OURS TO HACK AND TO OWN

OURS

TO HACK

AND TO OWN

THE RISE OF PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM,

A NEW VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK

AND A FAIRER INTERNET

OURS

TO HACK

AND TO OWN

THE RISE OF PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM,

A NEW VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK

AND A FAIRER INTERNET

EDITED BY

TREBOR SCHOLZ

AND NATHAN SCHNEIDER

OR Books

New York • London

The following authors have placed their contributions under a Creative

Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license: Michel Bauwens

and Vasilis Kostakis, Yochai Benkler, Francesca Bria, Miriam A. Cherry, Ra

Criscitiello, Max Dana, Joshua Danielson, Joel Dietz, John Duda, Enric Duran,

Matan Field, Noemi Giszpenc, Mayo Fuster Morell, Marina Gorbis, Jessica

Gordon Nembhard, Seda Gürses, Peter Harris, Steven Hill, Pedro Jardim,

Francis Jervis, Mary Jo Kaplan, Dmytri Kleiner, Brendan Martin, Rachel

O’Dwyer, Rory Ridley-Du, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushko, Nathan

Schneider, Trebor Scholz, Juliet B. Schor, Kati Sipp, Tom Slee, Christoph Spehr,

Danny Spitzberg, Armin Steuernagel, Arun Sundararajan, Ashley Taylor, Astra

Taylor, Cameron Tonkinwise, Akseli Virtanen, McKenzie Wark, Felix Weth,

Brianna Wettlaufer, Chad Whitacre, Aaron Wolf, and Caroline Woolard.

All individual contributions to this anthology © the respective author of the

contribution.

Published by OR Books, New York and London

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First printing 2016

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A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-68219-062-3 paperback

ISBN 978-1-68219-063-0 e-book

Text design by Under|Over. Typeset by AarkMany Media, Chennai, India.

Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United

Kingdom.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1 SOMETHING TO SAY YES TO

1. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider - What This Is

and Isn’t About

2. Nathan Schneider - The Meanings of Words

3. Trebor Scholz - How Platform Cooperativism Can

Unleash the Network

4. Susie Cagle - The Seven Cooperative Principles

5. Jessica Gordon Nembhard - Eight Facts about

Cooperative Enterprise

PART 2 PLATFORM CAPITALISM

6. Douglas Rushko - Renaissance Now

7. Juliet B. Schor - Old Exclusion in Emergent Spaces

8. McKenzie Wark - Worse Than Capitalism

9. Steven Hill - How the Un-Sharing Economy

Threatens Workers

10. Christoph Spehr - SpongeBob, Why Don’t You Work

Harder?

11. Kati Sipp - Portable Reputation in the On-Demand

Economy

12. Dmytri Kleiner - Counterantidisintermediation

13. David Bollier - From Open Access to Digital Commons

PART 3 AN INTERNET OF OUR OWN

Showcase 1 - Platforms

Stocksy United

Fairmondo

Coopify

Gratipay

FairCoop

Member’s Media, Ltd. Cooperative

TimesFree

Snowdrift.coop

Resonate

Loconomics Cooperative

NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative

Robin Hood Collective

Seed.Coop

14. Yochai Benkler - The Realism of Cooperativism

15. Janelle Orsi - Three Essential Building Blocks for

Your Platform Cooperative

16. Caroline Woolard - So You Want to Start a Platform

Cooperative…

17. Melissa Hoover - What We Mean When We Say

“Cooperative”

18. David Carroll - A Dierent Kind of Startup Is Possible

19. Marina Gorbis - Designing Positive Platforms

20. Cameron Tonkinwise - Convenient Solidarity:

Designing for Platform Cooperativism

21. Seda Gürses - Designing for Privacy

22. Danny Spitzberg - How Crowdfunding Becomes

Stewardship

23. Arun Sundararajan - Economic Barriers and Enablers

of Distributed Ownership

24. Ra Criscitiello - There Is Platform-Power in a Union

25. Saskia Sassen - Making Apps for Low-Wage Workers

and Their Neighborhoods

26. Kristy Milland - The Crowd: Naturally Cooperative,

Unnaturally Silenced

27. Tom Slee - Platforms and Trust: Beyond Reputation

Systems

28. Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis - Why Platform

Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops

102

108

113

119

125

130

135

140

145

149

154

158

163

PART 4 CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY

Showcase 2 - Ecosystem

Loomio Cooperative Ltd.

The FairShares Model

Swarm Alliance

Ms., The Madeline System

Purpose Fund

rCredits

External Revenue Service

Data Commons Cooperative

Coliga

CommunityOS: Callicoon Project

Backfeed

My User Agreement

29. John Duda - Beyond Luxury Cooperativism

30. Brendan Martin - Money Is the Root of All Platforms

31. Carmen Rojas - From People-Centered Ideas to

People-Powered Capital

32. Karen Gregory - Can Code Schools Go Cooperative?

33. Palak Shah - A Code for Good Work

34. Micky Metts - Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood

Tech Co-op

35. Michael Peck - Building the People’s Ownership

Economy through Union Co-ops

36. Mayo Fuster Morell - Toward a Theory of Value for

Platform Cooperatives

37. Francesca Bria - Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty

38. Miriam A. Cherry - Legal and Governance Structures

Built to Share

39. Rachel O’Dwyer - Blockchains and Their Pitfalls

40. Astra Taylor - Non-Cooperativism

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Further Resources

167

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

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PART 1

SOMETHING TO SAY

YES TO

1. WHAT THIS IS AND ISN’T

ABOUT

TREBOR SCHOLZ AND NATHAN SCHNEIDER

This is a guidebook for a fairer kind of Internet. While we intend to

foster something new in the online economy, we do so by turning to

something old: the long tradition of cooperative enterprise. The prob-

lems of labor abuse and surveillance that have arisen with the “sharing

economy,” also, are not entirely new; they have much in common with

struggles on nineteenth-century factory oors. By considering the

emerging platforms in light of well-hewn cooperative principles and

practices, we nd an optimistic vision for the future of work and life.

Already, this strategy is catching on. Workers, organizers, devel-

opers, and social entrepreneurs around the world are experimenting

with cooperative platforms and forming conversations about platform

cooperativism. This book, therefore, is an eort to serve a movement

in the making, to add to the momentum we and our fellow contribu-

tors already feel.

We each came to platform cooperativism by somewhat separate

paths. Trebor had been convening the Digital Labor conferences at

The New School since 2009, from which arose an earlier book, The

Internet as Playground and Factory. In publications like The Nation and

Vice, Nathan was reporting on the protest movements of 2011 and

eorts among young people to create ethical livelihoods, online and

o, once the protests receded. We met at OuiShare Fest in Paris in

2014, and, at Trebor’s “Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades” con-

ference later the same year, we both sensed it was time to think about

constructive alternatives to the dominant Silicon Valley model.

That December, Trebor published “Platform Cooperativism vs. the

Sharing Economy,” framing this concept that would come to be this

movement’s moniker. The same month, Shareable published Nathan’s

article “Owning Is the New Sharing,” which mapped out some of the

eorts to build cooperative platforms already underway. Realizing

our common interest, we discussed these ideas with interested plat-

form-workers, labor advocates, techies, and luddites—many of whom,

we found, were venturing into various forms of platform cooperativism

already. We agreed it was time that they should meet each other.

In November 2015, we held a two-day event called “Platform

Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy” at The New

School. More than a thousand people came, including New York City

Council members, CEOs, investors, platform creators, and leading

scholars. The Washington Post deemed the event “a huge success.”

Shortly after, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation published Trebor’s

primer on platform cooperativism, which has been translated into at

least seven languages. Follow-up events have taken place in Barcelona,

Berlin, Bologna, Boulder, London, Melbourne, Paris, Rome, Milan,

Vancouver, and elsewhere.

Before we get started, let’s make sure we are talking about the

same thing: shared governance and shared ownership of the Internet’s

levers of power—its platforms and protocols. Democratic ownership

and governance are the pillars of what cooperativism refers to, both here

and historically; without these, the word rings hollow.

Second, this book calls for a process, not another trick of tech-

nological solutionism. Platform cooperativism will not come about

simply through a few killer apps; it will require a dierent kind of eco-

system—with appropriate forms of nance, law, policy, and culture—

to support the development of democratic online enterprises. This

means challenging the cooperative movement to meet the opportuni-

ties of the platform economy, and challenging the platform economy

to overcome its obsession with short-term prots for the few.

Platform cooperativism is a radical horizon, to be sure, but

we should not regard it as an absolute. There will be multiple and

sometimes partial means of getting there. A company that shares some

ownership and governance is better than one that shares none, and we

celebrate that. We encourage a variety of strategies and experiments.

The contributors to this book, in that spirit, represent diverse

approaches and perspectives. It is a means of sharing what we learned

from the 2015 Platform Cooperativism event more widely, and of

drawing more people into the work of overcoming the challenges we

face. We can keep the conversation going at platformcoop.net, a place

for ongoing discussion of news, resources, and ideas.

After these introductory chapters, the rst set of essays considers

the opportunities and challenges of the existing online economy,

demonstrating the need for more cooperative approaches. The second

section addresses the practical design and development of coopera-

tive online platforms; it includes “showcases” of actually existing and

in-development platform co-ops. In the third section, we step back to

consider the broader ecosystems that we’ll need to develop if we are

serious about making shared ownership and governance a new norm

for the Internet; here, too, are showcases that show how far the plat-

form co-op ecosystem has already come.

Throughout this process, we have been amazed by the enthusiasm

and experience that so many people around the world have brought to

the #platformcoop conversation, and the eort to make it a reality. We

hope this book does justice to the power of what is already underway,

as well as the hurdles we still face together. We dedicate the book to

those with the courage and imagination to create an Internet worthy

of the people it connects.

2. THE MEANINGS OF WORDS

NATHAN SCHNEIDER

For most of the last decade, I’ve been a reporter, covering stories on

how technology is reshaping public life, from debates about God

to protests in the streets. One thing I’ve noticed is that Internet

culture has an odd way of using a really important word: democracy.

When a new app is said to be democratizing something—whether

robotic personal assistants or sepia-toned seles—it means allowing

more people to access that something. Just access, along with a big,

fat terms of service. Gone are those old associations of town meet-

ings and voting booths; gone are co-ownership, co-governance, and

accountability.

Words are the tools of my trade as a writer, so I like to have a

handle on what they mean. We rely on them so much. They connect

us to each other; they remind us what we’re capable of. And I hope

that the Internet can help us make our denitions of democracy more

ambitious, rather than redening it out of existence.

In late 2014 I was reporting a story about Amazon’s Mechanical

Turk platform, a website where users can nd entirely online piece-

work—jobs that might take between seconds and hours, like tran-

scribing a receipt, providing feedback on an ad, or taking a sociological

survey. I went to Trebor Scholz’s Digital Labor conference in New

York, which included real-life Mechanical Turkers. One was a wife

whose husband lost his job, for instance; another was a former cable

technician. I heard them describing what working on the platform is

like. Employers can review them, but they can’t review employers.

Their work can be rejected with no remuneration or recourse. There

are no constraints to prevent below-minimum-wage pay. One of them

complained in the media and her account was frozen.

Over the course of those days, a kind of question kept coming

up among the Turkers, a thought experiment. They wondered aloud:

What if we owned the platform? How would we set the rules?

They’d sit with that for a minute or two, batting ideas back and

forth about how to make the platform better for themselves—and for

Amazon. Reasonable ideas. Clever ones. But then the ideas would fade

back into reality again: back to the complaints.

Since then the agonies over the dictionary-altering Internet have

only intensied. People have blockaded Google Buses to protest

wealth inequality in San Francisco, and Uber drivers have gone on

strike around the world. Increasingly this online economy is becoming

the economy—the way more and more of us nd jobs, relationships,

and a roof over our heads. Internet companies aspire to network and

monetize everything from our cars to our refrigerators; the companies

call this the “Internet of things.” But the Turkers’ questions have kept

coming back to me.

Were they on to something? What if the platforms and networks

really were ours? What if we had an Internet of ownership?

REAL SHARING, REAL DEMOCRACY

Another word that the Internet has gotten to is sharing. Sharing used

to mean something we do with the people we know and trust. In the

so-called sharing economy, it means more convenient transactions that

take place on distant servers somewhere. Convenience is great, but all

along there has been a real sharing economy at work, the cooperative

economy.

One can trace the modern cooperative movement to the Rochdale

Principles of 1844, in England, though it had precursors among ancient

tribes, monasteries, and guilds around the world. The rudiments of this

stu could be basic common sense: shared ownership and governance

among people who depend on an enterprise, shared prots, and coor-

dination among enterprises rather than competition.

We might not know it, but co-ops are all around us. In Colorado,

where I live, 70 percent of the state’s territory gets its power from coop-

erative electric companies that date to the 1930s and earlier, owned

and governed by the people they serve. The credit union where I’m

a member is one of the top mortgage lenders in the region. Up in the

mountains west of me, some years back, a group of neighbors started

their own co-op Internet service provider. There’s also Land O’Lakes,

Organic Valley, and REI.

Co-ops come in all shapes and sizes. They fail less than other

businesses, and they often pay better wages (except to top executives).

Democracy, it turns out, works—though it can be less lucrative for

those just trying to get rich. People in charge are harder to swindle.

I lived in a co-op house once; it followed a certain dirty, organic,

folk-music-every-night stereotype. The same couldn’t be said, though,

for what I saw at Kenya’s business school for managers of cooperatives.

There, co-ops hold about half the GDP, and those students looked

like business students anywhere—except that, along with all the mar-

keting and case studies, they were also learning how to run a company

where the people who work for you are your bosses. In the area around

Barcelona, among the thousands of members of the Catalan Integral

Cooperative, I got a glimpse of what twenty-rst-century coopera-

tives might look like. Rather than securing old-fashioned jobs, these

independent workers help each other become less dependent on sala-

ries, and more able to rely on the housing, food, childcare, and com-

puter code they hold in common. They trade with their own digital

currency. In cases like this, the traditional lines between workers, pro-

ducers, consumers, and depositors may become harder to draw.

Part of the cooperative legacy has played out in tech culture

already. The Internet relies on free, open-source tools built through

feats of peer-to-peer self-governance, like Wikipedia and Linux. Visit

many tech oces, from a startup’s garage to the Googleplex, and there

are self-organizing teams creating projects from the bottom up. Yet

somehow this democracy doesn’t seem to make it to the boardroom;

things are still pretty twentieth-century corporate in there, with who-

ever happens to own the most shares calling the shots. There’s a re-

wall. We can practice democracy everywhere, it seems, except where

it really matters.

There are some pretty sci- questions before us these days: Will

apps and robots replace our jobs? Will any aspect of our digital lives

escape the notice of surveillance? Can there be a digital utopia without

the dystopias of sweatshops and blood minerals? In each case the coop-

erative tradition poses necessary questions, which in the onrush of

change we may neglect to ask: Who owns the tools we live by, and

how are they governed?

PLATFORM COMMONS

Cooperative enterprises of the past and present have relied on two

kinds of strategies to gain a foothold in economies and cultures prem-

ised on competition. One is the competitive advantage to be found

in cooperation—the ability to succeed where conventional markets

fail, for instance, and the power latent in solidarity. The second is

when the rules of the system are changed to support more coopera-

tive practices—especially through governments that see the value of

cooperative enterprise enough to encourage and fund it. For platform

cooperativism to ourish, I suspect we need both of these.

We can begin by identifying the competitive advantages of coop-

eration. Cooperative practices, for instance, are poised to thicken the

notoriously loose ties that online connectedness normally oers. And

as big tech companies continue having diculty treating workers and

users as—well, people—co-ops can oer positive, ethical alternatives

that workers and users can turn to. Hybrid models—combining aspects

of a conventional company with aspects of cooperative ownership and

governance—seem promising in the short term. Yet the rules of the

system remain very much tilted against cooperativism.

This needs to change. Governments should recognize that coop-

erative platforms will mean more wealth staying in their communities

and serving their constituents. Rather than trying (and failing) to say

“no” to the likes of Uber, platform co-ops are something public insti-

tutions can say “yes” to. We need laws that make it easier to form and

nance co-ops, as well as public investment in business development—

stu that extractive businesses get all the time.

This also means thinking dierently about the incumbents. The

Facebooks, Googles, and Ubers aren’t just regular companies anymore.

Their business models are based on how dependent so many of us are

on them; their ubiquity, in turn, is what makes them useful. They’re

becoming public utilities. The less we have a choice about whether to

use them, the more we need democracy to step in. What if a new gen-

eration of antitrust laws, instead of breaking up the emerging online

utilities, created a pathway to more democratic ownership?

Rather than donating Facebook shares to his own LLC, Mark

Zuckerberg could put them into a trust owned and controlled by

Facebook users themselves. Then they, too, could have a seat in the

boardroom when decisions are made about what to do with all that

valuable personal data they pour into the platform—and they’d have a

stake in ensuring the platform succeeds. How would you vote?

These aren’t just questions about what kind of Internet we want,

or even what kind of world we want; they’re about how we see our-

selves. Do we trust ourselves enough to expect democracy from the

institutions on which we rely? Are we bold enough to imagine, as the

Mechanical Turkers were, what the Internet would look like if we

were in charge?

Thirty years ago, when the Internet wasn’t much more than a

lab experiment, the social critic Theodore Roszak saw a lot of this

coming. “Making the democratic most of the Information Age,” he

wrote in The Cult of Information, “is a matter not only of technology

but also of the social organization of that technology.”

We forget that. New gizmos come and go so quickly that we hardly

notice when the meanings of our words change, and when what we

expect of ourselves changes with them. Ordinary people have already

made the Internet their own with their hacks, their memes, their pro-

tests, and their dreams. The cost of forfeiting control over these things

is too high, and too mysterious. We need to expect better, to demand

more. It’s time that we own and govern what is ours already.

3. HOW PLATFORM

COOPERATIVISM CAN

UNLEASH THE NETWORK

TREBOR SCHOLZ

In 1998 I moved into a small Buddhist temple in San Francisco’s

Mission District. My spiritual comrades in this commune could not

understand why I would spend all the money that I had saved on an

IBM laptop when the community already owned a computer. As

someone who studies the social impact of the Internet, I was surprised

by the proposal to collectively use one computer. For me, up to that

point, thinking about the Internet meant thinking about individual

use, not communal ownership. This episode showed me how a cul-

ture of genuine sharing can also mean sharing technology, just like

anything else.

Over the past ve years, the technological ingenuity of the

“sharing economy” deeply resonated with the zeitgeist. Emphasizing

community, underutilized resources, and open data, the genuine

sharing economy was initially presented as a challenge to corporate

power. Just like my Buddhist friends, the pioneers of this economy

proposed to split the use of lawn mowers, drills, and cars. But soon,

the non-commercial values behind many platforms were rewritten in

the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, turning the “sharing economy” into

a misnomer. Today, facing various prophecies about sharing and the

future of work, we need to remind ourselves that there is no unstop-

pable evolution leading to the uberization of society; more positive

alternatives are possible.

In Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen foresees a future in

which a tiny “hyper meritocracy” would make millions while the rest

of us struggle to survive on anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000

a year. It already works quite well in Mexico, Cowen quips. Carl B.

Frey and Michael A. Osborne predict that 47 percent of all jobs are

at risk of being automated over the next twenty years. And I have

no doubt about the vision of platform owners like Travis Kalanick

(Uber), Je Bezos (Amazon), or Lukas Biewald (CrowdFlower)—

who, in the absence of government regulation and resistance from

workers, will simply exploit their undervalued workers. I’m all on

board for Paul Mason’s and Kathi Weeks’ visions for a post-capitalist,

post-work future where universal basic income will rule the way we

think about life opportunities. In the United States, however, unlike

in Finland, the chances for this scenario becoming a reality over the

next two years are not high. The question then becomes what we can

do right now, with and for the most precarious among the contingent

third of the American workforce, which is unlikely to see the return

of the traditional safety net, the forty-hour workweek, or a steady

paycheck.

Today’s Internet bears little resemblance to the ARPA-designed,

non-commercial, decentralized, post-Sputnik network. We are

nding that the sources of our entertainment, the platforms where

we are logging on to work every day, and the apps that constantly

draw us into feedback loops are all owned by a small number of deep-

pocketed founders and stockholders. That’s simply unacceptable, and it

is for this reason that I proposed a theory of “platform cooperativism”

in 2014. Workers in the on-demand economy are called upon to “live

like lions,“ but with slightly more exibility have come more risks and

harsher taskmasters. The average on-demand economy worker earns

$7,900 a year through labor platforms, which indicates that many of

them work only part-time in this digital economy. Often disregarded

in this discussion are those who are pushed out of the market by, for

example, Uber drivers, who are 40 percent college-educated and more

likely to be white than legacy taxi drivers who may lose their jobs.

