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Podcast: Basil's Table — Building co-operative futures in the tech bros era (December 2022)

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The final Basil's Table event was held on 6 December 2022 at the Kelvin Club, Melbourne, organised by Antony McMullen and Sonja Schulze of 888 Co-operative Causeway. The timing was pointed: Twitter had just been acquired by Elon Musk and was visibly imploding; Deliveroo had collapsed; the question of who owns the platforms people depend on was suddenly live again.

Basil Varghese — community builder, patron of 888, 50-year veteran of social justice movements — hosted. The panel: Elena Pereyra (architect, CoHousing Australia, Deakin PhD), Jose Ramos (Action Foresight, critical globalisation studies), Bridgette Engeler (Swinburne University, strategic foresight and post-growth innovation), and Alexar Pendashteh (technologist, DOD organiser).

The earlier Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility episode with Antony McMullen provides useful background on what 888 Co-operative Causeway is and why it exists.

The billionaire problem

Jose Ramos opened with a framing that shaped the rest of the conversation: the left-right axis obscures more than it reveals. The real structural question is the concentration of wealth and power at the top.

"We have a billionaire problem." — Jose Ramos

This isn't a left critique of the right or vice versa — it's a structural observation. The same logic that produces Twitter under Musk produces any platform where one person's decision can reshape the conditions for millions. Cooperatives — democratically owned and controlled — are one structural response: the ownership question is answered before it becomes a crisis.

What drives each speaker

Antony framed the event around what drives people to this work. The answers were revealing:

Alexar Pendashteh — potential. Trained in electrical engineering, he draws a direct analogy between electrical grids (the largest single human-made system, which can fail catastrophically) and social systems. When information flows freely and people are organised with dignity, small teams can carry extraordinary weight. Hackathons — where strangers form teams and produce functional work in 48 hours — are his proof of concept for what collective intelligence can achieve when conditions are right.

Elena Pereyra — collective housing as a model for collective governance. Elena ran for the Greens in Footscray. Her architectural practice led her to observe that individualised housing design — whether high-density or sprawl — was failing environmentally and socially. CoHousing as a practice: people co-designing where and how they live, then collaboratively governing those spaces. The question she keeps asking: why, at age 18, are people told to stop sharing?

Bridgette Engeler — post-growth innovation and better questions. A professional futurist who describes her job as tormenting MBA students. Her honest position: "I don't think I'll see a positive outcome in my lifetime, but I'm working on 150 years." Her concern is what we do when growth-as-default has to stop — not because anyone chose to stop it, but because complex adaptive systems don't accommodate infinite growth indefinitely. Foresight means sitting with uncertainty rather than manufacturing false certainty.

Jose Ramos — curiosity born of contradiction. Grew up between two narratives — his Chicano activist parents' account of US history and the standard high-school version — and never resolved the tension. That discomfort became a method: take the contradiction seriously rather than collapsing it into one side.

Basil Varghese — affirmation of young talent. At 70+, after five decades in social justice movements (Vietnam, Black rights, anti-apartheid, now Indigenous Voice to Parliament), Basil's self-described role has shifted from activist to patron: "My role is to affirm and support young talent."

The cooperative as a design response

Antony's questions kept returning to a practical one: given institutional breakdown — climate rendering parts of Australia uninsurable, corruption, polarisation — what are the institutional forms that can sustain communities through this?

The cooperative model has specific design properties relevant to this: - Democratically controlled (one member, one vote — not one share, one vote) - Purpose-defined (members' common economic, social and cultural needs) - Structurally resistant to acquisition (assets locked to purpose in some models)

The tech-bros frame of the event title wasn't just polemic. The collapse of centralised platforms creates a genuine opening for federated and cooperative alternatives — not because cooperatives are new, but because the failure mode of the incumbent model is now visible in real time.

AI, and the case for collective intelligence

The most striking exchange came late, prompted by a question about AI image generators producing disturbing outputs. Jose Ramos turned it into a reflection on what AI actually is — and what it reveals about us:

"AI reflects the cesspool of human thinking on the internet. It's going to regurgitate some combination of something between Putin, Trump and the Kardashians. And that's why it's so damn intelligent." — Jose Ramos

His deeper point: humans are technological beings — "we don't do technology, we are technology" — pyrotechnical for 200,000 years, and now facing a moment that demands we reinvent ourselves rather than keep cranking out nuclear bombs and Agent Orange and calling each consequence an accident.

Alexar Pendashteh picked up the thread and reframed it around a term he argued is conspicuously absent from the discourse: not AI, but CI — collective intelligence. His case: collective intelligence isn't new (evolution, bacterial quorum sensing, wolf packs, human myth-making all rely on it), but it has always been slow. The internet changed that. For the first time, billions of people share a single information layer — to the point that you can read tweets and know an earthquake is happening seconds before the local authority does.

"We can simply enable us humans to bounce information amongst each other, and tap into our collective intelligence. But we're not doing it — I think because it doesn't translate into shares and assets. That's a problem, but it's 100% feasible." — Alexar Pendashteh

This is the link back to DOD's core interest. The deliberative-democracy tradition — citizens' juries, Pol.is, consensus-mapping — is in effect an attempt to build collective-intelligence infrastructure deliberately, rather than leaving it to the accidental architecture of social media. Alexar's argument is that the technical capacity already exists; what's missing is the ownership model and the will.

Basil's closing: practising to become human

Basil Varghese closed the evening with a reflection that reframed the whole conversation. Drawing on years working with Pitjantjatjara elders in central Australia, he recounted being told by one elder, after five years of acquaintance:

"We are all connected to one another and connected to everything — to the mountains, to the trees, to the rivers, and particularly to every human being. Yes, we are human, but we have to practice to become human."

His second reflection cut to the structural question underneath the whole panel: the great issues of our time — poverty, racism, sexism — are persistently misdiagnosed as individual failings ("a bludger," "a slacker") when they are systemic and structural. Progress, he argued, comes only when we listen to one another and accept that "the truth lies between us" — to be unravelled together and then acted on together. Cooperation and cooperatives, on his account, quintessentially mean exactly that.

It's a fitting note for a DOD record: a reminder that democratic design isn't only mechanism and ownership structure — it's also the slow cultural practice of treating governance as something done with and between people rather than to them.

Relevance to DOD

Economic democracy — democratic structures not just in government but in workplaces and ownership — has been a recurring theme in DOD's landscape. The Beyond CSR episode with Antony McMullen covers the co-op model in detail. This panel extends that into the adjacent questions of housing, foresight, collective intelligence, and structural power — what it takes to build cooperative capacity before the crisis, rather than scrambling in response to it.

See also