I'm taking the seminar Eco Radicals: The Legacy of Revolutionary Cooperatives at New School with Prof. Trebor Scholz. This is a series of personal notes and thoughts in and around the course.

I recorded this as a voice note on an early morning walk by the Baltic Sea. I have been here for a few days, and the quiet helps me sort through my thoughts.

Wednesday’s session surprised me. I had missed last week, and I felt it. Coming back in, I expected the familiar weight of our topics between utopia, activist practice and desperation. Instead, I found something I did not anticipate: a sense of hope that is not naïve, but practiced.

Part of that is probably Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark echoing in the background: hope not as optimism, but as a discipline that keeps action possible even when outcomes are uncertain.

We talked about data centers and the political economy of data. Not data as a neutral resource, but as something accumulated, potentially weaponized, and concentrated inside monopolistic, hyper-capitalist, hyper-resource power structures.

It is tempting to treat the billionaire topic as internet noise: a meme, a punchline, a shorthand for “late capitalism.” But it is not only that. Billionaire power is real. It shapes what gets built, what gets funded, and what becomes normal.

It is easy to slip into hopelessness when the scale looks that big. Don Quixote comes to mind: the absurd mismatch between a single body and a massive system.

Solnit puts it bluntly:

“Activism is not a journey to the corner store, it is a plunge into the unknown.”

And yet, out here by the Baltic Sea — with that huge moon hovering above the water — I felt something shift. What gives me hope is the long horizon. That surprises me, because I tend to be on the impatient side of the human spectrum.

We are not starting from scratch. What we call “activism” today sits on centuries of cooperative experiments, mutual aid, organizing, and institution-building. The work will not be finished in a few years. But the point is not finishing. The point is continuity: building on what already exists, and moving reality closer to what we collectively envision. Boom!

One thing I keep noticing in this course is the group itself. It is diverse in a way that keeps changing my perspective, and that matters. Coming from where I am — a middle-aged white guy from Hamburg, Germany — this is genuinely valuable to me. From where I stand, I can feel how much I gain when I listen across the various lived experiences, personal and political backgrounds.

I am also starting to understand cooperativism as more than an “operating model” for ethical businesses. It is flexible enough to support a neighborhood grocery store, and it is flexible enough to hold a huge international structure like MONDRAGON. And it connects to something even bigger for me: democracy as in participation, shared power, agency and – Solidarity.

I have grown more aware that “socialism” is a red flag in many contexts, especially in the US, and that histories shape what language can do. Still, the underlying questions do not go away: who owns, who decides, who benefits, and what kinds of futures we are building toward.

What I am left with after this week's session are loose ends I actually want to follow. This feels like a good sign. Not closure, but commitment.

What I’m carrying forward to week eight:

  • Data infrastructure is political infrastructure.
  • Power concentrates through accumulation, and it also concentrates through design choices.
  • Hope is not a mood. It is a practice sustained over long timelines.
  • Cooperativism can be a democratic tool, not just a business structure.
  • My role is – in gluey fashion – connecting dots, and connecting people who should be in the same conversation.