Many of the business models of the “sharing economy” are based

on the strategic nullication of the law. Companies knowingly vio-

late city regulations and labor laws. This allows them to undermine

the competition and then point to a large customer base to demand

legislative changes that benet their dubious modus operandi. Firms

are also activating their app-based consumers as a grassroots polit-

ical movement to help them lobby for corporate interests. Privacy

should be a concern for workers and customers, too. Uber is ana-

lyzing the routines of its customers, from their commutes to their

one-night stands, to then impose surge pricing when they most

rely on the service. Navigating legal gray zones, these deregulated

commerce hubs sometimes misclassify employees as independent

contractors. They are labeling them “turkers,” “driver-partners,”

or “rabbits,” but never workers. Hiding behind the curtain of the

Internet, they would like us to believe that they are tech rather than

labor companies.

In the decade between 2000 and 2010, the median income in the

United States declined by 7 percent when adjusted for ination. In

2014 51 percent of Americans made less than $30,000 a year, and 76

percent of them had no savings whatsoever. Since the 1970s, we have

witnessed concerted eorts to move people out of direct employment,

which has led to the steady growth of the number of independent con-

tractors and freelancers. Digital labor, a child of the low-wage crisis, is

part of that process.

What has the “sharing economy” really gotten us? Beyond the

consumer convenience and eciency in creating short-term prots

for the few, it has demonstrated how, in terms of social well-being

and environmental sustainability, capitalism turns out to be amazingly

ineective in watching out for people. Seemingly overnight, the gains

of more than one hundred years of labor struggles, dating back to the

Haymarket Riots in 1886 and the protests after the Shirtwaist Factory

re in 1911, have been stalled. Also, the Fair Labor Standards Act of

1938 suddenly has far less pull because the number of employees is

shrinking rapidly.

Among all the problems of the twenty-rst century that are related

to workers—inequality, stagnant wages, loss of rights—the biggest

predicament is that there seem to be so few realistic alternatives. But

there are. I will identify four approaches.

The rst two approaches are based on the belief in negotiation

with corporate owners and with government. The Domestic Workers

Alliance, for example, formulated a Good Work Code in hopes that

policy makers would endorse their guidelines and that platform

owners would follow them. Seattle imposed a tax on Uber and gave

drivers the right to unionize, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City

made attempts to curb the number of Uber cars, and the city of San

Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. A third pathway is to move pro-

duction outside of the market altogether. Yochai Benkler labeled this

“non-market peer production,” with the most successful example being

Wikipedia. And, nally, for the compensated labor market, there is a

fourth approach, which is platform cooperativism, a model of social

organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially

change what you don’t own.

My thinking about platform cooperativism owes much to the

Digital Labor conferences at The New School. These events started in

2009 and one of the recent ones was Platform Cooperativism in 2015.

Initially, at these events, discussions focused on the Italian Workerists,

immaterial labor, and “playbor.” Artists like Burak Arikan, Alex

Rivera, Stephanie Rothenberg, and Dmytri Kleiner played pioneering

roles in alerting the public to these issues. Later, debates became more

concerned with “crowd eecing,” the exploitation of thousands of

invisible workers in crowdsourcing systems like Amazon Mechanical

Turk or content moderation farms in the Philippines. Over the past

few years, the search for concrete alternatives for a better future of

work has become more dynamic.

The theory of platform cooperativism has two main tenets: com-

munal ownership and democratic governance. It is bringing together

135 years of worker self-management, the roughly 170 years of the

cooperative movement, and commons-based peer production with the

compensated digital economy. The term “platform” refers to places

where we hang out, work, tinker, and generate value after we switch on

our phones or computers. The “cooperativism” part is about an own-

ership model for labor and logistics platforms or online marketplaces

that replaces the likes of Uber with cooperatives, communities, cities,

or inventive unions. These new structures embrace the technology to

creatively reshape it, embed their values, and then operate it in sup-

port of local economies. Seriously, why does a village in Denmark

or a town like Marfa in rural West Texas have to generate prots for

some fty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version

of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating

prots for the few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative

platform, which could maximize use value for the community.

Platform co-ops already exist, from cooperatively owned online

labor brokerages and marketplaces like Fairmondo, to video streaming

sites that are owned by lmmakers and their fans. Photographers

co-own the stock photography cooperative Stocksy and massage

therapists in San Francisco started the freelancer-owned online labor

market Loconomics. Students at Cornell University built Coopify

for (and with) co-ops of low-income immigrants in Sunset Park,

Brooklyn. Platform co-ops could be attractive options for home health

care professionals and also low-income residents, or pensioners who

need to earn extra cash. In the United States, the 650,000 people who

are released from U.S. prisons every year would be likely to welcome

dignied work. And nally, platform co-ops might be attractive for

refugees, for whom it often takes as long as eight years after their

immigration to nd a job, even in a country like Sweden. With this

model, workers can become collective owners; they do no longer have

to subscribe to the pathology of the old system that trained them to be

followers.

Few people will feel drawn to build a platform co-op based on

abstract principles. But for the already committed, common principles

and values matter. From the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers,

to African-American cooperatives in the South of the United States,

to the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, forming any kind of coop-

erative endeavor has always started with a study group. Political sci-

entist Elinor Ostrom reminded us that aspiring to create alternatives

without rigorous study is a pipe dream, a vain hope. Being realistic

about cooperative culture is essential. From the history of cooperatives

in the United States, we learned that they are indeed able to oer a

more stable income and a dignied workplace. While the necessary

enthusiasm of makers doesn’t always sit well with justiably skeptical

scholars, their dialogue is important. Jointly, they could rewrite the

Rochdale principles for the digital economy, for instance. Education is

an essential cornerstone of platform cooperativism.

Platform co-ops should consider the following principles. The

rst one, which I explained already, is communal ownership of plat-

forms and protocols. Second, platform co-ops have to be able to oer

income security and good pay for all people working for the co-op.

And history shows that co-ops are able to oer this. Emilia-Romagna,

an area in Italy that encouraged employee ownership, consumer coop-

eratives, and agricultural co-ops, has lower unemployment than other

regions in Italy. The agship of cooperatives, Mondragon, is a network

of co-ops that employed 74,061 people in 2013. But in the United

States, despite its dominance in areas like orange juice production, the

cooperative model has been faced with many challenges, including

competition with multinational corporate giants, public awareness,

self-exploitation, and the network eect. So, it is essential for platform

co-ops to study the communities they’d like to serve and get their

value proposition right.

In opposition to the black-box systems of the Snowden-era Internet,

these platforms need to distinguish themselves by making their data

ows transparent. They need to show where the data about customers

and workers are stored, to whom they are sold, and for what purpose.

Work on platform co-ops needs to be co-determined. The people who

are meant to populate the platform in the end must be involved in its

design from the very beginning. They need to understand the parameters

and patterns that govern their working environment. A protective legal

framework is not only essential to guarantee the right to organize and

the freedom of expression but it can help to guard against platform-based

child labor, wage theft, arbitrary behavior, litigation, and excessive work-

place surveillance along the lines of the “reputation systems” of companies

like Lyft and Uber that “deactivate” drivers if their ratings fall below 4.5

stars. Crowd workers should have a right to know what they are working

on instead of contributing to mysterious projects posted by anonymous

consignors.

At its heart, platform cooperativism is not about any particular

technology but the politics of lived acts of cooperation. Soon, we may

no longer have to contend with websites and apps but, more and more,

with 5G wireless services (more mobile work), protocols, and AI. We

have to design for tomorrow’s labor market. In the absence of rigorous

democratic debates, online labor behemoths are producing their ver-

sion of the future of work right in front of us. We have to move quickly.

Together with cities like Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro,

which have already pushed back against Uber and Airbnb, we ought to

rene the discourse around “smart cities” and machine ownership. We

need incubators, small experiments, step-by-step walkthroughs, best

practices, and legal templates that online co-ops can use. Developers

will script a WordPress for platform co-ops, a free-software labor

platform that local developers can customize. Ultimately, platform

cooperativism is not merely about countering destructive visions of

the future, it is about the marriage of technology and cooperativism

and what it can do for our children, our children’s children, and their

children into the future.

5. EIGHT FACTS ABOUT

COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE

JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD

1. Cooperative enterprises address market failure and need.

They provide rural electricity or other utilities in sparsely popu-

lated areas; aordable healthy and organic foods, especially in food

deserts; access to credit and banking services; access to aordable

housing; access to quality aordable child or elder care; and access

to markets for culturally sensitive goods and arts.

2. Cooperatives overcome historical barriers to development

in the ways they aggregate people, resources, and capital. Of 162

non-agricultural cooperatives in one study, 44 percent of the

respondents said they could not have opened their business had it

not been organized as a cooperative.

3. The economic activity of the approximately thirty thousand

cooperatives in the United States contributes an estimated

$154 billion to the nation’s total income. Co-ops have helped to

create over 2.1 million jobs, with an impact on wages and salaries of

almost $75 billion. After becoming owners of a house-cleaning co-op

in Oakland, the workers experienced a median income increase from

$24,000 to over $40,000.

4. Cooperative businesses have lower failure rates than other

businesses, both after the rst year (10 percent failure versus

60-80 percent) and after ve years (90 percent still operating

versus 3-5 percent). Evidence also shows that cooperatives suc-

cessfully address the eects of economic crises and survive crises

better.

5. Cooperatives are more likely to promote community

growth than an investor-oriented rm, since most are owned

and controlled by local residents. Since cooperative business

objectives are needs-oriented, cooperatives are more likely to

stay in the communities where they originate. For every $1,000

spent at a food co-op, $1,606 goes to the local economy; for every

$1 million in sales, 9.3 jobs are created.

6. Cooperative businesses stabilize communities because they

serve as business anchors, distributing, recycling, and multiplying

local expertise and capital. They enable their owners to generate

income and jobs; accumulate assets; provide aordable, quality

goods and services; and develop human and social capital.

7. Co-ops and their members pay taxes and are good

citizens. They tend to give donations to their communities, pay

their employees fairly, and use sustainable business practices.

8. Cooperative start-up costs can be low. Members can con-

tribute time and capital, osetting costs that require other busi-

nesses to seek outside nancing. Co-ops are also eligible to apply

for loans and grants from a number of federal and state agencies

designed to support co-op development, and are often provided

relatively low-cost loans from non-governmental nancial insti-

tutions like cooperative banks.

Adapted from Benets and Impacts of Cooperatives, working white paper

for the Center on Race and Wealth, Howard University (February 2014),

http://is.gd/ItoPHT.

PART 2

PLATFORM

CAPITALISM

6. RENAISSANCE NOW

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

What would it take to make the digital economy less like industrial

capitalism on steroids, and more consonant with the distributive nature

of digital networks themselves? People are trying a lot of strategies,

from peer-to-peer value exchanges and the restoration of the com-

mons to crowd-funded debt remediation schemes and local favor-banks.

Something big is going on here.

Surprisingly, perhaps, these eorts rarely involve digital technology

itself at their core. Rather, they are informed by a digital sensibility.

It turns out that we don’t actually need blockchains to reconcile and

administrate the contributions that each driver has made to a driver-

owned version of Uber any more than we need cryptography to stage

a debt strike.

Such activities are not so much digital in their implementation as

they are in the hands-on, hacker ethos from which they emerge. Digital,

after all, refers rst and foremost to the ngers—the digits—through

which human beings create value. In a sense, the digital hearkens back

in time, not just ahead, to a time when people were not disconnected

from the value they created, and when the world was not simply a set

of resources to be extracted by corporations.

One wouldn’t know that from looking at the dominant players in

the digital economy today. Instead of remaking the economy from the

ground up, these companies—Amazon, Uber, Facebook, Apple…take

your pick—simply practice capitalism with digital tools. Their founders

are happy to “disrupt” one industry or another, but they never even

consider disrupting the landscape on which they are functioning—the

operating system of venture capital beneath all the apps and devices

they make.

As soon as a developer comes up with a potentially useful digital

technology, he (yes, usually a he) runs to a venture capitalist or invest-

ment banker for funds. Those funders then run the show. Satised

with nothing less than 100x returns on their money, they push the

founders to “pivot” the business toward outlandish, “home run” out-

comes. The object of the game is not to create a successful business,

but to “exit” through an IPO or acquisition before the business fails.

In spite of their abuse of the environmentalist’s lexicon, they do not

create sustainable “ecosystems” at all, but scorched-earth monopolies

through which no one—no one—gets to create or exchange value.

That doesn’t really matter. All they have to do is extract enough

value from people and places in order to sell themselves to someone

else—or leverage their monopoly in one market (like books or taxis)

to another one (like movies or robotic vehicles).

Looked at from a digital perspective, these companies are really

just software, optimized to extract as much value as they can from the

real world, and convert it into share price for their investors. They

take real, working, circulating currency, and turn it into frozen, static,

useless capital. That’s the digitally enabled division of wealth, in a nut-

shell. It’s not truly digital; it’s not hands-on, connective, or a hack of

the underlying operating system. It’s the same old industrialism, being

practiced with powerful new digital tools. It’s also utterly inconsistent

with the underlying biases of digital technology. That’s why such

schemes tend to work against the interests of real people or communi-

ties, and are bound to fail in the long run.

Industrialism, an outcome of the Renaissance, worked pretty well

as long as the economy was growing. Based on the premise of debt-

based central currency—interest-bearing bank notes—the object of

industrialism was to grow the economy so that more money could be

paid back to lenders than was borrowed.

Industrialism replaced the peer-to-peer economy of the late

Middle Ages. Skilled workers were shunned in favor of low-cost

assembly line laborers. Local currencies that promoted friction-

less exchange were replaced by high-cost, interest-bearing money.

Human connections between interdependent producers and service

providers were overtaken by articial connections between brands and

consumers. Acquisition became a human value more important than

pleasure itself, as we all (with a bit of help from marketing psycholo-

gists) took on the characteristics of competitive businesses in our daily

lives and interactions. America became a Tupperware party.

All this was engineered simply to extract value from the periphery

to the middle—from the real and ground-up to the abstract stocks and

bonds of the already wealthy. All in accordance with the underlying

biases of the Renaissance: the centralization of power, the rise of the

individual, the emergence of the chartered monopoly, and the spread

of empires to new continents. People and places were just slaves and

territories.

The dominant digital economy—the one driven by venture cap-

ital, the stock market, and business as usual—expresses these values

and exacerbates all the same mechanisms, treating people and places

the very same way that Renaissance princes did. Algorithms exacer-

bate the extractive nature of our markets, while companies like Uber

and Airbnb leverage monopolies to disempower labor and neighbor-

hoods. Where territorial expansion once supplied corporations with

new room for growth, in the digital age the only new surface area is

human time, awareness, and data. People spend an increasing amount

of their lives in service of a digital economy that delivers them nothing

in return. Meanwhile, the best minds out of MIT and Stanford are

hired to optimize every device, app, and operating system to do this

more completely.

Of course, those left jobless (or simply incapable of generating

income through the same work they’ve always done for pay) are among

the rst to challenge the underlying assumptions of the rst, faux dig-

ital economy. To them—to us—the digital age is still the harbinger of

something dierent than business as usual. It oers not a mere ampli-

cation of the worst of capitalism, but the possibility for a state change:

something as dierent from corporate industrialism as corporate indus-

trialism was from the artisanal marketplace of the late Middle Ages.

Indeed, just as the Renaissance retrieved the values of empire from

ancient Rome, and re-birthed them as capitalism and industrialism,

might the digital era constitute a renaissance of its own? And if it does,

what values will it retrieve?

Well, if history is any lesson, today’s renaissance will retrieve

the values that were submerged and repressed by the last one. The

Renaissance obsolesced medieval attention to craft, quality, and per-

sonal connections among participants in the marketplace. Not only

were peer-to-peer currencies outlawed, but guilds were disbanded, the

commons were privatized, and craftspeople used to being paid for the

value they created became wage laborers working by the hour, with no

ownership stake in their enterprises.

Laugh all you like at the rise of artisanal beers and hand-knitted

sweaters, but these seemingly precious throwbacks augur the retrieval

of the medieval sensibility as surely as Burning Man, Game of Thrones,

and the newly expanded menu of body modications oered by the

piercing place at the mall. We are already retrieving the lost spirit of

medievalism in our culture and media.

The migration of this sensibility to our economy is next. And

necessary. Through the establishment of guilds, such as the Institute

of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, technologists are setting their

own standards for how they’ll apply their skills—and the price of the

NASDAQ is not on their list. Etsy retrieves the spirit of the peer-to-

peer marketplace, while the Creative Commons begins to compensate

for the privatization of shared intellectual resources.

Online favor-banks, time dollars, and local currencies retrieve the

possibility for direct, peer-to-peer exchange of value, while the block-

chain obsolesces the monopoly of central authorities over accounta-

bility and authentication.

Platform cooperatives—as a direct aront to the platform monop-

olies characterizing digital industrialism—oer a means of both

reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need

to work toward our collective good. Instead of extracting value and

delivering it up to distant shareholders, we harvest, circulate, and

recycle the value again and again. And those are precisely the habits we

must retrieve as we move ahead from an extractive and growth-based

economy to one as regenerative and sustainable as we’re going to need

to survive the great challenges of our time.

As the essays in this book make clear, the renaissance is on. Digital

is not simply a new high-tech tool to promote the agenda of the last

renaissance. It’s a good old human sensibility for bringing on the

next one.

7. OLD EXCLUSION IN

EMERGENT SPACES

JULIET B. SCHOR

It has been widely assumed by those drawn to the idea of platform cooper-

ativism that such platforms would help enhance gender and race diversity

and reduce the inequality that has often prevailed in the online economy

so far. But what evidence do we have that this would be the case?

For the last ve years, along with a team of PhD graduate students

in sociology, I have been studying platforms. We have been generously

funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which is interested in how dig-

ital technologies are aecting social life, opportunity, participation,

and social inequality. The research has mainly been qualitative: based

on interviews with people who engage in online platforms, or what

we have called the “connected economy,” as well as intensive ethno-

graphic research at connected economy sites. We started by concen-

trating on nonprot grassroots initiatives that were trying to re-shape

the way Americans get access to, exchange, and consume goods and

services, such as a time bank and a food swap. We later added educa-

tional and learning sites, such as online courses and workshops that

oer “upskilling,” and a makerspace. Then we moved on to the far

more controversial for-prots, such as Airbnb, and peer-to-peer car

rental sites. We’ve also been studying on-demand labor sites, including

TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Favor.

We’re interested in many aspects of these innovative arrange-

ments. How are they organized? Who is beneting from them? How

do people (on both sides of the markets) feel about them? What are the

dynamics of inequality and access that operate in these spaces?

Participants in the platform cooperativism movement have high

ambitions to create platforms that are owned and governed by their

users, that embody principles of equality and access, and that serve the

common good. They hope to develop “community” among partic-

ipants and to engage people in the maintenance of this community.

These are aspirations that are also shared by many of the innovators

and members of a number of the nonprot sites that we have studied.

There may be some shared challenges as well.

Consider three of our sites: the time bank, the food swap, and the

makerspace. The time bank is a volunteer-run and -led organization

that allows people to trade labor services on a purely egalitarian basis.

All types of services are welcome, so long as they are legal, and the

time bank has a wide diversity of oerings. They are all valued in

terms of the time it takes to provide them, irrespective of the market

value of the service; an hour of a lawyer or a plumber’s time is valued

at the same rate as that of a dog walker or someone oering a ride to

the airport. Similarly, in the food swap, people prepare foods in bulk

and bring them to trade with others’ preparations. There is no cost to

participate. Here, also, everyone’s food is valued more or less equally,

whatever its cost in terms of materials or labor; foods can be exchanged

at a one-to-one ratio for a roughly equivalent size. Our third site, the

makerspace, is also a place that attempts to create an open, accessible

site for people to learn to use a group of collectively owned tools, and

to become creative “makers.” The site oers classes and membership,

as well as a lively community of highly engaged individuals.

One of the central questions of our research is to assess the extent

to which the aspirations and ambitions of these sites are being real-

ized. Does an egalitarian trading economy work? Can it be expanded

to cover more services, more people, and more consumption needs?

Does the makerspace succeed at teaching skills and expanding its

community?

While there are many successes among our three sites, our research

also led to a troubling nding: all three cases are plagued with status-

seeking, subtle forms of social exclusion, and non-egalitarian behavior

that threatened the core goals of founders and members. They are also

all highly racialized sites in which nearly all participants are white. And

they are characterized by gender skews as well. The time bank and food

swap are strong-majority female. The makerspace is about two-thirds

male in terms of participants, but far more male in terms of power,

inuence, and the distribution of social status. Race, class, and gender

inequalities are pervasive in these sites, at times even threatening their

viability. Finally—and this is key to many of the dynamics—with the

exception of a few makers who gained their expertise outside the formal

education system, the people we interviewed and studied have dispro-

portionately high education and high parental education levels. This is

what Pierre Bourdieu has called “high cultural capital.”

Let’s start with the time bank. The time bank has a very white,

very female membership whose education levels, as well as parental

education levels, are “o the charts” in comparison to the U.S. pop-

ulation. One result is that, despite their ideological alignment with

the goals of the time bank, many members subtly undermine its func-

tioning. They do this by believing that their own time is worth more

than that of others, by failing to oer highly valued skills that they

have (such as computer programming) because they’d rather “work

with their hands,” or because they screen out potential trading part-

ners on account of grammatical errors or less-than-professional pres-

entation on the time bank’s website. In our research, we found that

people were often unaware of the ways in which their preferences were

undermining the egalitarian goals of the bank. Yet that behavior led to

a volume of trading being far below its potential on account of social

exclusion.

