Gotong Royong

With the emergence of most technologies, history shows us a common denominator: The benefits are privatized, the harms are socialized. This results in a widening divide, where those that enjoy greater power, privilege, and resources than others, wind up making the critical decisions around what technology gets built, how it gets built, for what purpose, and where and how it gets used. The resultant harms are addressed like a check-box exercise, often with the reduction of the entire experience of harm to an individual experience that requires the individual to take efforts to fix. Gotong Royong, a living social practice embedded in the daily lives of communities across Indonesia and Malaysia, teaches us to dismantle this.

Before proceeding, it must be remembered that Gotong Royong is a living social practice embedded in the daily life of communities across Indonesia and Malaysia. We approach it as learners, and with the knowledge that the concept has also been invoked by governments to mobilize collective labour in ways that were not always freely chosen. We hold that complexity rather than smoothing it over. We draw on the ethical core of the concept.

Understanding Gotong Royong

Gotong Royong describes the practice of working together, of neighbors gathering to build a house, harvest crops, or respond to a shared challenge without the expectation of individual payment. It is a form of mutual aid and operates as a way of life through sustained practice and embodiment rather than as an emergency measure or an afterthought. The boundary between what belongs to the individual and what belongs to the collective is deliberately kept permeable in the practice of Gotong Royong. One helps because helping is what sustains the community that sustains them.

The concept also carries a specific understanding of reciprocity. This reciprocity transcends the transactional reciprocity of exchange, coloured by the notion of a quid pro quo, and embodies a diffuse sense of reciprocity that informs communal life. In these spaces, contributions circulate through the community over time in ways that no bookkeeping or metric can fully and meaningfully track. The expectation is not that the specific help one invests will be returned to them in quantifiably equal terms, but rather that the practice of mutual care will create conditions in which everyone's needs can be met, when they need it, and in ways they need it to be met.

What Gotong Royong unsettles in AI governance

AI development is almost entirely centred on transactional and competitive models. On the one hand, developer companies compete for talent, data, and market share. On the other hand, individuals engage with platforms and trade their data for services, oftentimes without actually knowing they are doing so. Even the open-source movement and its offerings, all of which come close to the Gotong Royong ethic, tend to be governed by licensing and attribution frameworks that preserve the template of individual ownership.

Gotong Royong asks us to explore what an AI development ecosystem built around genuine mutual cooperation might look like. This is not to be restricted to falling back on the open-source paradigm as a development strategy. The invitation is to reframe the very container by thinking of, for instance, cooperative infrastructure as foundational. This could look like building shared data trusts, safety research, governance mechanisms, and infrastructure. A measure of this kind is grounded in the understanding that technology affects everyone, and thus, everyone should have a say in its development.

Additionally, Gotong Royong also offers a critique of the dominant model of community engagement in AI. When companies hold "stakeholder consultations" or "public comment periods," they are enacting a very limited version of participation that is still heavily transactional. The process stops with gathering inputs, which are often sifted, selected, and then used to legitimize the decisions that have already been made. Gotong Royong describes a more radical, mutual involvement where communities are not consulted, but are actually genuinely co-governing, with real power to shape outcomes.

At its heart, Gotong Royong asks us to imagine what it would look like to build AI together as a communal practice in which those who are most affected by it have the most say in the matter. It asks us to decouple the commercial angle from community engagement, and pushes us to think about the question of what those with the most resources would have to let go of, for this to be possible.

References

Bowen, J. R. (1986). On the political construction of tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia. The Journal of Asian Studies, 45(3), 545-561.

Magnis-Suseno, F. (1997). Javanese Etics and World-View. The Javanese Idea of the Good Life. Penerbit PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama.

Slikkerveer, L. J. (2019). Gotong royong: An indigenous institution of communality and mutual assistance in Indonesia. In Integrated community-managed development: Strategizing indigenous knowledge and institutions for poverty reduction and sustainable community development in Indonesia (pp. 307-320). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Murtadlo, M., Albana, H., Helmy, M. I., Libriyanti, Y., Izazy, N. Q., & Saloom, G. (2024). Preserving the gotong royong character for Indonesian Gen-Z in the digital era. International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education, 13(3), 1631-1640.

Note

This article draws from the wisdom, practices, and life work of Indigenous groups. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider donating to Indigenous groups, collectives, organizations, or initiatives to support their lives and work.