge level, access to AI alone is insufficient if the tools operate as black boxes that cannot explain or be challenged in their outputs and that are grounded in imposed rather than democratically established values. The solidarity approach responds by reclaiming the knowledge layer as a collectively governed space—one that favors explainability, contestability, shared standards, and deep AI literacy. […]

AI systems are built on ownership models, supply chains, and technical architectures that prioritize profit, scale, and control. These structural incentives determine how data is collected, how labor is treated, who makes decisions, and who captures value, leaving ethical guidelines with no power to override the system’s underlying logic. […]

MIDATA demonstrates that creating high-quality, ethically sourced datasets is possible without surveillance; members willingly share their data because they trust the cooperative’s governance and data stewardship, eliminating the need for extraction or coercive monitoring. […]

Federated learning allows cooperatives to leverage AI while maintaining privacy by training algorithms locally rather than centralizing data. Shared protocols can further facilitate the technical integration of these efforts by providing the framework for a decentralized ecosystem of community-owned platforms.

Dawn of the electric world order

I’ve already shared a few articles in this general direction, most notably the interview I retitled Electrostates & physics in No.398 but also a few other pieces in link blocks. Still, I’m back on this topic with a piece by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay on the dawn of the electric world order because it’s a major story and a quite hopeful one, in my opinion. Well, ok, it’s also sad that this great transition is taking place in part because of wars and in part for basely monetary questions, but I’ll take it.

We are going through the first major energy shock that has a credible alternative already in place. Two wars in four years have made the geopolitical conditions that once stabilised global oil and gas markets unreliable, and the 2026 Hormuz crisis is accelerating a shift that was already underway. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and heat pumps were already cost-competitive before the shock; they are now geopolitical insurance. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in net fossil fuel importing countries, and governments across France, Spain, Vietnam, and Nigeria are responding not with emergency fossil fuel procurement but with accelerated electrification. The cheap, abundant supply of electrotech exists largely because of Chinese industrial policy. Beijing built the clean industrial base at home for energy security reasons, then exported that capacity globally, and Chinese factories are currently running at around half their capacity, meaning supply can meet the surge in demand.

The transition won’t be uniform. Countries with existing renewable infrastructure are accelerating; others are proceeding piecemeal; those with strong fossil fuel lobbies or constrained fiscal capacity may see consumer-led transitions while governments inherit stranded assets. The US is the notable outlier—pursuing energy “dominance” through oil and LNG exports while renewables projects are being cancelled domestically and most of the rest of the world moves the other way. The authors argue this strategy is self-defeating: it creates the volatility that pushes other countries faster toward electrification, while the US risks becoming an energy island. One thing I’ll throw in beyond the piece; imagine for a moment that instead of being in a battle for AI dominance against China, the US had embarked on a battle for solartech dominance.

More → Iran is targeting a hidden engine of US economic power. “Before the closure, Iran was charging oil tankers ‘tolls’ of up to $2M to pass through the Strait of Hormuz… payable only in Chinese yuan,” a direct attack on the petrodollar system. ⊗ It’s a bit long and I’m not in love with his delivery, but the quasi-documentary You are being misled about renewable energy technology by Technology Connections, is absolutely packed with information and insights. The corn/ethanol/land use vs solar in the US is especially brain exploding, and the “build instead of burn” lens is essential.

No matter how uneven and uncertain the immediate reaction from markets and governments, the lesson of the present energy shock is unavoidable: the geopolitical conditions that once stabilized the carbon-based logistics of the modern world can no longer be guaranteed, and electrification offers a structural exit from instability. […]

Madrid now views its cheap clean electricity as a way to attract energy-intensive industries away from gas-dependent European countries whose electricity prices have spiked yet again “Berlin and Paris,” argued Marc Lopez Plana in Agenda Publica, are now “viewing Spain as a competitor in the race to become the continent’s industrial core.” […]