Low trading volume also proved to be a problem for the food

swap. Here, social exclusion took a fairly familiar form: snobbishness

around food. Founders and longer-term members were reluctant to

trade with newcomers whose oerings did not conform to a strong,

albeit unarticulated, ideal. The wrong packaging was often fatal to

one’s chances of nding trading partners. So was oering the wrong

type of foods. How one presented the food, the size of the oerings,

and the choice of ingredients were critical to making trades. Including

any processed ingredients, for example, no matter how artfully com-

bined or “re-mixed,” was taboo. In our research, near-moral condem-

nation of oerings that did not conform resulted in a collapse of the

food swap. Newcomers failed to stay as their oerings were rejected.

Even longer-term members eventually stopped coming. Socially

exclusionary practices among a homogeneous, highly educated group

led to the failure of this once-promising social innovation.

The makerspace presented a dierent kind of social dynamic.

Unlike the other two sites, it did have a vibrant community with high

demand for services. Many people took classes or joined as members.

Space was at a premium. On the surface, the site appeared to be highly

successful. But as we did our research, we discovered that it was dom-

inated by a small group of men who vied for status via a strongly

classed set of values. At the core of those values was what Bourdieu has

called “distance from [economic] necessity.” To gain high status at the

makerspace, one had to participate in a status system that denigrated

usefulness and functionality and valued esoterica, eccentricity, and a

certain kind of waste. Makers got status by creating items that would

be destroyed after a single use. They specialized in highly abstruse

sub-cultural knowledge. They created an exclusive community, which

screened out people whose making was ordinary, mundane, or eco-

nomically useful. In that way, quite unintentionally, they created bar-

riers for ordinary people. As a result, the site was culturally and racially

very homogeneous.

In our research on for-prot sharing platforms, we found a more

open trading landscape—it was easier for people to join and make

exchanges. However, we did also nd evidence of discrimination.

Airbnb hosts screened potential guests for educational credentials, evi-

dence of nancial assets, and the like. Some indicated they only wanted

to rent to people like themselves. On the other hand, dynamics of social

exclusion were stronger and more prevalent in the nonprot spaces.

So what’s the lesson of our research for platform cooperativism?

Historically, cooperatives have mostly been formed by working class

people who share a lot in terms of culture and history. That shared cul-

ture was crucial to their success. But platform cooperativism is coming

from a dierent social space. If platform co-ops are to succeed without

reproducing their own more privileged class, race, and gender homo-

geneousness, founders and early participants must be highly attuned to

subtle social dynamics that valorize the practices and traits of dominant

groups. Furthermore, they must stop those dynamics from developing.

Practically speaking, achieving that probably means starting with a

diverse group of founders and early participants—at the very least on

the social dimensions of class, race, and gender.

8. WORSE THAN CAPITALISM

MCKENZIE WARK

What if this was no longer capitalism, but something worse? Such a

perspective might help explain some of the features of the contempo-

rary political-economic landscape. My argument, odd though it may

sound, is that both capital and labor have lost ground to an emerging

ruling class, one that confronts a quite dierent kind of antagonist.

It helps to see capitalism as already a kind of second-order mode

of commodied production. First-order commodication emerged—

in part, at least—through the transformation of the relations between

peasants and their lords; the peasants lost traditional rights to arable

land and to the commons. In place of the (supposedly) ancient rights

and duties that held between landlord and peasant, in which the peas-

ant’s duties to the lord were paid directly with a share of the produce,

the peasant had to pay rent in cash.

First-order commodication was thus the commodication of

land. Pieces of land became abstract pieces of property that could be

bought and sold. Peasants lost traditional rights to land and saw much

of it enclosed and privatized. A “surplus population” of peasants ended

up in the cities, where they were to become the working class, sellers

of labor-power.

Capitalism was a second-order mode of commodied production,

built on top of the pastoral one that preceded it in the countryside.

One can forget that when David Ricardo wrote On the Principles of

Political Economy and Taxation, he wrote on behalf of a rising, urban,

capitalist ruling class and against the interests of a pre-existing, rural,

pastoralist ruling class. It was a study in intra-ruling class studies.

In opposition to the pastoralist ruling class, the capitalist ruling

class constructed a rather more abstract mode of production, one in

which not only land but labor and the factory could be elaborate forms

of fungible private property. With the destruction of the privileges

awarded it by the state, the landlord class became a subordinate ruling

class within capitalism, still extracting its extortionate ground rents (as

indeed it still does today) but unable to claim the whole of the state as

its own and to govern exclusively in its own interests.

The peasantry were, of course, no mere spectators upon their own

oppression, but resisted the landlord class, every so often rising up

against it. However, the peasantry tended toward a politics based on

ancient rights. The rise of the modern labor movement was a cultural

revolution that replaced the backward-looking peasant politics with

a forward-looking one, based on the evident fact of capitalism as the

dominant mode of production.

Such might be a more or less orthodox thumbnail sketch of the

rise of capitalism in Britain, where it rst arose. Of course, elsewhere

in the world it followed dierent paths. But rather than turn toward

the complicated business of pluralizing this historical sketch, I want

to do something dierent: to pose the question of whether there is,

on top of the second-order commodied mode of production of cap-

italism, a third-order commodied mode of production—what I will

call vectoralism.

First-order commodication, what I call pastoralism, made land

into a form of abstract private property relation. Second-order com-

modication, generally called capitalism, much advanced the abstrac-

tion of the private property relation into fungible things. Third-

order commodication, which I call vectoralism, extends abstraction

much further, subordinating information to whole new kinds of pri-

vate property rights, and in the process creating new kinds of class

relations.

On top of the class relation of landlords and peasants, and of cap-

italists and the working class, there is a relation between a vectoralist

class that owns the vector of information in one form or another, and a

hacker class that has to produce new forms of information that can be

made into private property.

This emerging class relation does not replace previous layers of

commodied abstraction, but it does transform them. Initially, the

vectoralist class enabled capital to outwit the working class in the class

conicts of the late twentieth century. The information vector was

what enabled capital to route around the power of labor to interrupt

production. The information vector enabled capital to draw resources

from a variety of sources at short notice. The information vector ena-

bled capital to develop productive resources remote from traditional

working class communities, with their historic memory and capacity

for self-organization.

In the short term, the vectoralist class was helpful to capital in its

struggle against labor, but in the long run, it is trying to subordinate

capital to itself. Take a look at the top Fortune 500 companies, or the

top “unicorn” venture capital darlings of the moment. With a few

exceptions, one nds iterations of the same thing: companies whose

power and wealth relies on stocks or ows of information, which con-

trol either the extensive vector over space or the intensive vector of an

archive of commodied information—so-called intellectual property.

Whether it is nance, tech, cars, drugs, food, or chemicals—often

the big companies no longer actually make their products. That can

be contracted out to a competing mass of capitalist suppliers. What the

vectoralist rm owns and controls is brands, patents, copyrights, and

trademarks, or it controls the networks, clouds, and infrastructures,

along which such information might move.

The rise of the so-called sharing economy is really just a logical

extension of this contracting out of actual material services and

labor by rms that control unequal ows of information. This con-

trol via the information vector is becoming more granular, working

now at the level of individual laborers rather than subcontracted rms.

At rst, the vectoral made capitalist rms subordinate. Now, where

they can, the vectoralist class replaces them altogether with individual

subcontractors.

Like all previous extensions of the abstraction of private property,

this one too produces its own internal antagonist. And like all pre-

vious antagonists, it never appears in a pure and self-conscious form.

Most peasants tugged the forelock and did what they were told, silently

cursing the lord under their breath. Most workers settled for some job

security and a weekend. Radical class-based movements are rare.

So it comes as no surprise that the hacker class is not particu-

larly conscious or organized or antagonistic either. But its frustrations

are real. The hacker class designs the information tools by which all

human eort is controlled and organized by asymmetrical ows of

information. The hacker can see her or his own job succumbing to this

tendency in the end as well.

The organization of the activity of hackers is built into the form of

code itself. Their eorts are compartmentalized and separated—black-

boxed. They work on alienated tasks just as workers do. Only they do not

work from clock-on to knock-o time. Even when they sleep they work

for the boss. They might in some cases be well paid, but in many instances

they are not. Their skills date quickly, and they are replaced by others.

Hackers won’t necessarily respond to the vectoralist class in tradi-

tional labor movement terms. A strike would hardly be eective given

that hackers can’t shut down production. The most frequent forms of

antagonism are more likely changing jobs, or stealing time on the job

for one’s own projects. Of course many dream of start-up glory, but

that dream quickly tarnishes when the hacker gets to see rsthand who

usually cashes out rst in such schemes.

The signicance of platform cooperativism is that it is a movement

that can place itself at the nexus of the interests and experiences of both

workers and hackers. Why not use the specic skills hackers have to

create the means of organizing information, but use it to create quite

other ways of organizing labor? Cooperatives have a long history in the

labor movement; indeed, in their origins, they looked back to forms of

peasant self-organization of the commons.

Why not re-imagine the cooperative on the basis of contem-

porary forms of information vector—but without the information

asymmetries that are the basis of vectoralist class power? That seems

like the thread of a political-economic project that both honors past

struggles and also addresses the distinctive form of commodication in

the age of the information vector as a private property relation.

The vectoral political economy is in many ways worse than the

capitalist one. It gives the ruling class of our time unprecedented

wealth amid growing poverty and despoliation. It enables that ruling

class unprecedented exibility in routing around strikes, blockages,

or communal strongholds. It has made the whole planet appear as an

innitely exploitable resource at precisely the moment when it is also

clear that the past products of commodied production are coming

back to haunt us.

And yet every advance in the abstraction of the form of private

property also opens up new perspectives on what may be held in

common, and how the common might counter-organize. The prac-

tical and conceptual experiments of platform cooperativism are a key

moment in the advance of this counter-organizing agenda.

9. HOW THE UN-SHARING

ECONOMY THREATENS

WORKERS

STEVEN HILL

The U.S. workforce has been enduring a long downward spiral for

nearly three decades. That’s how long it’s been since American workers,

in aggregate, have had a pay increase. Even as corporate prots are at

an all-time high, with signicant chunks of it parked overseas in tax

havens to avoid being taxed, not many of the benets of that labor

productivity are being returned to domestic shores.

A signicant factor in the decline of the quality of jobs today

has been the increasing reliance by many employers on “non-regular”

employees—a growing army of contractors, freelancers, temps, and

part-timers that form the precarious vanguard in a “freelance society.”

Any proposal to revamp platform capitalism and launch platform coop-

erativism is challenged with coming to grips with how technology is

changing the nature of work across an astonishing range of occupa-

tions and industries.

Meet Chris Young, an assembly-line worker at a Nissan man-

ufacturing plant in Tennessee. Young works alongside other Nissan

employees, but he works for a private contractor who now provides

a majority of Nissan’s workers. Young receives half the salary, less

job security, and fewer safety-net benets than the regular Nissan

employees, even though he does the exact same job.

Auto manufacturers increasingly rely on this kind of two-tiered

system. Nationwide, temps have provided nearly a fth of the job

growth since the recession ended. And increasingly, the temps aren’t

very temporary. Some have been employed at the same company for as

long as eleven years, resulting in the doublespeak term “perma-temps.”

Microsoft paid $97 million to settle a lawsuit for denying benets to

over eight thousand perma-temps.

Besides temp workers, another type of worker is known as the

“independent contractor.” Fritz Elienberg worked for ve years as

a full-time employee installing cable and Internet service for RCN

Corporation in Boston. Elienberg often worked ten to fourteen hours a

day yet he never received time-and-a-half for overtime. When a ladder

fell on his foot and seriously injured it, workers’ compensation would

not cover his medical bills. Why? Because RCN did not regard him as

a regular employee; instead he was an “independent contractor.” That

meant, legally speaking, he worked for himself and was not employed

by RCN. Elienberg sued RCN and the company promptly red him,

adding retaliation to his list of grievances.

The business advantage of using such non-regular workers is

obvious: it can lower labor costs by 30 percent, since the business is

not responsible for providing health benets, Social Security, unem-

ployment or injured workers’ compensation, paid sick leave or vaca-

tion, and more. Contract workers, who are barred from forming labor

unions and have no grievance procedure, can be dismissed without

notice. A small percentage of contract workers, especially in the tech

industry, earn high enough wages to make it all tenable, but most

are helpless tumbleweeds in the erratic labor market of the freelance

society.

Besides the explosion in the number of temporary and contract

jobs, nearly half of the new jobs created in the so-called “recovery”

pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Three-fourths of Americans

are living paycheck to paycheck, with little to no emergency savings

to rely on if they lose their job. Income inequality is now as bad as it

was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Incredibly, the share of

wealth held by the bottom 90 percent is no higher today than during

our grandparents’ time. It’s as if the New Deal had never existed.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN THE FREELANCE SOCIETY

Now a new and alarming mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and

Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic trend: the

so-called sharing (or gig) economy. Companies like Uber, Instacart,

Upwork, and TaskRabbit allegedly are “liberating workers” to become

“independent entrepreneurs” and the “CEOs of their own businesses.”

In reality, these workers also are contractors, with little choice but to

hire themselves out for ever-smaller jobs (“gigs”) at low wages and

with no safety net, while the companies prot.

Silicon Valley is redesigning the corporation itself. These gig

companies are little more than a website and an app, with a small

number of executives and regular employees who oversee an army of

freelancers, temps, and contractors. In the vision of the techno gurus

and their Ayn Rand libertarianism, CEOs want a labor force they can

turn o and on like the latest Netix movie.

For example, Upwork is an online business portal that acts

like an eBay for jobs, allowing each worker to hang out a shingle

to attract buyers of their services. A mere eight hundred employees

(two-thirds of whom are contractors) oversee an army of ten million

freelancers from all over the world who compete against each other,

scrounging for jobs in an online labor auction in which the bidders

oering the lowest wages usually win. The types of jobs on the auc-

tion block include website and app designers, software developers, logo

and graphic designers, translators, architects, engineers, and more.

Workers from India, Thailand, and the developing world compete

against developed world workers, undercutting each other’s wages. It’s

a race to the bottom.

As contractors, these workers don’t receive safety-net benets

because they aren’t “employees” of whoever hires them. They also

aren’t paid while they are hustling for their next gig, a never-ending

activity. Increasingly, these sorts of online job brokerages comprise a

bigger chunk of the overall work force. TaskRabbit, CrowdFlower,

Work Market, HourlyNerd (for hiring freelance MBAs), Thumbtack,

and Freelancer.com (all of which either currently or in the past have

used a similar online auction price structure) have innitely expanded

the geographic range and size of the contingent labor job applicant

pool.

With wages at, the quality of jobs declining, and the safety net

deteriorating, a whi of desperation has crept into the labor force.

Businesses large and small, whether in the traditional economy or

the sharing economy, are gradually distancing themselves from any

enduring relationship with the workers they hire. “Fissured” work is

an increasingly common feature of our outsourced economy. It’s how

more and more people are working, whether they want to or not.

Welcome to the Freelance Society.

THE UBER-IZATION OF WORK

Uber is the best known of these new kinds of businesses. It is nothing

more than a temp agency, in which the predominant job on oer is

that of a taxi driver (more recently Uber is trying other related services,

such as courier or delivery person). Drivers are not treated as employees

but as freelance contractors, and most drivers, after they subtract their

considerable driving expenses, don’t earn any more than taxis drivers.

Indeed, many Uber drivers complain they don’t earn minimum wage,

much less a living wage. They receive no safety-net benets and can be

cut o the app-based platform at any time. Recently Uber cut o hun-

dreds of drivers (and possibly over a thousand) in Los Angeles and San

Francisco because those drivers’ “acceptance rate” was too low. Many

veteran drivers have gured out that, given the increase in congestion

(in part stemming from the proliferation of ride-sharing vehicles on

the streets), drivers often don’t make any money on short rides because

they get stuck in trac. They have begun refusing short rides, so Uber

red drivers it deemed to be oending without warning.

If these workers really are the “CEOs of their own driving busi-

ness,” as Uber likes to claim, shouldn’t they be able to refuse a ride they

know will cause them to lose money? This incident and others seem

to support the legal claim by thousands of drivers who are suing Uber,

insisting they are indeed employees under the strict management of

Uber, not sovereign contractors. As an employer, Uber would be

responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare contributions for

these workers, as well as unemployment and injured workers’ compen-

sation and driving expenses. This stark reality also points to the grave

need for the creation of a new ride-sharing platform in which drivers

have more control, either through outright cooperative ownership of

the platform or a binding contract negotiated by a union-type organ-

ization, such as was recently empowered in Seattle via new legislation.

According to Uber’s own numbers, most drivers work only part-

time and leave after a year. New drivers like the exibility, but after a

while they burn out, with frequent wage cuts and unfair treatment. In

January 2016, Uber slashed wages once again, this time by 30 percent

to about 50 cents per mile in some locations (after Uber’s 25 percent

cut of each fare is subtracted). If driving for Uber was such a great job

and paid halfway decently, wouldn’t more drivers last longer and drive

more hours?

Many businesses are increasingly relying on these types of oper-

ations as a core part of their prot-maximizing model. If this new

corporate model is left unregulated, it will destroy what remains

of a vibrant middle class. But fortunately there are solutions. One

that I and others have proposed is creating a “universal and portable

safety net.” Each worker should be assigned an “Individual Security

Account” into which every business that hires that worker would pay

a small “safety net fee,” prorated to the number of hours a worker

is employed by that business. Those funds would be used to pay for

each worker’s safety net.

We don’t have to wait for a dysfunctional U.S. Congress to pass

this new kind of deal. State governments and even city councils can

pass it, requiring local businesses to pay into Individual Security

Accounts for each worker. By modernizing the social contract, and

combining that with the creation of cooperative platforms and greater

economic democracy that can oer to consumers an alternative to

runaway capitalism, we would take major steps toward forging a world

in which most workers would be enriched by technology and innova-

tion, instead of being disrupted and deprived by a freelance society and

its “share-the-crumbs” economy.

10. SPONGEBOB, WHY DON’T

YOU WORK HARDER?

CHRISTOPH SPEHR

As we head once again into a brave new world, this time character-

ized by buzzwords such as “platform” and “mutual” and “decen-

tered,” it is worthwhile to remember the fundamental dierence

between the cordless drill and emancipation. Cordless drills came

into the world as a spin-o—of space travel, from there spreading

through earthly households and construction sites. Emancipation,

especially the emancipation of labor, does not. It does not emerge as a

by-product of technological development, and this still holds true in

the age of platforms and algorithmic capitalism. Yes, there are great

possibilities for redening the position of labor in the production

process. Yes, the force is strong in the new means of production, but

so is the dark side.

Should you feel discouraged from opening up a new plat-

form cooperative? No, not at all. But do not expect exploitative,

hierarchical, narrow-minded capitalism to roll over and die just

because you’re clever enough to program a platform of your own.

A new mode of production that could release the potential for

a less alienated, less exploited, less asshole-infested worklife will

not prevail just because it seems economically superior. Merely

embracing the change will not be good enough. You can’t win

by just being better. You have to change the rules, which implies

getting organized.

WORKING HARDER

SpongeBob: Mr. Krabs, you wanted to ask me a question.

Mr. Krabs: Yes, SpongeBob. Why don’t you work harder?

SpongeBob: I don’t know, Mr. Krabs. I don’t know!

To keep it brief and simple, listen to the master of brief and simple:

SpongeBob SquarePants. In the landmark episode “Imitation Krabs,”

the shortest possible explanation of the capitalist-worker relation is

oered when Mr. Krabs poses his most pressing concern: “Spongebob,

why don’t you work harder?”

This is what capitalism is all about: the capitalist (Mr. Krabs) buys

and pays for the worker’s (SpongeBob’s) manpower but owns all of

the product. The harder the worker works, the greater the dierence

between wage and creation of surplus value, the greater the prot. The

bulk of surplus goes to the pockets of the capitalist, enhancing his lead

in social power. Simple, right?

A common method for the capitalist to increase value creation is

handing the worker a tool (in SpongeBob’s case, the spatula and the

secret recipe), enabling the worker to be more productive. The worker

is dependent on the means of production, which are owned by the

capitalist, because the worker can only be productive through them.

Yes, you own a laptop and a mobile phone now; but in analyzing a

mode of production, the decisive question is not who owns any kind of

means of production but who owns the dominant means of production.

These used to be the factory, the machinery. They are now becoming

the big algorithms, the constantly adjusted and ever-developing vir-

tual machinery. If you own them, you’re the capitalist. If someone else

owns the majority of your company because you needed investors, or

if you depend on the platforms and algorithms owned by others, you’re

not the capitalist. (You’d “get cash, but they’d get the reins,” as Nathan

Schneider puts it.)

PAYING TO BREATHE

Mr. Krabs: Breathe on your own time. I don’t pay you to breathe!

Squidward: (unfolding his pay slip) What is this? You want me to pay for

standing at the cash register?

Mr. Krabs: There’s gonna be a few changes around here.

