Building a Solidarity Ecosystem for AI

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(Photo by iStock/necati bahadir bermek)

The digital economy’s story often centers on stock prices and initial public offerings, but the processes and people behind it reveal a very different reality. Across outsourcing hubs like Nairobi, Manila, and Hyderabad, content moderators working for Facebook, OpenAI, and their subcontractors spend hours each day reviewing beheadings, sexual violence, child abuse, and hate speech to train and police AI systems. This form of labor has led many to report severe psychological harm, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Investigations have documented suicide attempts<br>among moderators in Kenya and the Philippines, alongside widespread reports of suicidal ideation linked to relentless exposure to traumatic content, low pay, and a lack of mental-health support. These incidents are not isolated tragedies, but rather symptoms of an industry structured to offload risk downward through opaque contracting chains while concentrating profit and control at the top.

These cases are a stark reminder that when technological systems are designed solely for extraction and efficiency, they isolate and break the people who sustain them. As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates, we face a similar precipice. Without deliberate intervention, these extractive logics will scale globally, further concentrating power at the top, unless we choose to build a fundamentally different system.

Participants at the Cooperative AI Conference, Istanbul, 2025. (Photo by NeedsMap. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial, CC BY-NC)

Previous contributions to the Stanford Social Innovation Review have argued for investing in enterprises that work for everyone<br>and prioritizing community-centered AI collaborations. Others have highlighted how worker cooperatives drive civic engagement<br>and the necessity of reconceptualizing the social economy.<br>Building on this discourse and the momentum of a recent Cooperative AI conference in Istanbul, we argue that the response to AI’s harms cannot stop at regulating dominant platforms. The concentration of Big Tech power increasingly leaves even critical international institutions vulnerable to authoritarian politics and executive pressure, as the International Criminal Court’s dependence on Microsoft infrastructure amid threats issued under the Trump administration illustrates. Instead, cooperatives, public institutions, and social movements must actively construct and connect alternatives through what we call the “solidarity stack”—an emerging, cooperative digital economy. Already 1.2 million workers across 53 countries are engaged in building it, with potential for much wider participation and collective scaling.

A New Structure for Solidarity

Extraction is not just a matter of biased algorithms or privacy violations. It is a structural issue, and AI today operates through what we call a vertically integrated “extraction stack” that includes hardware, cloud infrastructure, models, labor, and applications. Only a few companies control how to build, govern, and use these technologies; the people who depend on them have no democratic say in any of it.

Critics and regulators rightly point out that ethical guidelines alone cannot resolve this issue. AI systems are built on ownership models, supply chains, and technical architectures that prioritize profit, scale, and control. These structural incentives...

Building a Solidarity Ecosystem for AI

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