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Solidarity Intelligence

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Solidarity Intelligence

Solidarity Intelligence — in Korean, 연대지능 (yeondae jineung) — is the name for a third kind of artificial intelligence, distinct from the two that currently dominate the conversation about AI and society.

Big Tech’s AI is the intelligence of the market. It is built to be sold, licensed, or rented, and its logic follows price: whoever can pay gets access, whoever cannot is left outside. Government AI, by contrast, is the intelligence of redistribution. It is allocated from above, through policy and budget, to citizens treated as recipients of a public service.

Solidarity Intelligence is neither of these. It is 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. It is not a product bought from a vendor and not a service delivered by a state agency. It is something closer to a mutual-aid practice, carried out with the tools of AI.

The market, the state, and the third place

The framing rests on a simple three-way division of how intelligence — meaning, in this context, computational intelligence built with data and models — can be organized in a society:

  1. Market intelligence. Produced by large technology companies, licensed for a fee, optimized to capture and retain paying users. Whatever public benefit it produces is a byproduct of a commercial relationship, not its purpose.
  2. State intelligence. Produced or commissioned by government, distributed through public programs, accountable to political processes and budget cycles. It can be broad in reach but is also slow, centralized, and shaped by whatever a given administration prioritizes.
  3. Solidarity intelligence. Produced by the people who will use it — co-operatives, community organizations, neighbours — for their own purposes, on their own infrastructure where possible, answerable to each other rather than to shareholders or to a ministry.

This is not a claim that markets or states are illegitimate. It is a claim that a third space has been largely missing from the conversation about AI, and that this space has a name, a history, and a practice behind it.

Where the name comes from

The Korean term 연대지능 pairs 연대 (yeondae, solidarity — the word used for labour solidarity, social solidarity, international solidarity) with 지능 (jineung, intelligence). The concept grows directly out of Pumasi (품앗이), the old Korean practice of neighbours exchanging labour freely and without a ledger — one household helps another with the harvest, and is helped back in turn, with no formal accounting of who owes whom. Solidarity Intelligence is an attempt to carry that same logic of reciprocal, ledger-free mutual aid into the era of AI: not a transaction, not an entitlement, but help freely given because it will be freely given back.

Why it needs to be built, not bought

The argument for building Solidarity Intelligence rather than simply subscribing to commercial AI tools runs through the economist Karl Polanyi’s idea of fictitious commodities — see Fictitious Commodities and the Intelligence Proletariat for the full argument. In short: things that were never produced for sale can still be forced into a market, and once they are, whoever owns no means of producing them becomes dependent on whoever does. The claim here is that intelligence itself is now being enclosed this way, and that co-operatives and communities need their own capacity to produce it — their own Domain AI — rather than rent it indefinitely from a small number of large firms.

That capacity is inseparable from data sovereignty: holding on to the traces of one’s own cognition, relationships, and memory, rather than handing them to a platform as the price of using a tool.

What is actually being built

This is not only a theoretical position. It is practised in Daejeon, South Korea, by a small group of co-operatives working across several fields at once:

  • Food — local food stores, the ground the movement already stands on.
  • Energy — citizen solar generation and an AI system built for renewable-energy work.
  • Money — a community currency co-operative, running a citizen-led local currency and a climate currency, so that money keeps circulating inside a community rather than draining out of it.
  • Education and training — training in civic sovereignty and community organising, so that people who have never written a line of code can build AI with their own hands.
  • Intermediary support — organisations that connect and mediate across the wider social and solidarity economy.
  • Intelligence — a shared wiki, a knowledge graph, and open models that carry the movement’s thinking and its working knowledge forward, rather than letting it live only inside a commercial product.

Each of these fields is held by a different co-operative or organisation, and each is treated as one axis of a broader livelihood sovereignty — food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, monetary sovereignty, and data sovereignty together, as the condition of being able to determine one’s own way of life rather than depending on capital or platforms for it.

A companion, not a replacement

Solidarity Intelligence is not framed as AI that will think or decide for people. The stated aim is a companion AI — a tool like a bicycle, something that extends human judgement rather than substituting for it — and a gathering place for human wisdom that sits between Big Tech on one side and the state on the other. The people who build it are not asked to trust it blindly; they are asked to build it themselves, in the place they already stand, one small piece at a time — in a food store, in a solar co-operative, in a classroom, in one small algorithm in one small shop.

Korean-language sources

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