As passionate SpongeBob fans know, things improve very little in the

Krusty Krab. Even the fabulous turbo-drive spatula from the episode

“Help Wanted” never reappears once the “anchovies situation” is over.

Capital can be quite reluctant to push for progress. It costs a lot of

money, and once everybody has it, the gains in productivity go to the

consumer.

Throughout the history of capitalism, capitalists used to increase

their prots through changes that do not improve the means of pro-

duction but shift costs and burdens from the capitalist to the worker

or the society—for example, by claiming something as capitalist

property that used to be common property. In nineteenth-century

England it was land. In the twenty-rst-century global economy it

is information appropriated by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In

proto-industrialization, the cottage system (when the workers had to

work at home) allowed the manufacturer maximum f lexibility,

minimum responsibility, and low wages. Today, ubiquitous plat-

formization does the same. In many cases, its competitiveness

stems only from de-organizing and de-valuing labor.

This is not progress. According to Stephen Marglin (in his famous

essay “What Do Bosses Do?”), a method of production is technologically

superior (“progressive”) only if it produces the same output with less input.

There is no economic superiority in producing something cheaper just by

paying lower wages, by skimming labor costs through unpaid hours or

unrewarded density of work, or by making the worker pay for breathing.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as progress. It happens even

in capitalism, mostly when labor is organized and society is on alert

for externalization of costs (so that other exits are closed). While

competition may work as an incentive to apply progress, it is produced

outside competition: through cooperation, in spaces of non-eciency.

CHANGING THE RULES

SpongeBob: We are workers united! We’re gonna smash that with the

people’s hammer! And we’re gonna…wait…Squidward, what was that

other thing?

Squidward: Dismantle the oppressive system.

SpongeBob: Yeah, that one, too!

Ah, what was that other thing I mentioned above? Wait…yes: you have

to close the exits!

To push for economic transformation, for the cooperatives to take

over, you have to dene the game as ruled by progress. And as we

have learned, this means closing the exits, preventing the possibility of

thriving not by progress but by shifting burdens and costs to workers

and society. This cannot be done individually. Rules are collective,

and obtaining a change of rules means getting organized.

What we have to obtain is a bill of rights for the age of algorithmic

capitalism. First, we need a ght for new labor rights to force back the

new forms of exploitation that are running wild. Workers have a right

to know their fellow workers, especially in platform labor. They have

a right to balanced job packages; to a xed space of self-determined

labor as part of their job (expanding Google’s “20 percent time” to

all workers); to rules-based, democratic governance instead of com-

mand-based management. They have a right to a share in produc-

tivity gains; a right to log o; a right to work without surveillance.

That’s not only trade-union work. Palak Shah’s “Good Work Code”

or Trebor Scholz’ principles for platform co-ops are today’s equivalent

to the demand for an eight-hour day.

Second, we need new entrepreneurial rights—today’s equivalent

to the antitrust laws—to ght back the stiing power of size, nancial

markets, and incumbency. Network neutrality and equal rights for

cooperatives are essential, as is equal access to supply, services, pub-

licity, and clouds. Enterprises need a right to set up their own consti-

tutions and to represent their interests in the context of holdings and

investors. As Nathan Schneider writes, “A new economy will need

new public politics to level the playing eld between traditional cor-

porations and collaborative enterprises.”

Third, we need a legal framework for a new regime of accu-

mulation. This takes vision; it’s today’s equivalent of what a social-

democratic or socialist economic policy used to be. It means bringing

state and society back in, not only as neutral gatekeepers of economic

fair play but as a volonté générale that gives the economy a social purpose

and a base in democratic values. There is nothing neutral about the

actual economy. It is a complicated, systematized eort to reconcile

productivity with the privilege of powerful elites, dominant social

groups, and global coalitions. A democratic, cooperative economy

will likewise be a systematized eort to reconcile productivity with

equality, sustainability, and “the liberation of the productivity of all”

(as Bertolt Brecht stated in his lines on the “great production” in his

journals). This might mean public investment, public co-ownership,

and strong incentives for social enterprises.

Some of this might sound slightly awkward to us, since we haven’t

discussed it for a long time. But we have to have this conversation if

we want to implement cooperativism. I fully agree with Trebor Scholz

when he states: “This isn’t about some romantic attachment to the past.

This is about the language of labor and living within it, its cardinal

lesson, which is that in confrontation with the power of the employing class,

individual solutions are not working.” Or, as one person in the audience

at the Platform Cooperativism conference put it: “Please shut up and

grow some class consciousness.”

11. PORTABLE REPUTATION IN

THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY

KATI SIPP

While the app-based gig economy derives a certain sexiness from its

association with the tech world, the gig economy has existed oine for

generations. Some workers have been pushed into the gig economy by

circumstances beyond their control, while others have always chosen

and will continue to choose it, either due to the nature of their occu-

pations or for personal reasons. Workers in gig situations get new jobs

through the strength of their reputations; the dierence in the on-de-

mand economy is that workers don’t own their reputations.

“Just like domestic workers were tucked away in people’s houses,

digital laborers remain invisible, tucked away in between algorithms,”

said Trebor Scholz in his opening talk at the Platform Cooperativism

conference. This observation resonated with me, because I worked for

many years with homecare workers and their allies in the disability

rights movement, who have the slogan “Invisible No More.” One of

the big dierences between domestic workers and platform workers

(especially online-only platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) is

that the domestic workers have word of mouth, and references, and do

work that is geographically located in a specic place.

Most of us employed in traditional jobs have things like resumes,

coworkers that we can rely on for references, networks of people who

will tell us about jobs, and other advantages that help when we’re

looking for new work. I personally have changed jobs twice in the past

two years, and both times I took my reputation with me—through

word of mouth, through work-related networks, and yes, through

LinkedIn recommendations. In some ways, the platform economy has

the potential to be wildly democratizing, because more transparent

networks for nding work should mean larger numbers of people get-

ting new opportunities.

Many of these platforms don’t let workers have any control over

their reputations. I don’t want to sugarcoat the problems of reputa-

tion for workers with traditional jobs, but in some ways reputation is

much more punishing for platform workers. There have been many

stories about Airbnb, Uber, and others removing workers from their

platforms, with little to no notice or ability to correct problems. In

fact, Uber drivers are required to maintain a certain rating in order

to stay on the platform—a fact that few passengers know. Workers in

most cases lack the ability to challenge the stain on their reputations,

and sometimes they don’t even know why their reputations might

have suered. Platforms are highly dependent on customer ratings for

policing the quality of their workforce, but they haven’t gured out

how to correct for those same customers’ race and gender biases. It can

feel to the worker like it’s “one strike and you’re out”—and that arbi-

trariness just adds to the instability of gig work. In addition, reputation

isn’t portable. If Uber drivers want to change platforms and start deliv-

ering packages for Instacart, they have to start from scratch to build up

a good reputation on the new site—even though they are using skills

that are valuable to both sites.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and the oine gig economy reminds

us of that.

Meet my friend Dave. Dave is an actor who lives in New York

City. The nature of acting is contingent—even the longest-running

Broadway musical will come to an end long before the end of an indi-

vidual actor’s career. The same is true for movies, TV shows, commer-

cial work, recording audio books, and Shakespeare in the Park (or, in

his case, Shakespeare in the Parking Lot).

Like most gig workers, Dave has multiple sources of income

throughout the year—and to supplement them, he also works as a

catering bartender. In years when he books more acting work, he

might bartend less, but he’s been a steady bartender for a long time.

Catering is itself seasonal work. There’s lots to do in December, when

rich people or companies are having their holiday parties, but much

less in January. Catering managers know him, and they know he’s reli-

able. They keep calling him for jobs, even in years when he might be

turning them down frequently for acting gigs.

For Dave, one part of the solution to his “gig” insecurity is his

union, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television

and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA. The union negotiates multi-

employer agreements within different industry sectors—so the

contract for TV commercial work in New York is different from

the contract for recording audio books—but all the employers pay

into common health, benefits, and pension funds, on a per capita

basis. If Dave books a one-day commercial shoot, the ad agency

pays less into the pension than if he books a recurring role on a

TV show, of course, but all the money goes into one pension that

Dave will eventually be able to retire on.

It’s important for folks in the platform-cooperative community to

understand that there are existing worker-led organizations that are set

up to deal with multi-employer, disaggregated work situations—and

that we can build from their model, rather than starting from scratch.

Not every union was set up to deal with jobs in which workers stayed

with the same company for years on end. Lots of people are starting

to think about ways that workers can organize in the gig economy—

and I want to urge all of them to think about how to build reputation

best-practices into their eorts. A decent reputation system should be:

• Worker-controlled

• Transparent

• Reparable

• Able to take input from multiple companies (if that is relevant

to the worker)

• Resistant to bias and prejudice

• Fair in how it distributes rewards

• Correctable with improved behavior

• Equipped with some kind of a grievance process

Dave’s union was formed the old-fashioned way. Actors struck

in Hollywood in 1929, and then radio producers in 1939. The tech-

nological tools that actors have worked with have changed over the

years—and the union has transitioned with the new technology. Now,

for instance, it is organizing workers who voice video games, guring

out how to deal with new channels for distribution of content like

YouTube and Hulu, and taking on the digital advertising industry.

SAG-AFTRA hasn’t had to “solve” the reputation problem in the way

that online platform worker organizations will—but that is because

they are dealing with employers who want to see actors’ work through

auditions before they cast them. We don’t get to ask to see samples

of our TaskRabbit’s work assembling Ikea furniture; we choose them

based on their on-site ratings instead. Dave still relies on reputation in

his catering work, but that’s delivered through his existing (and oine)

personal network.

We are already seeing tech companies develop ways of aggre-

gating our online reputations—through sites like LinkedIn, Karma,

MakerBase, and Work Hands—but those platforms still haven’t caught

up to the best-practices of the oine gig economy. And let’s be honest;

you wouldn’t want a union that just exists to protect workers’ repu-

tations, just as we don’t organize oine unions only around issues of

worker reputation.

Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online

economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and pro-

tection into our other organizing work. We can’t let reputation man-

agement become disaggregated from the platforms on which workers

get work. So build a better mousetrap. We should take a lesson from

Dave’s union too, and build organizations that can evolve as the tech-

nology work evolves.

12. COUNTERANTI-

DISINTERMEDIATION

DMYTRI KLEINER

In Chapter 33 of Capital, Karl Marx introduces us to the character of

Mr. Peel, recounted from E. G. Wakeeld’s England and America:

A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations. Although

Mr. Peel’s story is one of early nineteenth-century colonialism, it

helps us understand what has become of the Internet and the so-called

sharing economy.

Mr. Peel went to Swan River in Australia to seek his fortune.

He brought everything an aspiring capitalist might need to start

accumulating surplus value and become a great capitalist: three

hundred people, including men, women, and children, to provide

the labor and its reproduction, along with £50,000, a large sum at

the time.

However, things didn’t work out for Mr. Peel, as Marx concludes,

“Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of

English modes of production to Swan River!”

Once arrived in Swan River, the three hundred people simply

went o and settled on the vast amounts of free land available, and

“Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water

from the river.”

He discovered that capital is not a thing but a social relation

between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

As Marx explains further, “Property in money, means of sub-

sistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet

stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the

wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his

own free will.”

Marx argues, “The means of production and subsistence, while

they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not cap-

ital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they

serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the

laborer.”

Mr. Peel’s capitalist class was not satised with their inability to

expand their mode of production into the colonies, and found a solution

in enclosure, described by Wakeeld as “Systematic Colonialization.”

Land was seized by law as public property and privatized, with no

free land available. Only those with wealth could be owners, and thus

everybody else needed to sell their labor to capitalists.

The early Internet was like Swan River. How can the modern Mr.

Peel make money operating Internet platforms, if anybody can do so?

If all the software and the networks were open and widely available,

then nobody could really make signicant prot. If the means of pro-

duction are available to all, then there can be no capital.

Like the colonies, the Internet needed to be systematically colo-

nized in order to create the conditions needed by capital. This was also

accomplished by enclosure. The original infrastructure was taken over

and brought under capital control, and decentralized systems were dis-

placed with centralized systems.

“Social media” and “sharing” platforms are two forms of this cen-

tralization, two business models for platform capitalism.

SURPLUS VALUE VS. SURPLUS PROFIT

It’s tempting to look at sites like Facebook and YouTube and conclude

that they earn their prots by exploiting their own users, who generate

all the content that makes the sites popular. However, this is not the

case, because the media is not sold and therefore makes no prot and

captures no value.

What is sold is advertisement, thus the paying customers are the

advertisers, and what is being sold are the users themselves, not their

content.

This means that the source of value that becomes Facebook’s

prots is the work done by the workers in the global elds and factories,

who are producing the commodities being advertised to Facebook’s

audience.

The prots of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value

has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but sub-

jected, captured as audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus

prots from other sectors of the ownership class.

Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own

no vehicles or real-estate, capture prots from the operators of the cars

and apartments for which they provide the marketplace.

Neither of these business models is very new. Media businesses

selling audience commodity are at least as old as commercial radio.

Marketplace landlords, capturing rents from market vendors, have

been with us for centuries.

Rather than subvert capitalism, “sharing” platforms have been

captured by it.

CONSENT-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

Capitalist platforms based on the sale of audience commodity and cap-

turing marketplace rents demand a sacrice of privacy and autonomy.

Audience commodity, like all commodities, is sold by measure

and grade. Eggs are sold in dozens as grade “A.” An advertiser might

buy audience commodity by thousands of clicks from middle-aged

white men who own a car and have a good credit rating with a certain

measure—e.g., 10,000 clicks.

Audience commodity is graded by what is known about the audi-

ence’s demographics. Platforms with business models that sell audi-

ence commodity require surveillance. Likewise, platforms that capture

marketplace rents collect extensive data on their users and providers in

order to maximize the protability of the platform.

A mandatory sacrice of consent is required to use the platforms.

When a user shares information on the platform, they may consent to

sharing that information with certain people, but they don’t neces-

sarily consent to that information being available to the platform’s sta,

to advertisers, or to business partners and state intelligence. Yet for

most users there are no practical alternatives, and they must sacrice

such consent in order to use the platform.

Corporations built to maximize prots are unable to build

consensual platforms. Their business model depends fundamentally on

surveillance and behavioral control.

True consensual platforms should have privacy, security, and

anonymity as core features.

The most eective way to ensure consent is to ensure that all user

data and control of all user interaction resides with the software run-

ning on the user’s own computer, and not on any intermediary servers.

COUNTERANTIDISINTERMEDIATION

On her blog, Wendy M. Grossman writes, “‘Disintermediation’ was

one of the buzzwords of the early 1990s. The Net was going to elim-

inate middlemen by allowing us all to deal with each other directly.”

Today, the landscape is dominated by many fewer, much larger ISPs

whose xed connections are far more trackable and controllable. We

thought a lot about encryption as a protector of privacy and, I now

think, not enough about the unprecedented potential for endemic

wiretapping that would be enabled by an increasingly centralized

Internet.

The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipa-

tory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more medi-

ated than ever before. If we want to think more about the conse-

quences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by

addressing the cause of this centralizing. The Internet was colonized

by capitalist platforms; centralization is required to capture prot.

Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by

capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be built

to capture prot.

The aw was, to some degree, a result of the architecture of the

early Internet. The systems that people used in the early Internet were

mainly cooperative and decentralized, but they were not end-to-end.

Users of email services and Usenet, the two most used platforms, did

not generally operate their own servers, on their own local computers,

but were dependent on servers run by others.

Servers require upkeep. Operators need to nance hosting and

administration. As the Internet grew beyond its relatively small early

base, Internet service came to be provided by capitalist corporations,

rather than public institutions, small businesses, or universities. Open,

decentralized services came to be replaced by private, centralized

platforms. The prot interests of the platform nanciers resulted in a

policy of antidisintermediation.

Just as systematic colonialization was developed to establish the

capitalist mode of production in the colonies, antidisintermediation

was developed to colonize cyberspace.

The basic strategy of antidisintermediation was formulated by

economists like Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian. Their inuential book

Information Rules encourages platform owners to pursue “lock-in.” As

they summarize on their website, “Since information technology

products work in systems, switching any single product can cost users

dearly. The lock-in that results from such switching costs confers a

huge competitive advantage to rms that manage their installed base

of customers eectively.”

Their advice was well received. Varian is currently chief econo-

mist of Google, while Shapiro was a deputy assistant attorney general

for economics in the Department of Justice.

Going back to an early Internet architecture of cooperative, decen-

tralized servers, as projects like Diaspora, GNU Social, and others are

attempting to do, will not work. This is precisely the sort of architec-

ture that antidisintermediation was designed to defeat.

Decentralized systems need to be designed to be counteranti-

disintermediationist.

Central to the counterantidisintermediationist design is the end-

to-end principle; platforms must not depend on servers and admins,

even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible,

run on the computers of the platforms users.

The computational capacity and network access of the users’ own

computers must make up the resources of the platform, so that on

average each new users adds more resources to the platform than they

consume.

By keeping the computational capacity in the hands of the users,

we prevent the communication platform from becoming capital,

and we prevent the users from being instrumentalized as audience

commod ity.

Thus, we leave Mr. Peel just as unhappy in cyberspace as he was

in Swan River, resisting the colonization of our communication plat-

forms by venture capital and paving the way for venture communism.

13. FROM OPEN ACCESS TO

DIGITAL COMMONS

DAVID BOLLIER

We are accustomed to regarding open platforms as synonymous with

greater freedom and innovation. But as we have seen with the rise

of Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, open platforms that are

dominated by large corporations are only “free” within the bounda-

ries of market norms and extractive business models. Yes, open plat-

forms provide many valuable services at no (monetary) cost to users.

But when some good or service is oered at no cost, it really means

that the user is the product. In this case, our personal data, attention,

social attitudes, lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities are

the commodity to which platform owners are seeking unrestricted

access.

In this sense, many open platforms are not so benign. Many of

them are techno-economic fortresses, bolstered by structural dynamics

that enable dominant corporate players to monopolize and monetize a

given sector of online activity. Market power based on such platforms

can then be used to carry out surveillance of users’ lives; erect barriers

to open interoperability and sharing, sometimes in anti-competitive

ways; and quietly manipulate the content and experience that users

may have on such platforms.

Such outcomes on seemingly open platforms should not be

entirely surprising; they represent the familiar quest of capitalist mar-

kets to engineer the acquisition of exclusive assets and mine them for

private gain. The quarry in this case is our consciousness, creativity,

and culture. The more forward-looking segments of capital realize

that owning a platform (with stipulated, but undecipherable, terms

of use) can be far more lucrative than owning exclusive intellectual

property rights for content.

So for those of us who care about freedom in an elemental human

and civic sense—beyond the narrow mercantilist “freedoms” oered

by capitalist markets—the critical question is how to preserve certain

inalienable human freedoms and shared cultural spaces. Can our free

speech, freedom of association, and freedom to innovate ourish if the

dominant network venues must rst satisfy the demands of investors,

corporate boards, and market metrics?

If we are serious about protecting human freedoms that have a

life beyond markets, I believe we must begin to develop new modes

of platform cooperativism that go beyond standard forms of corporate

control. We need to pioneer technical, organizational, and nancial

forms that enable users to mutualize the benets of their own online

sharing. We must be able to avoid the coerced and undisclosed sur-

render of personal information and digital identity to third-parties

who may or may not be reliable stewards of such information.

There are other reasons to move to commons-based platforms.

As David P. Reed showed in a seminal 1999 paper, “That Sneaky

Exponential,” the value generated by networks increases exponen-

tially as interactions move from a broadcasting model based on “best

content” to a network of peer-to-peer transactions. The most valu-

able networks, however, are those that facilitate group aliations to

pursue shared goals—which is to say, networks that are treated like

commons.

Reed found that the value of such “group forming networks,” in

which people have the tools for “free and responsible association for

common purposes,” to be 2

, where n is the number of members in

the network. That’s a fantastically powerful growth curve. His analysis

suggests that the value generated by Facebook, Twitter, and other pro-

prietary network platforms remains highly rudimentary because par-

ticipants have only limited tools for developing trust and condence

in each other. In short, the value potential of the commons has been

deliberately stied as part of the business model.

For all of these reasons, our imaginations and aspirations must

begin to shift their focus from open platforms to digital commons.

Self-organized commoners must be able to control the terms of their

interactions and governance, and to reap the fruits of their own col-

laboration and sharing.

From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of

the chief challenges that network-based peer production must meet if

we are going to unleash the enormous value that distributed, autono-

mous production can create.

A variety of legal and technological innovations are now starting

to address the structural limits of (market-nanced) open platforms

as vehicles for commoning. These initiatives remain somewhat emer-

gent, yet they are lled with great promise.

THE POTENTIAL OF THE BLOCKCHAIN

One instrument for converting open platforms into digital commons is

the blockchain ledger, the software innovation that lies at the heart of

the Bitcoin digital currency network. Although Bitcoin itself has been

designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private

accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is signi-

cant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective

action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of

a digital object (for example, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-

party guarantor such as a bank or government body.

