Pumasi

Pumasi (품앗이) is the old Korean practice from which this entire movement takes its name: neighbours exchanging labour with one another, freely and without a ledger. One household helps another at planting or harvest time; the help is returned in kind, later, when it is needed — not measured, priced, or recorded, but simply expected to balance out over time within a community that intends to keep living together.

It is a specific, named custom of rural and village life, distinct from a market transaction (no price is set, no payment changes hands) and distinct from a formal welfare entitlement (nothing is guaranteed by a state or an institution). It works because the people involved expect to keep needing each other, season after season, and trust that this ongoing relationship is worth more than any single, itemized favour.

Why an AI movement is named after a farming custom

The organisations behind Solidarity Intelligence describe their project, in its own words, as “pumasi for the AI era, the local strikes back.” The claim is not metaphorical decoration; it is the literal design principle. Where commercial AI is exchanged for money and government AI is distributed as a public entitlement, this movement is trying to build AI the way a village builds pumasi: reciprocal, un-metered, and grounded in an ongoing relationship between the people using it rather than a one-off transaction.

The Korean term for the movement’s core concept, 연대지능 (solidarity intelligence), pairs 연대 (solidarity) with 지능 (intelligence) — but the practice it is trying to recreate is pumasi specifically. Solidarity Intelligence is, in effect, an argument for what pumasi could mean once “labour” includes writing software, training a model, or maintaining a shared knowledge base, and “neighbours” includes co-operatives working across food, energy, money, and education rather than only households working the same fields.

The two threads of the project

The project built around this idea holds together two threads at once, stated as its slogan and its working description:

• “Pumasi for the AI era” — reimplementing the spirit of pumasi with AI: mutual help, given and returned without a ledger, now including digital and computational work alongside physical labour.
• “The local strikes back” — taking data, technology, and decision-making back from platforms and large capital, and returning them to the locality, rather than accepting that these things must be centralized far away from the people they affect.

Read together, the slogan is “the pumasi of AI and localists.”

Where the name is also a corporate name

The word pumasi is not only a concept here; it is also carried directly into an organisation’s name. Poomasi Consumer Co-operative (품앗이소비자생활협동조합) is the corporate root of the movement and the site where its ideas are tested against real, everyday operations. It held its inaugural general meeting on 24 May 2012, with a stated business area covering Daejeon Metropolitan City and neighbouring cities and counties (Sejong, Yeongi, Gongju, Gyeryong, Nonsan, Geumsan, Okcheon). Its stated founding purpose describes “a happy world where life is saved and people live together for one another, a community of circulation and coexistence where consumers and producers, person and person, person and nature coexist” — language that echoes the same reciprocal, non-transactional spirit as the practice the co-operative is named after. It runs local food stores in Daejeon’s Jijok and Gwanjeo neighbourhoods.

Livelihood sovereignty as the larger aim

The project’s stated ultimate aim, reached through this pumasi-based approach, is livelihood sovereignty — an umbrella concept covering food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, monetary sovereignty, and data sovereignty: the state of self-determination across every area of life, free from dependence on capital and platforms. Pumasi, in other words, is not treated as a quaint historical reference; it is the working model for how a community can hold onto self-determination across food, energy, money, and now intelligence itself, by helping each other directly rather than depending on an outside market or an outside state to provide it.

Why a farming custom, and not a slogan borrowed from elsewhere

It would have been possible to reach for an imported vocabulary — “sharing economy,” “commons,” “mutual aid” in its Western sense — to describe what this movement is trying to do. It reaches instead for a specific, local, and quite old word, one that villagers already used for generations before anyone spoke of AI. That choice matters for the same reason the movement insists on building its own Domain AI rather than renting someone else’s: the point is not to find the closest available global concept and apply it, but to work outward from a practice this community already has a name for, already understands the etiquette of, and already trusts. Pumasi does not need to be translated into the logic of a platform to make sense; the platform, if anything, is what needs to be translated into the logic of pumasi.

Related concepts

• Solidarity Intelligence — the AI-era name for the intelligence this practice produces.
• Fictitious Commodities and the Intelligence Proletariat — the argument for why this reciprocal approach is needed, framed against the enclosure of land, labour, money, energy, data, and now intelligence.
• Domain AI and Data Sovereignty in Practice — what pumasi looks like once it is implemented as working AI systems rather than only argued for.

Korean-language sources

• https://poomasi.org/ — home site (Korean)
• https://poomasi.org/en/ — English landing page
• https://poomasi.org/llms.txt — identity document (Korean)
• https://seed.poomasi.org — Poomasi Consumer Co-operative