Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Against the grain of “There-is-no-alternative” discourse, such a platform can be successful without focusing on profit-making. BeWelcome.org offers lessons for other endeavors promoting the Commons.
How can cooperatives serve as vehicles for social change, especially in online spaces? What practical interventions could check the anti-social behaviors of Big Tech? These are two questions that I explored recently with Nathan Schneider…
The platform cooperativism movement intervenes at a moment of social crisis in the United States when ninety-four percent of jobs created over the past decade were not in the employment category. In 2016, over twelve million workers have made money on labor platforms. Much of that work is invisible with laborers often exploited, tucked away between algorithms. And over the long-term, as more labor markets shift to the Internet, it also matters that ownership of cloud services and social hangouts on the Internet is highly concentrated.
To counter poor labor practices, gig workers and entrepreneurs are now taking matters into their own hands by launching their own digital platforms for various services. Called “platform cooperatives,” these businesses bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance, to the digital world.
Beyond critiques of the Silicon Valley-style “sharing economy”, Open Cooperativism questions the dominance of capital in the free and open source software economy, and suggests P2P-empowered digital solutions in order to lower the transactional costs of networked cooperative production.
The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement…and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements
Platform co-ops, and the burgeoning movement behind them, are big news.
To return to our original question: How can we develop new ways to preserve and extend the democratic capacities of ordinary people and rein in unaccountable market/state power?
The good news is that there is an alternative — one that places control and ownership of digital services into the hands of its users. It’s called a platform cooperative, or platform co-op.
For many, a permanent state of social economic uncertainty is the new normal.
In this interview for Shareable John discusses ideas from his latest book How To Thrive In The Next Economy, which celebrates the power of small actions to transform the bigger picture.
As we wrestle with the bounty of productivity as well as the displacement of employees by digital technologies, we may consider the greater operating system on which they’re all running.