This solves a particularly dicult collective-action problem in

an open network context: How do you know that a given digital

object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certicate, dataset, a vote,

or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and

not a forgery? By using a searchable online ledger that keeps track of

all transactions, blockchain technology solves this problem by acting

as a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast, distributed peer

network. This makes it far more secure than data kept at a centralized

location, because the authenticity of its records are registered among

so many nodes in the network that it is virtually impossible to corrupt.

Because of these capabilities, blockchain technology could provide

a critical infrastructure for building what are called “distributed col-

laborative organizations” (sometimes called “distributed autonomous

organizations”). These are essentially self-organized online commons.

A DCO could use blockchain technology to give its members specied

rights within the organization, which could be managed and guaran-

teed by the blockchain. These rights, in turn, could be linked to the

conventional legal system to make the rights legally cognizable and

enforceable.

One rudimentary example of how the blockchain might be

used to facilitate a commons: In the United States, former Federal

Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed

using blockchain technology to create distributed networks of solar

power on residential houses coordinated as commons. The ledger

would keep track of how much energy a given homeowner generates

and shares with others, and consumes. In eect, the system would

enable the ecient organization of decentralized solar grids, together

with a “green currency” that could serve as a medium of exchange

within solar microgrids or networks, helping to propel adoption of

solar panels. The blockchain amounts to a network-based architecture

for enabling commons-based governance.

SMART TRANSACTIONS

This eld of experimentation may yield another breakthrough tool for

forging digital commons: smart contracts. These are dynamic software

modules operating in an architecture of shared protocols (much like

TCP/IP or HTTP) that could enable new types of group governance,

decision-making, and rules-enforcement on open network platforms.

We are already familiar with rudimentary—and corporate-

oriented versions—of this idea, such as digital rights management, a

system that gives companies the ability to constrain how users may use

their legally purchased technologies, from movies on DVD to ebooks.

As the power of networked collaboration has become clear, however,

many tech innovators now recognize that the real challenge is not how

to lock up and privatize digital artifacts, but how to assure that they

can be reliably shared on open platforms in legally enforceable ways,

for the benet of a dened group of contributors or for everyone.

There are now many active eorts underway to devise technical

systems for deploying “smart” legal agents whose transactions would

also be enforceable under conventional law. These transactions could,

of course, be used to invent new types of markets, but they also could

be used to create new types of commons. Ultimately, the two realms

may bleed into each other and create social hybrids that conjoin com-

munity commitments and market activity.

A related realm of software innovation is trying to blend familiar

cooperative structures with open network platforms to enable collec-

tive deliberation and governance—“commoning”—through online

systems. Some of the more notable experiments include Loomio,

DemocracyOS, and LiquidFeedback. Each of these seeks to enable

members of online networks to carry on direct, sustained, and some-

what complicated discussions, and then to clarify group sentiment

and reach decisions that participants see as binding, legitimate, and

meaningful.

NETWORKS OF PEER PRODUCERS

In a natural extension of such capacities, open value networks, or

OVNs, are attempts to enable bounded networks of participants to

carry out crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of knowledge, and co-

budgeting among their identiable participants. OVNs such as Enspiral

and Sensorica have been described as an “operating system for a new

kind of organization” and a “pilot project for the new economy.”

These enterprises consist of digital platforms that facilitate new modes

of decentralized and self-organized social governance, production, and

livelihoods among members of distinct communities. The networks

are organized in ways that let anyone contribute to the project and be

rewarded based on their contributions—as measured by actual con-

tributions, experience, and other collectively determined criteria.

Unlike most commons, which are intended to serve household or

community needs, not market gain (e.g., commons for water, urban

spaces, open access publishing, FabLabs, and makerspaces), open value

networks have no reservations about engaging with markets; users

of OVNs simply wish to maintain their organizational and cultural

integrity as commons-based peer producers. This means open,

horizontal, and large-scale cooperation and coordination; responsible

stewardship of the shared wealth and assets while allowing individual

access, use, authorship, and ownership of resources where appropriate;

careful accounting of individual inputs and outcomes via a common

ledger system; and the distribution of fair rewards based on individual

contributions to the project.

These initiatives to create new technical, organizational, and

nancing opportunities for platform cooperativism are still emerging.

They will require further experimentation and development to make

them fully functional and scalable. Yet they promise to furnish attrac-

tive, potentially breakthrough alternatives to centralized, prot-

centric platforms. By providing more trustworthy systems for genuine

commoning and user sovereignty, these new forms could soon enable

digital commons—and hybrid forms of user-driven markets—to

surpass the value-creating capacities of conventional open platforms.

PART 3

AN INTERNET OF

OUR OWN

SHOWCASE 1: PLATFORMS

What would it be like to use a cooperave Internet? How would we

interact with it dierently? How would we protect our rights and meet

our needs? These projects answer such quesons in a variety of ways.

While not all are formal co-ops, they replicate exisng tools in fairer

forms, in addion to imagining new possibilies that cooperaon

makes possible. Some are sll lile more than an idea, while others

are earning millions of dollars in revenue. But they all demonstrate

that plaorm cooperavism is under way already.

Project Name: Stocksy United

Completed by: Nuno Silva & Brianna Welaufer

Locaon: Victoria, Brish Columbia

URL: stocksy.com

Stocksy is a stock photo agency providing royalty-free licenses on exclu-

sive photos via an online marketplace that provides sustainable careers

to photographers through co-ownership, prot sharing, and transparent

business pracces. Our content is curated to challenge the status quo

of stock photos. We’re very selecve of our photos and our members in

order to provide a premium product at an accessible price-point.

Each member owns an equal vong share in the company. We’re

organized into three classes: founders and advisors, sta, and photogra-

phers. Daily operaons are managed by execuve sta and employees

in a at decision-making structure to encourage ownership and enthu-

siasm for each individual’s contribuons. Our board includes directors

from each class. Any member can propose resoluons. Annual general

meengs are held to report, discuss, and vote on the business and

strategy.

We’re growing at a sustainable and controllable rate. Our founders

knew that growing too fast can oen lead to distracons from core

values. Markeng has been modest; we let our aesthec and word of

mouth be the most signicant driving factor for acquision. Tech and

product development grow out of necessity with an understanding of

what’s required to remain compeve and with careful thinking about

how things could be done beer and more eciently given our limited

resources. Our greatest innovaons have come from listening to our

customers and knowing how to do more with less.

Growth has exceeded projecons year aer year. We have a great

reputaon in the industry as having a premium brand and enviable

membership. Our members are seeing some of the highest revenues

they’ve ever seen; they will receive annual dividends that account

for 90 percent of the company’s prot. In a few years we’ll launch

video licensing and begin developing an innovave search soluon for

nding the perfect image.

Project Name: Fairmondo

Completed by: Felix Weth

Locaon: Berlin, Germany

URL: fairmondo.com

Fairmondo is an online marketplace owned by its users. It is open to

businesses as well as individuals, with no general restricons on what

products and services can be oered, except for illegal oers or oers

deemed unacceptable by our members. By contrast, through the pos-

ive promoon of products that fulll a set of criteria for “fairness,”

Fairmondo makes it easy for users to shop in line with their values.

These criteria are constantly open for discussion and improvement by

members and the broader user base.

Founded in Germany in 2012, Fairmondo is a mul-stakeholder

cooperave with open membership for every person who feels

aected by its acvies. Its statutes include a legally binding com-

mitment to uncompromising transparency and democrac account-

ability. The managing board is elected by the employees, to ensure a

culture of mutual respect within the operang team.

In September 2013, we launched the German marketplace run-

ning on our self-developed open source plaorm. To start o, we

focused on building a network of sellers to make the marketplace

valuable to customers. Currently, it oers over two million products,

the majority being books and media arcles. For nancing, we aimed

at keeping the business 100 percent in the hands of the crowd. Over

2,000 members invested over €600,000 to make it happen. While this

approach lends credibility, it also brings obvious challenges when it

comes to scaling.

Our next step is pushing forward: bringing Fairmondo to other

countries, in the form of autonomous co-ops owned by local users.

Through sharing resources on technical development and outreach,

we collaborate toward the goal of creang a true mulnaonal coop-

erave, strong enough to challenge the big players in e-commerce.

Project Name: Coopify

Completed by: Steven Lee

Locaon: New York City

URL: coopify.org

The goal of Coopify is to empower and assist low-income worker

cooperave members and entrepreneurs through the power of tech-

nology. It provides three key benets. First, Coopify creates a brand

for the marketplace designed to engage consumers to hire low-income

members of cooperave businesses, such as home-care workers and

movers. This, in turn, drives the second benet: more work for exisng

cooperave members and the ability to onboard new members into

the cooperave. More worker members means a faster path to sus-

tainability and increased purchasing power for cooperaves. And,

third, Coopify will simplify tasks for cooperave members. Currently,

cooperave members have lile to no technology tailored to their

needs and oen rely on manual organizaon and phone calls to book

appointments, receive payment, aend trainings, and other tasks.

Coopify eliminates these cumbersome processes by allowing mem-

bers to interface with the plaorm in their nave language (such as

Spanish or Mandarin), respond to customer requests by texts, manage

their own schedules, and receive payment—all on their smartphone.

Currently, the plan is to turn Coopify itself into a cooperave,

with shared ownership and governance.

There are three priority areas. We need to build the plaorm.

We need to sell the plaorm to potenal cooperaves who might

be willing to join. And we need to market the plaorm to potenal

consumers.

We’re starng small with a community—cooperaves—that

already has a built-in consumer base. We make their jobs easier and

hope to bring in more consumers. Going forward, we’d like Coopify to

be the go-to plaorm for New Yorkers to book services.

Project Name: Grapay

Completed by: Chad Whitacre

Locaon: Global, with headquarters in Ambridge, Pennsylvania

URL: grapay.com

Grapay oers payments and payrolls for open organizaons via the

Internet. Our value proposion is that we enable open organizaons

to comply with the global nancial and legal system. We compete on

mission because we ourselves are an open organizaon, and we com-

pete on cost because our fees are pay-what-you-want through our

own plaorm.

As a legal enty, Grapay is an LLC with a minimal set of owners,

just enough to get by. As an open organizaon in the free and open-

source soware tradion, Grapay is a benevolent dictatorship that

shares power broadly through public, open decision-making on the

Internet. Anyone willing to behave well is free to voluntarily collab-

orate in our work and share in our revenue. (See inside.grapay.com

for details.)

Grapay is funded from revenue. Our interest in growing faster

than revenue allows is oset by our diculty ng into tradional

capitalist or philanthropic boxes, by wariness of greed, and by the

example of successfully bootstrapped companies.

Grapay has processed over $1 million since we launched four

years ago. We’re proud of this modest accomplishment, because

we’ve achieved it while pioneering an open organizaon in a heavily

regulated industry. We’re even prouder of the way our open organ-

izaon has enabled people to nd not just economic support, but

meaning and purpose in a voluntary community of work—a commu-

nity that has already survived several existenal threats together.

Today, we process about $5,000 per month for about 150 projects

and organizaons. We don’t know how big we’re supposed to get,

nor how fast we’re supposed to get there. Our goal over the next

few years is to stay faithful to our mission: to culvate an economy

of gratude, generosity, and love.

Project Name: FairCoop

Completed by: Enric Duran

Locaon: Earth

URL: fair.coop

FairCoop is not about oering a specic service but building a full eco-

nomic ecosystem for a postcapitalist society. In this sense, the eco-

system is what is going to be oered, oering individuals, collecves,

cooperaves, and social companies a set of tools for connecng with

and supporng each other and anyone aiming to make real, radical

social change.

FairCoop does not have a legal enty at the moment, so there

is not a legal basis for ownership. FairCoin is a peer-to-peer crypto-

currency based in free soware, so in that sense nobody owns it;

everyone who has some faircoins and runs the wallet soware is part

of the decentralized ownership of the currency system. Governance

takes place in an open, parcipatory process through online assem-

blies every month and open discussions that can be accessed at the

Fair.Coop site.

Openness is the main characterisc of the FairCoop development.

Developers and acvists with strong will are the main elements for

building our iniaves and this community involvement and backing

signicantly helps nancial costs. The cooperaon and horizontal con-

text are also important to take into account. The nancial dicules for

the cooperave acvity have been resisted parally using the FairCoin

monetary hack, and we are organizing to add dierent mechanisms of

economic disobedience to generate constant incomes for the common

good.

FairCoop is sll in early development stages, but step by step

we are building the ecosystem. For example, FairMarket is an online

marketplace. Aside from our main focus we hope to extend the local

nodes network, which is the main infrastructure needed for deploying

resources at the community level, specially the FairFunds, which con-

sists of 20 percent of all the faircoins in circulaon, and which will

be distributed to commons-producing projects when the network

becomes strong enough.

Project Name: Member’s Media, Ltd. Cooperave

Completed by: Robert Benjamin

Locaon: Portland, Oregon

URL: membersmedia.net

Member’s Media is the equivalent of the Studio System for inde-

pendent lm and TV. Our direcve is to increase the quality, quanty,

and value of independent narrave media, and give the audience a true

voice in the creaon of content that is produced for their consumpon.

Member’s Media oers development and producon, as well as sup-

port, to aspiring micro-budget lmmakers from diverse communies.

The ulmate goal is to connect a large supporng audience with a slate

of high-quality, independently produced narrave content through an

online and mobile plaorm that is majority-owned by the users.

Member’s Media is a mul-stakeholder Limited Cooperave

Associaon or “Balanced Ownership Cooperave.” There are four classes

of patron owners (Supporter, Collaborator, Creator, and Mentor) and two

classes of investor owners (Investor and Builder). The organizaon strives

for the “golden mean,” balance between the interests of each member

class and the overall health of the cooperave. A comprehensive set of

founding documents provide the framework for how the community

interacts and supports each other’s eorts. During the startup phase the

Investor and Builder classes exercise greater control. As patron member-

ship thresholds are met, majority control transfers to the patron member-

ship classes.

Member’s Media is sll in the early stages of plaorm develop-

ment. Thus far, narrave support iniaves have been piloted through

exisng plaorms and services. There is a need for applicaons and

plaorm funcons specically designed for the demands of the inde-

pendent narrave community. We are currently fundraising in order

to complete the build of the phase-one plaorm.

Member’s Media is proving the power of cooperave pracces in

the creaon of independent narrave media. With more resources we

will also show the power of cooperave audience engagement. Our

goal in the coming years is to host a vibrant narrave media commu-

nity with members worldwide and to provide a home to stellar inde-

pendent narrave work.

Project Name: TimesFree

Completed by: Francis Jervis (CEO, founder)

Locaon: San Francisco, California

URL: mesfree.co

TimesFree is a plaorm for swapping services between trusted friends

without using cash.

Babysing co-ops swap sits between families using a simple

token system. They’ve been tried and tested for over y years.

Sharers save over $1,000 a year compared to families who hire casual

siers. But running a co-op with spreadsheets and an email list takes

up too much me. As well as taking care of all that administraon,

TimesFree will oer comprehensive safety coverage. Members will be

protected by identy vericaon, background checks and insurance.

Just xing babysing will make life beer for millions of families, but

co-ops oer a perfect model for sharing everyday services like dog

walking and other errands too.

TimesFree is currently privately held and will be working toward

benet corporaon status to help us connue to both serve our mem-

bers as eecvely as possible, and make safe and ecient coopera-

ve, cash-free sharing available to everyone.

So far, the company has been bootstrapped. I built the iOS app

(released in August 2015) in Swi, with a MongoDB-hosted back end.

A version for the Web and Android are next.

Delivering a user experience that’s as good or beer than “sharing

economy” plaorms like Airbnb, and handling user data—especially

identy and reputaon informaon, once we start oering services

like background checks—are my biggest priories for developing the

next iteraons of the service. The “sharing economy” so far has g-

ured out how to make cooperaon easy and safe, and it’s me to build

plaorms for real sharing on that scale or bigger. We’re only beginning

to see the possibilies for real, money-free sharing plaorms, and I’m

sll learning how creave people can be in what they want to share!

Project Name: Snowdri.coop

Completed by: Aaron Wolf

Locaon: Earth (incorporated in Michigan)

URL: snowdri.coop

This book took me to write, edit, and promote. To fund such work, pub-

lishers use legal and technical restricons to make access exclusive to

those who pay. Funding is necessary, but restricons have terrible side-

eects, including blocking sharing, discouraging derivave work, and

excluding people—ulmately, liming the work’s value. Snowdri.coop is

developing a plaorm to fund creave projects without arcial restric-

ons such as those listed above. Our matching pledge creates a network

eect: each patron’s monthly donaon to their favorite projects is based

on others joining them, such as a pledge of $1 for every 1,000 patrons.

This exible approach minimizes risk and maximizes collecve impact.

As a mul-stakeholder co-op, we propose three member classes:

the worker class made of employees of the plaorm itself; the pro-

ject class made up of those funding their creave work; the general

class made up of users who only donate. As the products are public

goods, the only exclusive value of co-op membership will be in

decision-making. Each class will have Board representaves, and

policy votes put to members will require approval from all classes.

As a nonprot, we have no stock; to get co-op membership, a user

pledges to the plaorm itself as a project.

Everything we do aligns with cooperave values including using

exclusively free/libre/open resources. We use the Haskell-based Yesod

web framework, create illustraons with Inkscape, and communicate

with Jitsi Meet and IRC. We’re an all-volunteer organizaon aside from

our web development contractor. We ran a fund-drive in 2014 and

connue accepng donaons toward our launch.

Since our rst public announcements in 2013, we’ve aracted hun-

dreds of test users and dozens of volunteers, but we face the same chal-

lenges as other projects we aim to support. Our published wrings and

research are interesng, but the real value will come with reaching a

working beta stage.

Project Name: Resonate

Completed by: Peter Harris

Locaon: Berlin, Germany

URL: resonate.is

Resonate is building a streaming music plaorm with a truly unique lis-

tening model—“stream to own”—which helps casual listeners become

dedicated fans. This plaorm in turn allows us to do something that

no other service can claim to do: pay musicians directly for every

single stream. The rst stream of a parcular song starts out really

cheap, while repeat plays gradually increase in price unl reaching the

normal price of a regular download.

Resonate is a mul-stakeholder cooperave where musicians,

fans, and sta share in prots and governance roles. For vong proce-

dures, it’s a one-member-one-vote structure, while prots are distrib-

uted according to the value generated by parcipants—various values

being the amount of streams among musicians, the expenditures of

listeners, and the me commitments of sta and volunteers.

Development has started in a number of areas: design, market

research, and technology. While signicant progress has been made,

we won’t be able to meaningfully sink into development unl we suc-

ceed in raising funds. Given the typical investor problem for all plaorm

co-ops, we’re going to seek our inial capital through crowdfunding—

in parcular, by reaching out through all the musicians and indie labels

in our network. We plan to make the enre campaign reect our values

by recruing musicians and listeners to fully parcipate in geng the

word out, and by rewarding volunteers through a points system that

may be redeemed in the future for streams or exclusive content.

We’re very proud of what has been accomplished so far. Design

and branding have been rmly established (while the site connues to

evolve), and numerous content items have been wrien and shared

socially as our Twier followers and newsleer subscripons con-

nue to grow. Addionally, signicant connecons have been made

with mulpliers wring on streaming royalty issues: hundreds of

indie musicians and a few labels have joined, and we have recruited

numerous sta and volunteers eager to dive into development!

Project Name: Loconomics Cooperave

Completed by: Joshua Danielson

Locaon: San Francisco, California

URL: loconomics.com

Loconomics Cooperave is an on-demand web and mobile app struc-

tured as a plaorm cooperave where the owners are local service

professionals who use technology to connect to a community market-

place to grow their businesses.

Owners pay a $30 monthly user fee that funds the business team

who market and operate the plaorm. Business team employees

are also owners and will eventually be paid market-rate salaries.

Execuves will have their salaries capped at 3.5 mes the median

income of San Francisco. This ensures that income is used to further

develop and market the plaorm in the best interests of the coop-

erave. Loconomics will aim to acvely counteract the tendency for

power to be concentrated at the top by creang an equal opportunity

for owners to parcipate in governance, empowering all owners to

inuence the acvies and choices of the organizaon, and integrang

the wisdom, needs, and ideas of a broad spectrum of its owners into

the cooperave.

We’ve bootstrapped the money needed to create the inial app

with reliance from a number of professionals who, along with the

founders, will be paid with loan payments over the next ten years.

There are no equity investors, and the owner-user fees will be able

to cover these payments easily when we reach a couple of thousand

owners.

We’re just nishing beta tesng the plaorm with a small group

of owners before an ocial launch in May 2016. We had one event

in November with about twenty-ve local service professionals who

were very excited about shaping the future of the plaorm. Most felt

that a $30 monthly fee to access the plaorm’s benets is a small price

to pay. We have a database of a few hundred potenal local service

professional owners and just as many potenal clients.

Project Name: NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperave

Completed by: members of the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperave

Locaon: New York City

URL: nycreic.com

The New York City Real Estate Investment Cooperave (NYC REIC)

is a democrac nancial organizaon that exists to secure perma-

nently aordable space for civic, small business, and cultural use.