For most African countries, and some in Asia, the total capacity of privately owned diesel generator sets exceeds the installed grid power capacity. These are now being swapped for solar plus batteries. Policy makers need to recognize the world-shaping power of this demand, and harness it to upgrade grids and expand electrification. […]

A fossil fuel supremacist government has made oil and gas costly and unreliable and accelerated the turn to the electric world order.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• The shared feeling of being harvested by the future. Ends up being more about AI than the future specifically, but the bleakness described is real and should be fought, like in the first feature above. “Moving between the two countries, I’ve been struck by how they have come to mirror and resemble each other. There is a shared sense of precarity that lies beneath the envy and distrust: The technological future is taking shape at vertiginous speed, yet its promise is not shared by all.”
• Do we think too much about the future?. First, I’d remind you of Betteridge’s law of headlines, so the answer is no. Second, like the one above it’s a good piece as an observation of the current “vibes” around the future(s). “The upshot, today, is that the future is deeply woven into the practical fabric of our lives. It’s almost as though we live there. And all sorts of people—technologists, writers, artists, politicians, investors, and businesspeople—now work to shape our notions about what’s to come.”
• MIT Future Fest. Also ends up not being about “the future,” just about that institution’s self-aggrandizing “where the future is made” proclamation, but I decided to keep it nonetheless, to complete the trilogy of “this is how people are using the word these days.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The impact of AI-generated text on the internet. “AI has been moving at an unprecedented speed, changing the way people write, communicate, and work. Existing research has pointed to AI's tendency to hallucinate, exhibit sycophancy, and other undesirable behaviors on the level of individual generations. However, no research has so far studied the impact of this technology on online discourse as a whole.”
• Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion. I’m curious but haven’t read yet, could go sideways quickly. “Recent advances in agentic AI reveal that frontier reasoning models, such as DeepSeek-R1, do not improve simply by ‘thinking longer’. Instead, they simulate internal ‘societies of thought,’ spontaneous cognitive debates that argue, verify, and reconcile to solve complex tasks. Moreover, we are entering an era of human-AI centaurs: hybrid actors where collective agency transcends individual control.” (James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas.)
• Africa is writing AI rules faster than the world notices. “What is taking shape is not a single African approach to AI governance, but a set of divergent governance paths shaped by state capacity, market access, political economy, and institutional ambition.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Paris staged a huge stress test for extreme heat. “It combined live drills and a tabletop exercise to help shape a plan to protect the city’s two million people from that kind of heat. Once limited to a handful of cities, these exercises are spreading as local governments stress test health services, emergency response, and essential infrastructure before temperatures reach dangerous extremes.”
• How the world’s happiest country decarbonized its power sector. “Finland already boasted one of the lowest per-capita emissions rates from electricity generation of any European country. But between 2016 and 2025, emissions from electricity generation fell a further almost-80%, from almost 15 million to ~3 million tonnes annually.”
• The Chinese EV standard winning globally is banned in the US. “By banning Chinese software, the U.S. risks isolating its automakers from the integrated systems, standards, and partnerships shaping the global electric vehicle market.”

Asides

• THE BAT CLOUD. Beautiful visuals, nicely weird project. “The artwork was conceived by attuning to the echoes of the Mayan forest, following intuitions that led toward the resonances of cenotes. These ecosystems, home to many bat species, are known locally as paths to the infraworld, where mineral, vegetal, and animal have listened to one another across the deepest horizons of time. In these places, bats are regarded as messengers.” (Via Matt, the curation beast at Webcurios.)
• Mesmerizing 4K video of a cat-5 super typhoon. I’d have this on a tv like the fireplaces videos on Netflix “The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was the ‘strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere’ since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026.”
• Endangered butterflies are thriving behind bars. “On a cool spring morning in Washington state, the work of saving an endangered species unfolds in an unlikely place: a greenhouse just outside the perimeter of a women’s prison. Inside, trays of host plants line long tables. … This is where the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly, once common across Pacific Northwest prairies, is being brought back from the brink.”