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Paradox of Collaborative Speed

Two events in Melbourne over the past 10 days week revealed a tension across contemporary technology debates: how do we build social/technical alternatives when urgency itself seems to undermine the very deliberation that collaboration requires?

Trebor Scholz‘s talk on platform cooperatives (May 16th) and the No Harm Done #2 workshop on risk, technology, and climate (May 19th) approached this paradox.

The Temporal Politics of Platform Ownership: Scholz presented compelling evidence of cooperative digital infrastructure already operating at scale – 1.2 million workers across 60+ countries owning their platforms. Embedded in his examples was a persistent tension: the months / years of relationship-building required to  build a cooperative versus the venture-capital pace of Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things.’

Successful cooperatives emerge through federation, through what Scholz called “the slow relational work of care, not just the speed of code.”

Three days later, NoHarmDone #2 hosted three speakers including Trebor to ‘collide’ ideas. before inviting participants to discuss, explore and extend the implications of AI across the interconnected issues of climate, risk and technology.

Jathan Sadowski introduced an unexpected actor in this politics: the insurance industry as technology’s shadow regulator. When Air Canada’s chatbot hallucinated a discount, it wasn’t government regulation or user protest that responded – it was an AI insurance startup, immediately seeing market opportunity in algorithmic failure: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

Sadowski’s insight remains vital: “Who actually governs?” isn’t answered by looking at democratic institutions but at actuarial tables and risk models. Insurance operates on entirely different temporalities – calculating risk across decades while enabling or constraining technological deployment in real-time.

Convergence emerged around Scholz’s provocation: “What if AI wasn’t built on the backs of exploited workers, but by workers themselves through cooperatives?” This wasn’t just about ownership structures but about temporal reconciliation – how do we embed the deliberative time of democratic governance into systems designed for computational speed?

Bonnie Shaw‘s work with MAV offered one bridge. Her description of building trust through “feedback loops” – where effective leadership and reliable service delivery create space for citizen participation – suggested how democratic temporalities might be cultivated rather than imposed.

Perhaps most intriguingly, both events suggested that the resistance we encounter – the slowness of consensus, the friction of democratic process, even the “failures” of collective action – might be features rather than bugs.

What emerged across both events was something we might call “temporal sovereignty” – communities claiming the right to operate on their own timescales rather than those imposed by venture capital, algorithmic optimisation, or crisis rhetoric.

The question isn’t whether democratic alternatives can match Silicon Valley’s speed, but whether they can create more resilient, responsive, and ultimately more innovative systems by working with different temporal logics entirely.

#PlatformCooperatives #CooperativeAI #TemporalPolitics #DemocraticTechnology #DigitalGovernance #TechPolicy #CivicInnovation