Consistent with the principles and spirit of the cooperave

movement, the NYC REIC aims to make long-term, stabilizing, and

transformave investments for the benet of our member-owners

and our communies. We will: assist communies in raising the cap-

ital they need; work with community-based organizaons to plan

and implement their real estate development projects; and sup-

port local community acvism to ensure that the city emphasizes

aordable, community-controlled commercial space in its land use

decisions.

While member investments are the heart of the cooperave,

during the startup phase of the NYC REIC, charitable contribuons

support operang expenses. Once we have idened a few potenal

investment projects and properes, we are commied to engaging

with residents and community-based organizaons from the neigh-

borhoods where those properes are located.

We have been working together since May 2015. In just one year,

we have organized 350 members into seven acve working groups that

have met over 150 mes, raised $1.3 million in investment pledges,

and democracally elected our rst steering commiee. We have sup-

port from 596 Acres, Fourth Arts Block, Spaceworks, Brooklyn Law

School, and Fordham School of Law, and are in touch with groups that

have been inspired by us in six cies naonally. Our public meengs

have over seven hundred RSVPs, and we regularly reach capacity. We

know that this is at least a ten-year project. We know that we cannot

have the city we want without informed, acve residents. By building

a cooperave, we are educang, empowering, and shaping a powerful

group of New Yorkers who say: development without displacement is

possible.

Project Name: Robin Hood Collecve

Completed by: Akseli Virtanen

Locaon: Helsinki, Finland, and San Francisco, California

URL: robinhoodcoop.org

We oer distributed capital services, personal hedge funds, next-gen-

eraon opon structures, and a range of powerful nance tools for

everyone. Our moo: the king’s opons for all. We think that nance

is a place of creaon. More precisely, we build nancial tools for the

socially networked generaon—for new economic agents, doers,

makers, co-creators, and peers, who are also oen collecve, and

don’t have access to nancial tools or knowledge. We also explore

the polical and organizaonal potenal of nance, derivaves, and

securizaon.

We have dierent forms: a cooperave that is owned by its mem-

bers (Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperave); a startup owned

by the core team and its partners, who have commied to its special

purpose of building a next-generaon nance plaorm (Robin Hood

Services); and an open-source plaorm for distributed nancial tools,

owned by all of its users (Robin Hood Unlimited). This is a dynamic

organizaonal formaon that is never exhausted in its actual forms.

You can’t own a multude.

We started with the cooperave but understood that it was an

organizaonal form that belonged to the last century, to an industrial

understanding of sharing of risks and rewards. We needed a more

dynamic, more muldimensional, more distributed way of owning,

nancing, doing things together, and risking together. More equity,

more opons, more assemblage, more king’s deer for all—that is what

we are building now. Blockchain technology oers the perfect organi-

zaonal infrastructure for that.

We will launch the world’s rst hedge fund on the blockchain this

spring, and the next new nancial services—DotCom Mutual Unicorn,

HouseHold Union. and DistributedCapital—later in 2016. What makes

us most proud? What we do touches people’s imaginaon.

Project Name: Seed.Coop

Completed by: Rylan Peery

Locaon: Ithaca, New York

URL: seed.coop

Seed.Coop helps organizaons grow by providing tools and support

services for easy onboarding of new members.

Seed.Coop is currently held in trust by CoLab Cooperave and will

be structured in a way that meaningfully gives control and ownership

to a diverse set of cooperave members and stakeholders (see hp://

bit.ly/colab_in_trust for a full explanaon).

The prototype of the plaorm has been built via sweat equity by

core team members. CoLab Coop has provided sponsorship funds to

underwrite a percentage of the development. The steering team is

currently exploring outside funding sources and pilot organizaons to

accelerate development of the plaorm. Of parcular importance is

cooperave support among organizaons so that there are no silos

between orgs building membership. Instead, members share a symbi-

oc relaonship via a member “referral engine.”

We have built our rst prototype of the plaorm and are now

working on prototyping decentralized membership onboarding solu-

ons for specic partners. We expect that, in 2017, Seed.Coop will

be a cooperavely owned plaorm for member onboarding working

interoperably with plaorms like Coopify and The Working World.

14. THE REALISM OF

COOPERATIVISM

YOCHAI BENKLER

Cooperativism, or mutualism, has been in the repertoire of alterna-

tives to capitalism since nineteenth-century gures like Owen and

Proudhon. In some regions—the Basque Country, or Emilia-Romagna

in Italy—or industries—U.S. dairy farming, for instance—coopera-

tives have become major, sustainable parts of the region or sector. But

we have to be honest: cooperativism has not played a transformational

role in the past two centuries of capitalism.

Four dimensions of opportunity suggest that the future could be

dierent.

First, disruption. Things are very much up in the air. Uber is

growing dominant in personal-transportation services in the United

States, but Uber could still be the Friendster, or at most the LinkedIn,

of the on-demand economy if the cooperative movement moves fast

into a broad range of services. Historically, cooperatives have been

stable in the face of market competition where they did emerge, but

not suciently competitive to force their way into markets already

saturated by conventional rms. Conventions, imitation, and prac-

tice—not economic superiority—determined the presence or absence

of cooperatives. The moment of opportunity is now, when the organ-

ization of production is still in ux.

Second, we are in the cultural moment of cooperation. Wikipedia,

free and open-source software (FOSS), citizen journalism, and other

forms of commons-based peer production have made normal people

encounter cooperation and its products as a matter of everyday

practice. The decades-long insistence of expert economics that we

should think of ourselves as self-interested rational actors acting with

guile is bumping up against a daily reality that refutes it. Sciences,

from evolutionary biology through the social sciences, psychology, and

neuroscience, are all lining up to conrm that people are not the moral

midgets and sociopaths that populate game theory and rational actor

modeling—that many of us cooperate when we are in situations we

understand as cooperative, and compete when we are in situations that

we feel are competitive.

Practice and theory are providing the cultural framework within

which people can come to believe that cooperativism can in fact work,

on a mass scale, for important swaths of their Internet-mediated social

practice.

Third, commons-based peer production has provided a template

and experience with the possibility of large-scale enterprises managing

and governing themselves through online cooperative platforms. They

oer extensive and growing experience with how networked peers

govern themselves, allocate work and responsibility, and manage day-

to-day operations across time and space. Peer cooperativism shares these

core governance and organizational patterns with commons-based

peer production, but its dening feature, enabling workers to make

a living from their cooperative work, presents distinct challenges that

peer production has not had to face.

Finally, networks have destabilized the model of the rm.

Transaction costs associated with both market exchanges and social

sharing have declined; interactions once preserved for rms that com-

bined capital with contractual commitments for labor, materials, and

distribution can now be done in a more distributed form. This tech-

nological fact has underwritten the rise of the on-demand economy,

workforce management software that increases contingency, and out-

sourcing and oshoring no less than it underwrote FOSS, Wikipedia,

or SETI@home. It will not determine a more cooperative future,

but it does mitigate some of the most important barriers that histor-

ically hampered cooperativism. Uber and Airbnb both involve the

reallocation, through markets, of shareable goods: mid-grained lumpy

goods, put in service by people for their own use, but with excess

capacity. When those who enthuse about these platforms emphasize

that they have built the largest transportation or hospitality company

without building a single room or owning a single vehicle, they are

meanwhile pointing out that the barrier to eective scale for cooper-

atives—the need to invest concentrated capital—is less strictly con-

straining than it once was. Commons-based peer production has

shown us that software can be developed as FOSS, marketing can be

done peer-to-peer, and it is likely that the legal and political meaning

and contests over services will be fundamentally more legitimate and

less oppositional when the service is built by cooperating peers.

The combination of economic disruption and the opportunities to

capture new markets, a shared cultural imagination of the possibilities

of cooperation, and deep practical experience with online cooperation

as a practical solution space make this moment dierent than it might

have been two decades ago, much less in the heyday of industrial cap-

italism. Maybe.

There are real challenges before peer cooperativism can occupy

a substantial space in the networked economy. Peer production has

thrived on pooling voluntary contributions of participants who had

other means of making a living. This allowed commons-based peer

production to release its outputs mostly free of charge, as well as

“free as in freedom.” Peer cooperativism, if it is to become part of

the solution to the increased economic insecurity for the many in

the twenty-rst century, must be able to sustain cooperation while

charging customers and users a price and fairly distributing the pro-

ceeds among the peers. This is a challenge that commons-based peer

production did not face. The established cooperative movement has

shown that the challenge is not insurmountable, but it is real. Not least

among these challenges will be the need to mediate the driving ethic

of peer production, ensuring that its outputs are in the commons and

available for all, with the necessity of providing income to the peers

themselves. This will be easier for service models, as we have seen

with FOSS, than for information goods that do not have a clear service

model, like stock photography. Ethical coherence strongly suggests

that cooperatives providing information goods must develop models

of shared membership or service, rather than aim for building on an

“intellectual property” strategy that will separate these cooperatives

from the heart of the movement.

Cooperativism is not simply shared ownership, as are many

employee-ownership plans. It is, rst and foremost, shared govern-

ance. Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said “the trouble with socialism

is that it cuts into your evenings”; the labor involved in peer cooper-

ativism presents a challenge, although online democratic governance

platforms oer exibility, transparency, tracking, and discourse-ow

aordances that can make the load more manageable than it was for

physical world cooperatives. Some FOSS projects, like Debian, have

successfully developed a democratic process. Many others depend on

a charismatic-leadership model that may not translate well into the

domain of making a livelihood. The primary resource for platform

cooperativists must be the rich literature on commons governance

pioneered by Elinor Ostrom, which did in fact focus on collaborative

communities managing their livelihood resources together without

property rights or government laws. The growing work on gov-

erning knowledge commons is the best source of translating between

the Ostrom school and the experiences of online cooperation, albeit

without the focus on making money and distributing it.

The enormous literature on governance in Wikipedia will be

pertinent, for instance, because Wikipedia, unlike many other peer

production communities, has evolved into a body that has a respon-

sibility—cultural, if not economic—for an output. And Wikipedia

tells us that things won’t be easy. Combining lessons from the rich

literature on Wikipedia governance with the Ostrom-school litera-

ture must drive cooperatives to design not only participation, but also

mutual monitoring and dispute resolution systems, and in particular

aordances to permit nested power or subsidiarity—the organization

of governance at the closest possible level to where the activity being

governed is taking place, while coordinating across the cooperative.

The biggest likely divergence from peer production will be the need

to define membership more strictly. In cooperativism, as with

commons-property-regimes, it will be important to clearly dene

who members are, and place a higher barrier on membership than peer

production has done. This is so partly because the quality and timing

of outputs will be more critical, and partly because of the need to

maintain a reasonably dened universe of participants among whom

returns suciently high to make a real contribution to their livelihood

must be shared.

Decades of studies of cooperation tell us that communication

among members—particularly communication that humanizes mem-

bers to each other—is central, as is developing a shared identity. A

strong core of moral values, avoidance of an ethic of “I’m just here for

the extra few bucks,” and a clear commitment to fairness among the

members will be necessary to overcome the inevitable tensions associ-

ated with work and income sharing. Framing is important, and while

self-interest undoubtedly plays a role in any community, no eort that

appeals primarily to that self-interest will likely survive, let alone out-

perform explicitly self-interested models of investor-owned rms.

At no time in the two centuries since cooperativism rst appeared

as a conscious alternative model to modern organization of produc-

tion has it been more feasible. That it is feasible, however, does not

make it inevitable. As a movement, cooperativism will only succeed

by moving fast and decisively, learning from the near past, and sharing

our experiments and knowledge quickly and repeatedly in a network

of cooperatives.

15. THREE ESSENTIAL

BUILDING BLOCKS FOR YOUR

PLATFORM COOPERATIVE

JANELLE ORSI

Below, I describe three elements I believe should be encoded securely

into the legal structures of platform cooperatives. These are particu-

larly designed for cooperatives that aim to be of long-term benet to

their members.

Oh, wait. Sorry about my redundant sentence. I basically just said

that these elements are for cooperatives that aim to be cooperatives. That

is the purpose of cooperatives: to benet their members.

I had to start with that reminder because I think it’s hard for most

of us, having embedded ourselves into the dominant models of doing

business, to break away from certain notions about what a tech startup

should do and how it should work. It’s enormously challenging to

narrow in, with unclouded and unwavering focus, on just one thing:

to be of benet to a community of platform users.

I frequently hear people talk about cooperatives as if they are a

plugin that can be installed into a run-of-the mill corporate struc-

ture. But cooperatives are a completely dierent operating system.

They process things quite dierently, and their outputs are dif-

ferent. In a world where the dominant models of doing business

are widely recognized to be escalating inequality and destroying

the planet, we desperately need to build economic operating sys-

tems that achieve the exact opposite. Cooperatives can be such

an operating system if we build them with great care, adapt them

constantly, and install every possible protection from infection by

business-as-usual.

When I started practicing law eight years ago, I committed to

focusing my work on supporting cooperatives. I’ve now seen both suc-

cesses and failures among cooperatives, and I’m perpetually challenged

by questions like what makes cooperatives work and endure, and how

can they manifest true economic democracy? Of course, these ques-

tions merit multiple volumes. For now, I’ll share three things that I

would advise any platform cooperative to build into its legal structure.

Before I dive in, though, here are a few concepts that guide my

thinking on platform cooperatives:

First, platforms are us: Platforms aren’t just software applica-

tions and the companies that administer them. What gives a platform

value, in most cases, is the community of users that employ the plat-

form, along with the networks, data, and ideas they create. In other

words, what makes platforms so valuable is what we put into them.

Second, platforms don’t need to be treated as commodi-

ties: It’s easy to develop a platform fetish as a result of their seemingly

magical potential to create billionaires. Yet all along, it is the users

themselves, and the rents they pay to platform companies, that enable

the billion-dollar valuations. Cooperatives, however, exist to provide

benet to their members, and they do so by not charging rents to begin

with. It would make no sense for a cooperative to charge excessive fees

to users—it would just end up paying the fees back to the same users

in dividends later.

When the spell of the platform fetish has been broken, we can

go back to focusing on the primordial function of platforms: bene-

ting users. Maintaining this focus won’t be easy—not when we are

pulled back into business-as-usual thought patterns nearly every time

we interact in the world. This will get easier the more that we come to

be surrounded by other cooperatives. Less and less, we’ll nd ourselves

asking things like: How can we market to a wealthier class? How can

we raise prices? More and more, we’ll ask things like: What else can

we do to help our users? How can we lower prices? It sounds strange

at rst, but transitions like this can make us wake up every morning

feeling slightly more grounded and human than the day before.

In the meantime, we can install strong protections that defend

our cooperatives from even our own habitual ways of thinking.

Fortunately, cooperatives come with at least two pre-installed protec-

tions, which are built into cooperative legal structures: First, money

doesn’t buy power in a cooperative; cooperative members elect the

Board of Directors on a one-member one-vote basis. Second, money

doesn’t buy prots in a cooperative; cooperative members may receive

dividends, but the dividends are calculated in direct proportion to

money spent by or earned by each member, not on the basis of how

much money anyone had the privilege to invest. These are powerful

protections in a world where money seems to buy power and prots

everywhere else.

Beyond those pre-installed protections, I’d urge that a few other

principles be embedded into cooperative bylaws and policies. Here are

my three big building blocks:

1. Prevent the platform from being sold. Imagine that your

platform cooperative builds a vibrant community of ten thousand

dedicated member-users. Then a large company or investor comes

along and oers your cooperative $50 million to take over ownership.

Tempting, right? Each member could get a payout averaging $5,000.

But the potential for quick cash can blind people to their long-term

self-interest. A for-prot company could start charging higher fees to

users, selling their data, manipulating search algorithms to privilege

some users over others, and other practices that put users at a perma-

nent disadvantage in relation to the company.

It is critical to adopt strong safeguards against the potential for

the platform and any of its major assets to be sold into for-prot struc-

tures. A decision to sell major assets of the platform should require a

high threshold of approval, such as by 80 percent of members, after

what would hopefully be a long public conversation about alterna-

tives. I would even suggest that outside parties, such as a panel of non-

prots and other cooperatives, be given the opportunity to review

any proposed sale, veto it, or exercise a right of rst refusal to buy the

assets. Lastly, to remove a major incentive to sell to a company, I rec-

ommend capping the amount of sale proceeds that can go to members

and sending the rest to a nonprot.

2. Put a cap on pay-outs and compensation. In our competi-

tion-driven economy, a scarcity mentality has given many people—or

even most—an insatiable drive to accumulate wealth. Even a coop-

erative can get swept up in this dynamic if powerful stakeholders use

their leverage to extract value from the cooperative. Executives could

vie for higher and higher pay. Although cooperatives generally—and

preferably—do not allow for prot-maximizing equity investment, a

cooperative could still end up giving up too much to lenders or pre-

ferred shareholders. To prevent these possibilities from even making it

to the negotiation table, a cooperative’s bylaws should establish caps on

employee pay, investment return, and other payouts.

Where to set those caps? The platform cooperative Loconomics

uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cap employee pay at

3.5 times the median wage for all occupations in the region where the

employee works. In the Bay Area, the cap would be $165,000. Among

tech CEOs, that might sound like poverty. But to an average person,

that might sound like, well, a whole 3.5 times better than life as it

is. It’s all relative, and the notion of “enough” is completely lost in a

society with such dramatic income inequality.

When decisions are no longer driven by the desire to maximize

gain, I think that a desire to ensure that everyone has enough is the

ethic that steps in to replace it. True, a company won’t be able to attract

the kind of talent that thinks of everything in terms of commodities

and maximizing monetary prot. But it will attract talented people

who are smart enough and have enough self-awareness to know that

doing good work with good people is what makes for a good life.

If you hire someone who is driven not by prot-maximization, but

rather by a desire to do meaningful work, they will also be more intu-

itively oriented to the cooperative’s purpose of beneting members.

Which leads me to the third item…

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3. Adopt a sta trusteeship model of governance. Sta trus-

teeship is a governance model that views all sta members of the coop-

erative as trustees who manage the platform for its beneciaries, the

body of members as a whole. I believe that sta trusteeship is a natural

model for large cooperatives in particular. Democracy in larger coop-

eratives is often quite bare-bones, mostly limited to members voting

for directors. Members’ voices are easily lost if they are primarily

expressed through the election of a board that meets infrequently and

is not very tuned in to the day-to-day work.

In a sta trusteeship cooperative, every sta person becomes a

point of accountability for the organization, taking on responsibility to

listen to and amplify the voices of its members. Sta self-manage using

an internal governance and operational model such as Holacracy or

sociocracy, which distribute power among sta, removing inecient

hierarchies and ensuring a great deal of agency for each sta member.

In a sta trusteeship cooperative, the board of directors is still

elected, but it takes on a role that is more akin to that of a guardian,

overseeing the activities of the organization and ensuring that the sta

are tuning in to members in every possible way. Incidentally, sta will

generally nd their work far more interesting and rewarding in this

model. They are not there to merely execute the directives of a board

or CEO; they get to bring their full selves to work, to apply their

talents, engage their full potential, and work with members to solve

real-life problems.

The list of things I would build into cooperative bylaws is actually

much longer than the above, but I have emphasized just three here,

because I nd them particularly useful in jolting us out of business-

as-usual ways of thinking, and in getting us back to the pure focus on

being humans working to benet humans.

By the way, you can replace the word “platform” in this article

with “housing,” “land,” “workplace,” “water,” “food,” or “energy,”

and apply the same principles to any cooperative. The beauty of

platforms, however, is that they are far easier to cooperativize than,

say, land and housing. Platforms are us. We don’t need to mobilize

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enormous amounts of capital to build a cooperative economy in the

world of tech. We primarily need to mobilize ourselves to make dif-

ferent choices. Then, having done that, we will have built collective

power, which gives us a platform of a dierent sort: one on which to

launch cooperatives of all varieties to take back land, housing, water,

energy, jobs, food, and everything else that has been poorly served by

business-as-usual.

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16. SO YOU WANT TO START

A PLATFORM COOPERATIVE…

CAROLINE WOOLARD

Dear Founder,

I’m glad to hear about your idea for a cooperative platform.

Congratulations! I’m sure we both agree that a diversity of opinions

is a good thing, and that platforms should benet their participants,

as participation is what makes a platform valuable. What follows are a

few questions that I wish someone had asked me when I started four

multi-year projects, most of which continue to run today.

The projects I co-founded, for what it’s worth, are an

8,000-square-foot aordable studio space (Splinters and Logs LLC,

2008–2016), a resource-sharing network (OurGoods.org, 2016–

present), an international learning platform that runs on barter

(TradeSchool.coop, 2010–present), and an advocacy group for

cultural equity (BFAMFAPhD.com, 2014–present). I also helped

convene the rst gatherings of the NYC Real Estate Investment

Cooperative in 2015 with Risa Shoup and Paula Segal, and am

inspired by the ongoing work of the NYC REIC’s member-elected

steering committee and the open working groups.

I am sharing these four questions, along with bits of advice,

because I hope that you will succeed in contributing toward the

cooperative culture we want to see. To live in a democratic society,

we all need more experiences of democracy at work, in school, and

at home. Thank you for helping push the cooperative movement

forward.

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You will notice that a lot of what follows also speaks to founders

of nonprot organizations or social impact businesses. I am writing

this especially for young, educationally privileged people who

have big ideas but are newcomers to the neighborhood they live

in. This reects my own experience as a college graduate, waking

up to working class histories in New York City while trying to

build cooperative software and resource-sharing projects. It took

me a while to learn outside my immediate group of friends; to reach

beyond the academy and beyond the Internet to learn.

1. Can you make a platform for an existing co-op?

In a culture that values ideas over practices, it might be hard

to see the existing cooperatives around you. But, I promise you,

there are many systems of mutual aid and cooperation nearby. These

“platforms” are systems of self-determination and survival created

by people who have been systematically denied resources through

institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism (read about redlining if

you don’t know what that is). The credit unions, land trusts, work-

er-owned businesses, rotating lending clubs (susus), community gar-

dens, and freedom schools in your neighborhood may not have great

websites, but they are incredible cooperative platforms that you can

learn from and with.

These initiatives are often not lifestyle choices made by educa-

tionally privileged people, and will therefore not be written up in The

New York Times, but they are robust and powerful community networks

with organizers who might be interested in adding an online platform to

their work. Here is an often-overlooked challenge: try to join and add

to existing cooperative platforms, rather than building your own from

scratch. The result will likely last longer as it will be informed by the

deep wisdom of existing cooperative community norms, roles, and rules.

Perhaps we need something like the Center for Urban Pedagogy for

cooperative software—an organization that matches grassroots groups

with developers to build software that is driven by community need.

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2. Who will build the cooperative platform?

Let’s say that organizers at your local credit union, land trust,

cooperative developer, community garden, or freedom school are

interested in building an online cooperative platform to add to their

ongoing work. Or, they conrm your hunch that the cooperative plat-

form you want to build is necessary. How will you form a team that

can make this software come to life?

I have found that innovation occurs most readily in small teams

with shared goals but dierent skill sets. Big groups, on the other

hand, are good for education and organizing work, and for rening

existing platforms. But to innovate, I like to work in core teams

of three to six people, as this allows for deep relationships, shared

memory, and relatively fast decision making, since each person can

speak for ten to twenty minutes per hour in meetings. The collec-

tive Temporary Services says that every person you add to the group

doubles the amount of time it takes to make a decision. So, I say:

build a small group of rigorous, generous experts whose past work

demonstrates that they are aligned with the cooperative platform

you want to make. Ask the larger group to consent to the expertise

of your small team, and ensure that your small team will make room

for feedback from the big group along the way.

Now, build your team! Find people who are better than you in

their area of expertise. At the very least, you will need: 1) a Project

Manager to help with scheduling events, facilitating meetings, and

tracking budgets; 2) a Communications Pro to craft a clear message

and recruit people to try out the platform as it develops; 3) a Designer

(or two) who makes the front end beautiful, 4) a Developer (or two)

who develops the software and annotates it so that other people can

add to it in the future; and 5) Advisors—one per area of expertise

above, as well as more who have strong connections to the community

you aim to work with. Meet with your core team on a weekly, if not

daily basis, and with your advisors on a monthly or quarterly basis.

105

You are likely the Communications Pro or the Project Manager,

since you are reading this letter. Find advisors who are retired, or far

older than you, and who have seen the eld change and are widely

respected for their work. Learn about programming languages—

which languages (Ruby, Python, etc.) have active development com-

munities, and which languages are most likely to be interoperable with

future cooperative platforms. Find developers who have worked on

social justice projects in the past. If you are a nonprot with limited

funds, watch out for developers who want to get paid market rate, as

developers and project managers (like you) should believe in the pro-

ject equally and should take an equal pay cut. Watch out for developers

who say they can build the site in a public hackathon or sprint, because

if they do that it won’t be built well.

3. How much time and money do you have?

As you build your team, be honest with yourself about your

existing priorities, and the likelihood that your life will change in the

coming months or year or two. To gauge our availability to work on

TradeSchool.coop, we did an exercise where each core member wrote

a list of their top life priorities, including family, friends, health, vol-

unteer projects, art, hobbies, and day jobs. This allowed us to be more

honest with ourselves and each other about the amount of time we had

to work on our project, which parts of our life were unknown, and

also our reasons for doing the project.

Plan for turnover by having clear systems of documentation and

open conversations about how to bring in people who might join the

core team when someone has to leave. Be sure that the Developer(s)

code in teams, or that an Advisor looks over the code, so that it is

intelligible to your other Developers. Be sure that the Project Manager

and Communications Pro share leadership and responsibility, crafting

a clear process for new people to join the core team, moving from roles

of assistance to core membership in months. After a year of organizing

TradeSchool.coop, I wrote a manual to make sure our systems were

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clear. Ask yourself: do you want to get it done, or do you want to get

it done your way? This is the question that Jen Abrams, a co-founder

of OurGoods.org, brought to us from a decade at the collectively run

performance space WOW Café Theater.

4. What if you ran events and hired a community organizer

instead of building software?

Last of all, consider the possibility that you could make a greater

impact on cooperative culture and resource-sharing in your commu-

nity by hosting events rather than building a new cooperative plat-

form online. Software does not run itself; it must be maintained and

upgraded by developers who can easily make tons of money working

on non-cooperative platforms.

Remember that people won’t take the time to learn a new app

unless they need it daily. Remember that people are used to Facebook,

Google, Twitter, and sites that have legions of developers working

around the clock. Remember that hire number three at Airbnb was a

lobbyist. If you are starting out, build the smallest feature and do not

add to it. It will be hard enough to maintain and upgrade that small

feature.

Be honest about your ability to put in long hours and to raise the

funds to sustain the development and constant upgrading of online

networks for years. Until we have cooperative investment platforms

for cooperative ventures, you will have to look for philanthropic sup-

port or venture capital that might alter your mission and that will

rarely sustain the initiative for years.

If you can’t raise $300,000 a year for a core team of ve, don’t

build a demo site that barely works or buggy software that won’t last—

organize great events and build community! You can use existing

online platforms that your members already know. You can use your

funds to pay a community organizer instead. Not only will you sustain

the livelihood of a wonderful person, but the knowledge built in the

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community won’t return a 404 Server Error when someone needs help

next year.

In cooperation,

Caroline Woolard

PS: If you want more information, just email me at carolinewoolard

@gmail.com. I also put a lot of links to organizing, facilitating, and

horizontal structures in the How to Start a Trade School manual from 2012,

and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative’s REIC U working

group is making a long list as well. Look for it on NYCREIC.org!

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17. WHAT WE MEAN WHEN

WE SAY “COOPERATIVE”

MELISSA HOOVER

Is platform cooperativism a social movement or a market intervention?

I would argue it is both, but that we should clarify the distinct implica-

tions of each of those imperatives—how they could come into conict

with one another, and where they can intersect powerfully.

These questions—these tensions, and their power—are not unique

to platform cooperatives. They animate the cooperative form at its

core, as cooperatives sit squarely at the intersection of values and mar-

kets, organizing and business, community institution and economic

engine. Understanding this nexus with as much clarity as possible will

help us build successful platform cooperatives and the appropriate eco-

systems of support for them.

As we advance our thinking on platform cooperatives, there seems

to be some impulse to muddy the concept of cooperatives, even to

dilute it so thoroughly that it comes to mean “something we like,” or

“something based on values,” or “something not owned by outside

shareholders.” All of these are partially true, but none captures the

promise of the form completely. It is critically important not to dilute

the meaning of “cooperative” as we advocate for it on a broader scale.

Rather, we should let the concept’s clarity move us toward simpler

and clearer formulations of what we mean when we say “platform

cooperativism.”

At their most basic, cooperatives are values-based businesses

that operate for member benet, that are owned and controlled by

the people who do business within them. They are formed to meet

109

those members’ needs, and the nature of the members’ economic rela-

tionship to the cooperative determines what kind of cooperative it

is. Though centered on member and community benet, coopera-

tives are not nonprots; they operate in the market and are subject to

market forces, although they often arise where conventional markets

have failed to meet people’s needs.

Carrots can help us understand some of the types of cooperatives:

• If the members’ need is to buy carrots, they may form a coop-

erative that buys carrots in bulk and sells them to members.

This is a consumer cooperative: the members are con-

sumers, and the cooperative helps them access products at a

fair price.

• If the members are carrot farmers and their need is to sell their

carrots, they may form a cooperative that pools their car-

rots, sells them under a shared brand, and gets the best price

they can in the market. This is a producer (or marketing)

cooperative: the members are independent producers and

the cooperative helps them access markets to sell products at

a fair price.

• If the members’ need is for paid work, they may form a carrot

processing plant that buys carrots, adds value through their

labor, sells the carrots, and uses the income to pay members.

This is a worker cooperative: the members are workers and

the cooperative helps them access good jobs.

• If a cooperative is designed to meet multiple types of needs,

it may have multiple types of members. This is a multi-

stakeholder cooperative: carrot growers connect to carrot

distributors and carrot consumers in one holistic entity that

aggregates all three pools of membership.

Amazon, of course, isn’t selling carrots; it’s selling convenience

and logistics. Uber isn’t a taxi company; it’s a lobbyist, a loan shark,

a labor broker. Developing platform cooperativism past its infancy

110

stage—or more to the point, intervening in platform capitalism as it

reaches the terrible twos—requires a keen ability to discern what is

really being sold, how the money actually ows, and who benets. A

return to the fundamental questions that structure cooperatives—who

are the members, what is their relationship to the cooperative, and

how is it meeting their needs?—can sharpen our analysis, bring much-

needed clarity to a complex concept, and help identify eective inter-

ventions that center on worker and community benet.

Workers’ needs clearly are not being met by current platforms.

Platform capitalism removes any accountable mediator between capital

and labor: there is no management to petition, no corporate structure

to organize against, just the platform with its built-in discipline of

user ratings and a contingent labor pool fathoms deep. Meet the new

boss, same as the old boss—except without, you know, any actual boss,

just the unmitigated imperative of capital to return value to investors.

Cooperatives actually connect investors directly to markets, too, but

in a very dierent way: the investors are members of the coopera-

tive itself. This alignment of interests can capture the promise of the

platform—direct connection to distributed markets—while centering

worker benet as its reason for being.

In the context of the platform economy, the old distinctions among

types of cooperatives still matter immensely. Why? The relationship

between owners and employers remains at the heart of many platform

capitalism models, although the platform owners attempt to turn our

attention away from it. Cooperative forms inherit this challenge; they

don’t automatically solve it. Neither platforms nor cooperatives are

so revolutionary that they obviate the need to address workers’ rights

and protections. A platform—even when owned cooperatively—is still

simply brokering market access and labor relations. For these arrange-

ments to be fair, they need to be clear.

Platform co-op developers should think carefully about what kind

of cooperative they intend to create. For instance, there may be good

reasons to set up a platform cooperative of producers, rather than one

based in an employment relationship. Taxi drivers may want to retain

111

autonomy over their earnings and exibility of gigs; house cleaners

may want to maintain a direct economic relationship with a client;

both may want a platform to increase their access to a market. Owning

and controlling the platform as a cooperative of independent operators

ensures that it serves them, rather than extracting from them. For con-

sumers, producer platform cooperatives may oer greater variety or

availability of service providers, while uniting them under a common

brand that conveys trust or increases access.

Similarly, there are reasons to set up a platform worker cooper-

ative. Care workers and their clients may want the protections that

come from a client-facing employer entity; owning and controlling

the platform as an employment entity provides both the protections

of employment and the workers’ right to set the terms for a market

they rely on. For consumers, the accountability and reassurance

oered by an employer entity may be critical; people may be reluc-

tant to entrust their aging parents’ in-home care to a stranger from

the Internet, and only an institutional relationship can appropriately

mitigate that risk.

In any of these cases, membership is meaningful, equating to

ownership and control over the entity. A platform that doesn’t actu-

ally consider at a granular level the question of membership, its mem-

bers’ needs, and their relationship to the cooperative—one that uses

“cooperative” as some sort of trust mark not backed by actual coop-

erative structures—runs the risk of simply being part of the problem.

Marketing the brand without the structure could end up replicating

and reinforcing contingency and, more practically, resting on a very

shaky foundation as a business.

Millions of dollars of venture capital are pouring into platforms

designed to exploit our desire for convenience while destabilizing

entire workforces—and often still not achieving market viability. The

advantages of this platform capitalism, meanwhile, are being aggres-

sively marketed and consolidated. We must therefore be especially clear

about the added value of the “cooperative” in platform cooperativism.

Platform cooperatives will be worthy of consumer trust only because

112

they are structurally built on trust: members operating a business for

member and community benet.

In the platform context, the added value of cooperatives comes

from the democratic commitments that they operate around—and

clarity of purpose is necessary to build structures that operate in ser-

vice of those commitments. As we react to rapidly changing economic

and social structures, we can best retool our principles and our strategy

for this new world by keeping clear focus on some decidedly old-world

cooperative fundamentals.

113

18. A DIFFERENT KIND OF

STARTUP IS POSSIBLE

DAVID CARROLL

The standard template for creating a tech company has begun to crack.

In 2016, investors are funding fewer companies than before, and many

of those that have been funded are announcing layos as their exu-

berant valuations are adjusted to worsening market conditions. For

founders, it’s becoming increasingly dicult to raise new or subse-

quent rounds of funding, as investors regain leverage over the entre-

preneurs who have put their livelihoods, careers, and emotional well-

being on the line to pursue their big ideas.

Two years ago, after working on a sponsored research project with

my graduate students at Parsons, we decided to spin o our machine-

learning publishing platform into a tech startup. We worked according

to the only model we knew, where you sell your equity to investors

on a massive bet that you can become their mythical unicorn success

story. Like the 90 percent of new companies that you never hear about

because they fail, we didn’t win the startup lottery. While our business

didn’t succeed, we learned lessons about starting a technology com-

pany. We also noticed ways in which the landscape is already starting

to shift as new technology radically transforms and disrupts markets

and opportunities, yet again.

Today, I’m a recovering entrepreneur, still reeling from the side

eects of losing our bet. But if another opportunity to build another

technology platform presented itself tomorrow, we now have an

entirely new labor and ownership model to consider, given that the

co-op model is increasingly being adapted to technology platforms. In

114

many ways, the platform co-op model is well suited to counteract some

of the ownership and sustainability problems intrinsic to venture-backed

enterprises that we encountered rsthand. But near-future tech plat-

forms will be built upon rapidly evolving infrastructures and will require

sudden adaptations to new capabilities. Given technology to come, what

assumptions should be questioned? Platform co-ops need to be designed

for tomorrow’s marketplace, not today’s. Based on lessons learned from

starting a tech company, along with my academic research, I anticipate

that the following sets of challenges and opportunities will shape the

possibilities for entirely new categories of cooperative businesses.

Platform co-ops can benet from the bursting of the

content bubble. The Web suers from the dominance of can-

cerous impression-based advertising, and so new business models

for producing content are badly needed. The same pressure from

walled-garden social sharing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and

Snapchat monopolizing app audiences also threatens the viability of

the commons and the Open Web. Its content is largely supplied by

the legacy publishing industry to be consumed by conventionally prof-

itable audiences measured by impressions using invasive industrial

surveillance technologies. As people adopt ad-blocking software on a

linear growth curve past the 200 million users of today, the traditional

publisher business model is threatened. An increasing reliance on dis-

covering content through sharing on the big platforms’ news feeds

ensues. Impression metrics continue to drive the industry to overpro-

duction, leading toward the risk of a content bubble bursting. Platform

co-ops like Member’s Media and Resonate can seize upon this desta-

bilization as we seek new models for funding and producing media for

connected audiences.

App store opportunities are drying up. At rst, app stores

were a boon to independent newcomers. Now app stores are crowded,

and the select few apps that get installed on home screens compete for

our daily attention. App makers are increasingly struggling to sur-

vive on these over-saturated storefronts. Indeed, proprietary platforms

inherently conict with the philosophy of free, open, and decentralized

115

systems and so many cooperatives might reject these corporate market-

places that take a steep cut of proceeds, arbitrarily regulate access, and

concentrate platform market-share. But can you make a big enough

impact if you’re not on these devices? If you need to, how can you

earn a coveted home-screen spot or t into our communication habits?

What if you don’t need to build an app, but rather should be building

a modular service that integrates into the social communications apps

that already consume our attention?

Chat is the new interface for apps. What comes after apps?

As people spend most of their time in messaging apps and less and less

time in specialized app utilities, functionalities are migrating into our

conversational interactions. We are seeing how modularized services

are poised to replace apps, where the familiar functionality of apps

dissolves into the text messaging prompt of our preferred chat service.

Amazon expects its customers to verbally chat with its shopping bot

Alexa on their Echo home appliance. Facebook has planned to oer

publishers access to its Messenger platform to deliver news as a con-

versation with users. Slack dominates the workplace communications

pipeline and pioneered integrations with other services and bots to

meet workers where they already are. Text-based labor platforms like

Jana suggest that this is possible in the context of platform co-ops.

What if you could connect and support a platform co-op through chat

bots rather than relying on your potential customers to download and

keep using your app or remembering your website?

With articial intelligence maturing quickly, it will matter

more and more who owns it. Leading computer scientists predict a

50 percent chance that software will substantially write itself by 2050.

But we’re already seeing more machine learning capabilities woven

into the fabric of our daily lives. As apps and the Open Web gradually

give way to big platforms, we’ll see more and more people converse

with machines in natural language rather than tapping icons and na-

gling user-interfaces. It’s possible that the bulk of our utilities and con-

tent consumption will be further embedded into our messaging apps

as bots bump out buttons. What does this mean for platform co-ops

116

who need to capture the attention of people, communicate with them,

and transact following the prevailing business logics, and do this eth-

ically? There is an urgent and critical need to build AI platforms that

are co-owned and governed by the people who will use them for

more and more purposes. These crucial eorts will help alternative AI

software mature and develop toward an intelligence that truly repre-

sents us, not just the wealthy few who funded the earliest research and

development expenditures.

Cooperative online platforms need a free, open, and rad-

ically decentralized answer to the cloud. The cloud is expensive

and decentralized platforms are only now emerging. Platform owners

claim that the Internet is free, but the conation of free-as-in-libre

and free-as-in-gratis causes confusion. The corporate cloud, really, is

just someone else’s computer; it is at odds with platform co-op ethics,

especially when we realize we’re just renting access and computa-

tion. However, to deliver the AI-powered features that near-future

users will demand, applications will need to draw upon sophisti-

cated industrial-strength AI software services and harness powerful

clusters of data-mining server farms. This stu doesn’t come cheap.

Free, open, and radically decentralized AI isn’t a thing yet, but

blockchain-based platforms like Ethereum and Backfeed could oer

decentralized alternatives to the corporate cloud. More libre but not

gratis, as you’ll pay for decentralization with cryptocurrency. In its

infancy, Ethereum is far more expensive than the Amazon cloud but

with laughable performance and capability by comparison. Can you

aord to wait for the decentralized solution or do you accept that a

corporate cloud is presently your only viable high-performance and

aordable option?

Co-ops require novel legal frameworks. Starting a conven-

tional tech startup incurs tremendous legal costs that even make the

cloud seem like a bargain. Co-ops require complex legal negotiations,

which demand specialized legal expertise. With our startup, we sunk

some of our common stock equity into our lawyer and accrued addi-

tional, deferred, unpaid legal fees to build our entity and negotiate deals.

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And by the time we had a thick corporate book of complex invest-

ment and intellectual property agreements, we hadn’t even gotten to

writing up our privacy policy and terms of service, both of which would

have been unusually expensive because we didn’t want to simply adopt

aggressively invasive boilerplates. Without formidable legal prowess, the

business world can eat you alive, especially in software. Perhaps the most

important early innovation in platform co-ops will be free and open

legal frameworks and new attorney compensation models that eschew

the conicts of interest pioneered by Silicon Valley lawyers.

Platform co-ops can mitigate dark surveillance patterns.

Can you mitigate surveillance and dark AI patterns? Building

data-driven technology can be scary. It’s horrifying how easy it is to

build a behavior-tracking infrastructure with modern web frameworks.

Everything gets much worse when you have to extract payments from

people. The software and metrics begin to write their own behav-

ior-tracking algorithms. When AI takes over, particular attention has

to be paid to surveillance-related design elements. Unchecked, they

could pose grave dangers. Platform co-ops can succeed at building

privacy-positivity and basic decency into products and sell this as a

competitive advantage against venture capitalist-backed tech compa-

nies that lack such qualities because they practice what is increasingly

recognized as surveillance capitalism, the extraction of our data to

modify our behaviors at scale.

Learn from those who are succeeding already. Stocksy United

is winning by being a design-led co-op that serves its design-oriented

customers through co-ownership. Loconomics is gaining traction

in the micro-labor market by solving pain-points of customers that

VC-backed startups don’t even touch, such as certifying the safety cre-

dentials of service providers. Fairmondo is a platform co-op Amazon-

style retailer. But dig deeper to nd out who has already attempted

your idea and investigate why they failed. The site autopsy.io chroni-

cles failed startup stories. Timing is likely the most determining factor

for your success; something that failed before might work this time

around as conditions evolve and our expectations shift.

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The time is right for platform co-ops. East Coast and West-

Coast VCs have predicted 2016 as a year of price and value correction in

the tech startup world. Ultimately, extreme decentralization by block-

chain may prove ungovernable, at least initially. Governance and shared

ownership form the basis of platform co-ops, which are distinct from the

C-Corp, LLC, or even B-Corp (Public Benet Corporation). As tech

startup workers begin contending with severe tax penalties now that

their stock is underwater, re-priced by institutional investors in down-

rounds, the lure of laboring for VC-backed tech startups could begin to

wane. As Silicon Valley’s supremacy falters, platform co-ops purveying

new tech are well poised to oer a better kind of web, one that works

more equitably for the people that create and use it because it promotes

social justice rather than heralds dystopia as prophesied in science ction

co-ownership models.

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19. DESIGNING POSITIVE

PLATFORMS

MARINA GORBIS

In the early days of digital technologies, we did not have user-interaction

designers. Alan Cooper, one of the pioneers in the eld, wrote an aptly

named book lamenting this state of aairs: The Inmates Are Running the

Asylum. In those days, most of the software interface decisions were made

by engineers, and much too often one needed to be an engineer to use

their creations. Over time, interaction design emerged as a discipline with

a set of rules and conventions, so ordinary people could use many of the

previously forbidding tools. We now know where to put the buttons on

the screen and how many links to embed so that people can get to the

information they need.

Many of today’s on-demand work platforms are the beneciaries

of this body of knowledge. They have mastered the discipline of inter-

action design and brought it to new heights—when it comes to con-

sumer experience. Uber, Munchery, Postmates, and many similar apps

are exquisitely designed, sometimes even addictive for users. They

make previously laborious processes eortless and seamless. Swipe your

phone with a nger and voilà—your ride, your meal, your handy-man

magically appear.

But the apps are not only platforms for consumption. They are

quickly becoming entry points for work, gateways to people’s liveli-

hoods. In this sense, whether or not platform creators like it or realize

it, they are engaging in another kind of design—socioeconomic

design. This involves the design of how people structure their work,

earnings, and daily schedules. And here we nd ourselves in the same

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phase as interaction design was decades ago—the inmates are running

the asylum. The stakes, however, are much higher; instead of just con-

venience, we are talking about livelihoods. Herein lies the urgent need

to develop on-demand platform design as a discipline, and a discipline

that includes not only technological expertise but also the best thinking

from disciplines such as economics, political science, governance, and

others. Otherwise we risk ceding many key social choices about how

we work—what is fair compensation, who owns our work products,

data, and reputations—to platform creators. We embed values into our

technologies, and today such values are reections of Silicon Valley’s

ethos and funding models.

The design of “Positive Platforms”—online platforms that not

only maximize prots for their owners but also provide dignied and

sustainable livelihoods for those who work on them—is one of the

most urgent tasks we are facing today. Cooperative ownership struc-

tures give us an opportunity to shape on-demand platforms in a pos-

itive direction. After all, the polarization of economic gains between

platform owners and those who use their apps to earn livelihoods is

one of the biggest dangers in an economy dominated by platforms;

distributed ownership can go a long way in remedying this. Platform

cooperativism also contains promise of a more democratic governance,

with those working on platforms having voice and power to make

good economic decisions from the point of view of owners and plat-

form workers. By themselves, however, these levers may not produce

the desired outcomes. They need to be combined with careful atten-

tion to design elements embedded in platforms themselves.

Platform design choices should arise from the experiences of

people interacting with them, including consumers and platform

workers. To help think about the latter, the Institute for the Future

last year engaged in ethnographic research involving people who are

working on platforms in dierent locations across the United States—

San Francisco, New York, Miami, Chicago, and elsewhere. We wanted

to understand the variety of their perspectives and immerse ourselves

in their vocabulary. We recruited study participants with two criteria

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in mind: the degree of engagement or time spent on platforms (from

passively renting to working full-time) and degree of skill required

(from Uber drivers to those working on HourlyNerd).

Based on this research, we’ve begun to identify some principles

or rules that should guide designers in order to achieve more positive

outcomes for workers:

1. Earnings maximization. It goes without saying that any

platform, cooperative or not, should have a viable economic rationale

for its existence. In addition, however, platforms should and can be

designed to optimize opportunities for those working on them to earn

a good living. Connections between design choices and earnings are

not yet fully understood. Research has suggested, for instance, that

for some types of work people do not do as well nancially when

the platforms set minimum wages as compared to when workers can

set their own wages. Arun Sundararajan and others, as well as our

own observations, have found that platforms on which workers can

organize their own small enterprises, like Airbnb, rather than those in

which workers merely serve the needs of the platform, tend to generate

higher levels of incomes for platform workers. Many platforms can

go a long way in providing services and feedback loops to help those

working on them create more lucrative small businesses.

2. Stability and predictability. We are in a phase of proto-

typing and experimentation in platform design, a practice that is key

to Silicon Valley’s style of innovation. But in the case of platforms

this innovation has a direct impact on people’s livelihoods. Imagine if

every month you came to work and your salary were dierent; this is

exactly what many on-demand workers experience today. Participants

in our study, for instance, described shifting pay structures with only

a few days’ notice. Platforms should be structured in ways to mini-

mize such volatility or give workers sucient time or compensation to

adjust to forthcoming changes.

3. Transparency. We need transparency at two levels: at the

level of the platform algorithm itself (so that workers understand

how to increase their earnings) and at the level of archived data (so

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that those working on platforms understand how their personal data

is being used). Many people we interviewed reported how dicult

it was to gure out how to maximize their earnings on platforms

due to the general opaqueness of the algorithms powering them.

Workers may consequently have trouble calculating their actual

hourly wages or whether it is worthwhile for them to take on cer-

tain tasks.

4. Portability of products and reputations. Reputation is

what powers access to work and ability to earn incomes for those on

platforms. People working on platforms should be able to own the

products of their work and their reputation histories, and carry them

from platform to platform. Platform reputations are often directly tied

to earnings as well as opportunities for various types of work. This

is how one research participant describes the experience of “losing”

a reputation—as well as the accompanying confusion when a plat-

form was acquired by another company: “All of my portfolio links are

broken now, and I don’t think people can nd me anymore.”

5. Upskilling. While traditional career ladders may not be rel-

evant in the world of on-demand work, people still look for oppor-

tunities to increase their levels of skill and expertise. The best plat-

forms already show those who work on them pathways for learning

a particular skill and connect people to resources for advancement.

Upwork, for example, not only provides forums for people to mentor

and provide support for each other but also links them to free and paid

courses where they can acquire desired skills.

6. Social connectedness. Many of today’s workers are creating

communities outside of the platforms where they work to exchange

tips and connect with each other. Reddit, Facebook, Google Groups,

and other social media sites are becoming de facto places for this. As

one person we interviewed said, “I think it’s important for me to build

a relationship with the people that I work with.” Mechanical Turk

workers have come together on a series of forums not only to create a

sense of cohesion but also to advocate for their rights. Platform designers

can make this easier by enabling and fostering such communities.

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7. Bias elimination. Networks are at the core of what makes

platforms work. Unfortunately, networks can be exclusionary (due to

clustering of people with like minds and backgrounds) and polarizing

(because more connected nodes tend to draw even more connections).

In formal organizations, decades of labor struggles and court rulings

have established some basic rules and principles for non-discriminatory

hiring and promotion. We need to evolve such rules and principles in

platform environments. Platforms could integrate mechanisms for sur-

facing bias as well as eliminating it. Models for this come from some

recent startups such as Knack, which matches people to job opportu-

nities independent of their degrees or demographic characteristics, or

Unitive, which develops software that helps spot unconscious bias in

job descriptions.

8. Feedback mechanisms. It is hard to negotiate with algo-

rithms, and most platforms do not have HR departments for handling

the issues that those working on them encounter daily, from late pay-

ment to unfair reviews. Platforms need to establish feedback mecha-

nisms and equivalents of customer support services for those working

on them. “If I were starting an Internet company or designing an app

for something,” one of our respondents said, “I would say that we

must have phone customer service 24/7, and we must be able to guar-

antee payment.” As platforms come to dominate more sectors of the

economy, customers and workers alike will come to expect eective

means for providing feedback.

These are just some of the early principles we’ve been able to

distill for Positive Platforms. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that

platform design by itself will not ensure sustainable livelihoods. It is

just one of the levers, along with governance, ownership, and funding

mechanisms. Ownership by itself, for instance, may not guard against

natural network biases or unfair reputation systems. This is why, when

designing cooperative platforms, we need to think about technology

or interaction design along with governance and ownership design.

And let’s not forget that the platform infrastructure also sits within a

larger ecosystem of economic, social, and regulatory frameworks. We

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need to be thinking about platform design as a part of rethinking this

much larger ecosystem as well.

While in the past most value was created and owed through

formal organizations, networked platforms and protocols are becoming

the new operating systems for value creation. If before we needed layers

of management to coordinate activities—to nd the right people, allo-

cate tasks, and share information—increasingly these are being done

by algorithms. At least for now, these algorithms are created by human

beings, and the stakes for how we design them are high.

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20. CONVENIENT

SOLIDARITY: DESIGNING FOR

PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM

CAMERON TONKINWISE

Designers aim to make things easier, more productive, or more enjoy-

able. They do this by creating careful interfaces for products, commu-

nications, or physical and digital environments. When well designed,

in ways appropriate to the contexts in which they will be used, things

can:

1. Attract people to undertake certain activities, or to do those activ-

ities more frequently,

2. Bring focus to these activities, and

3. Make those activities more habitual.

It is important to see how these three things are related but also

how they oppose each other. To attract people to do an activity, the

design must t the activity with people’s current habits and expecta-

tions. If someone has to gure out new ways of doing something, it

might obstruct their willingness to follow through on that activity.

This is important when starting to think about the design of platform

co-ops. Sharing has always been an important aspect of being human. But

it has been marginalized by transactional, ownership-oriented systems.

Today, systems that are nonprot or cooperative feel less convenient

than commercial market oerings. That’s why design for platform co-ops

needs to be focused on attracting people.

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Until now, the design of such systems has leaned toward auto-

mating interactions, mostly as a result of the business-as-usual invest-

ment structures underlying them. Platform cooperatives resist the

extraction of prot that only benets the few by promoting systems

that focus participants on forms of sharing that can enhance the sus-

tainability of everybody in that ecosystem.

How can you design with the aforementioned tensions in mind?

TRADE-OFFS AND OBSTACLES

Some people do things, no matter how eortful, because they believe

in them. But many will engage in a new system only if it aords them

a chance to get something for little or no money or eort. Currently,

successful systems of sharing have taken advantage of smart mobile

devices to lower the eort involved: memberships, proles, and ratings

provide levels of assurance about the transaction; payment systems and

default communications are semi-automated.

I suspect that sharing interactions should always have at least some

of the awkwardness of encounters between peers who do not know

each other so well. An added advantage of designing to retain some

social eort in the interaction is that it disincentivizes those seeking to

scam the system.

In practice, this might mean interfaces that allow a range of

payment types. If the on-demand economy already involves paying

with contributed labor, social friction, and other costs, then inter-

faces designed for platform cooperatives should enable even greater

variability.

Ride-sharing applications already display dierent wait times and

costs for dierent qualities of rides. If extended to display other quali-

ties of those oering the rides—unionized drivers, drivers with health

care coverage included, drivers otherwise currently unemployed—

interfaces could aord convenient forms of solidarity; I choose to wait

longer or pay more to benet a certain kind of driver. Despite obvious

127

privacy concerns, such systems could also be used to discourage other

kinds of drivers. But such design systems allow customers to pay more

to subsidize particular in-need workers.

MEMBER PROFILES AND PRONOUNS

Sharing platforms promise, on the one hand, ways of exchanging with

strangers that are not solely money-based and, on the other hand, they

encourage re-establishing exchanges of goods and labor around new

forms of sociality, ones that are less conned and more cosmopolitan.

In many ways, the core of the political potential of sharing economies

lies in the new kinds of social groups that they can sustain. Prior to the

rise of digital platform-based labor economies, these groups tended to

be formal organizations, like community organizations, cooperatives,

or unions. Platform cooperativism presents the possibility that much

of the current sharing economy should be restructured around and

beyond these existing organizations. But the work required to sustain

such structures can limit involvement to those with the time and skills

to do so.

The interaction designer for platform co-ops should therefore

work to enable participants to create and maintain “lighter,” but no

less sustainable, communities. At the outset of what is now called the

sharing economy, many systems were membership-based: for instance,

Zipcar. Current mainstream sharing economy systems require partic-

ipants to have an online account, but most have dropped the rhetoric

of “member.” The dominant players continue to brand themselves as a

community, while users experience the systems more like customers.

There is an opportunity for platform co-op designers to revive the

project of establishing genuine community.

A pivotal touchpoint is the ubiquitous prole page. In the socially

embedded economies of platform co-ops, these play a crucial role

in presenting participants to each other. What information a form

gathers about someone, and then how that information is curated by

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an interaction designer into a prole that others can see, is axial to the

nature of interactions people in that platform have, including issues of

trust.

In the interaction design of an app, there is often uncertainty

about which pronoun to use to describe a user’s assets: “my photos,”

“your music,” “Cameron’s account.” The issue here is not just one of

usability, but of how to describe what it means to cooperate through

this platform. Platform co-op designers should make more strategic

use of “we” and “our,” thereby building a sense of collective own-

ership and mutualism rather than individualism into all aspects of

platforms, including the pronouns used to guide participants.

PROTECTING THE COMMONS

Commons are sometimes considered tragic because of the asymmetry

between individual and collective cost and benet. An individual

might take the risk of exploiting a common resource because the indi-

vidual benet is great, whereas the cost—distributed across many other

people—may not be noticed—unless everyone else similarly exploits

the resource. Because of this asymmetry, commons need to be negoti-

ated through conventions that are actively maintained.

Cooperatives formalize this need to protect the commons. The

interaction designer of more cosmopolitan labor platforms must nd

ways of encouraging these protective actions without overburdening

more distributed participants. The Internet plays an ambiguous role in

this respect. On the one hand, the “true identity” and traceability that

have resulted from monopolies like Google might ensure that indi-

viduals whose actions might be threatening a common resource are

identiable. On the other hand, the anonymity that characterized the

rst decade of the Internet lowered the costs of criticizing the actions

of an exploiter. Today’s interaction designers might therefore allow

participants in a cooperative platform to be at times identiable and at

other times anonymous or collective.

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The on-demand economy relies heavily on peer-rating systems.

At the moment these tend to take the form of crude numerical schemes

that are known to be ineective, biased, or simply poorly designed. It

is possible for platform co-op interaction designers to make the process

of peer-rating a more nuanced interchange. Opportunities exist for the

“service design” of interchanges among participants that can protect a

commons from degradation.

Designing platform co-ops is an exercise in achieving a new kind

of balance—between ease and eort, between individuality and col-

lectivity, and between privacy and transparency. Designers need to get

this balance right to ensure a platform that encourages constructive

negotiation among members for collective benet.

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21. DESIGNING FOR PRIVACY

SEDA GÜRSES

Taking privacy seriously is part of what it means to create a democratic,

accountable, and fair platform cooperative. This chapter explores some

of the questions that you, as a platform co-op developer, should be

asking as you design your organization and your platform for privacy.

Privacy is not just a technical matter; it is also a social and political

one. The tools and architectures you may deploy are not neutral and

may pressure the production of the platform in certain ways. These

complexities make governance structures that accompany the tech-

nical evolution of the platform key to developing a healthy and coop-

erative privacy design process.

I propose practical ways to organize just such a process. I draw on

what I’ve learned from seasoned platform cooperativists Felix Weth

(Fairmondo), Emily Lippold Cheney and Noemi Giszpenc (Data

Commons Cooperative), and Alex Rosenblat (Data and Society), who

studies how Uber drivers experience their work.

WHO DOES WHAT

In “sharing” economies, the organization of platforms tends to rely

on a dichotomy between developers and users—and a presumption

that the expertise and decision-making power lie with the developer.

For example, TaskRabbit connects “taskers” and “clients,” which they

refer to collectively as “users”; Uber says they “create opportunities …

and improve the way everyone gets from A to B” inspired by the

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journeys of their “users and drivers.” Consistently, developers are

depicted as the makers, and users as passive consumers that have to

make do with the developers’ choices.

Through the developer-user dichotomy, sharing-economy plat-

forms erase the material conditions, the experiences, and the needs of

all other parties that contribute to or are aected by the functioning

of the platform. They often externalize a number of social, economic,

and legal risks to the user, leading to a social sorting of those who

cannot bear these risks. For example, these platforms typically estab-

lish trust in their workers-disguised-as-users by exposing personal and

performance information. This means risks from these information

exposures, such as discrimination, are also borne by the users.

You can break out of the user-developer dichotomy by reecting

on your tools, introducing democratic processes, and addressing pri-

vacy issues that most platforms refuse to account for.

CO-OP INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE DIVISION OF

DESIGN LABOR

The platform, conceived predominantly on Silicon Valley’s terms, is

not neutral. How, then, do you design a platform for privacy with tools

and processes designed for the extractive data economy?

Felix Weth explained to me, for example, “We decided against

monetizing user data. That takes away the antagonism and allows us

to enter a conversation about how to treat user data.” This is com-

mendable but can also be challenging. Is your platform co-op tech-

nically equipped to operate analytics and authentication on its own

rather than through data-hungry third-parties? Development methods

matter, too: will you use agile development practices to create an envi-

ronment of incessant feature changes? What are some co-op–centric

development practices that can enrich the user-centric models?

Rather than reducing these questions to developer dilemmas

alone, ask the development team to work closely with the co-op’s

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constituents in rethinking how the platform will be aligned with the

values of the cooperative. A co-op may go a step further by explicitly

recognizing the ways that dierent kinds of participants contribute to

the advancement of the enterprise. This way your constituents’ col-

laborations and contributions can become integral to establishing the

trustworthiness and fairness of the platform, reducing the centrality of

individual worker performance and personal attributes as signiers of

trust. These contributions can be formalized in a governance model

that includes a privacy supervisory board to promote and assure the

accountability of privacy design decisions.

COLLECTIVE INFORMATION PRACTICES AS A

PATHWAY TO PRIVACY DESIGN

Once your governance structure is settled, you can iteratively ask these

three questions to guide your privacy design throughout the evolution

of your platform.

1. What are the practices and activities that will be mediated

through the platform?

Identifying the desired collective information practices is central

to determining the relevant privacy issues for a platform. For example,

should co-op members, clients, and other parties be able to send mes-

sages to each other using the platform? If yes, should they be able to

broadcast messages to all members? Should these messages be visible

to the public, to other co-op members, to clients, or to the platform

administrators? Why or why not? Do all parties understand what is

visible to whom? The answers to these questions determines which

privacy approaches may be appropriate.

2. What are the potential information ows associated with

your collective practices?

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In a naïve design, in order to enable those practices and activities,

your platform will collect information about all those who engage

with the platform and the surrounding environment. Environmental

indicators may include data to evaluate the performance of the tech-

nical platform, or metrics that capture the activities of co-op members

or clients. Map out and discuss how this information may be collected,

used, or shared with third parties. You will rene this mapping based

on your privacy design.

3. Which approaches to privacy design are appropriate for

the dierent practices?

This is the big one. Within it, consider the three approaches that

follow.

The privacy-as-condentiality approach oers publicly vetted tech-

niques that will allow platforms to minimize data collection and avoid

single points of failure. Oering members end-to-end encrypted pri-

vate messaging, for example, provides the co-op a protection against

coercion or unreasonable search-and-seizure requests from law

enforcement. Techniques based on encryption and secure protocols

may be indispensable for guaranteeing that platform administrators

cannot single-handedly compromise sensitive information related to

practices such as voting, anonymous participation, and reputation sys-

tems. One approach is to use trustworthy third-parties to run polls or

elections, in which case you should take measures to protect the data

collected by the third party and ensure the reliability of the results.

Privacy-as-control approaches focus on access control and trans-

parency. These include measures that the platform can implement to

assure accountability and compliance with data-protection require-

ments. Such mechanisms can also be used to provide platform users

with choices about data collection and processing.

Co-ops may face tensions due to conicts among legal require-

ments. Data protection laws require that platforms make transparent

what data they collect, process, and share, and provide controls over

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those ows. In contrast, co-op laws may require that members have

access to a detailed member roster. If you publish the roster, you

may inadvertently subject members to spamming, harassment, and

doxing, and risk the abuse of your co-op by commercial competitors.

These risks will most forcefully impact those who do not possess the

social, technical, and legal capital to bear the costs of those risks.

Further concerns may be raised when a third-party service is used,

like Google Analytics or Facebook Groups. Discuss with your co-op

dierent design solutions that allow constituents to control which

information is disclosed to whom while remaining compliant with

transparency requirements.

If your platform is also used to facilitate work, then the platform

potentially needs to comply with laws about workplace surveillance.

Privacy settings and the ability to log o without continued tracking,

as well as mechanisms to examine and dispute the data the platform

tracks, may be vital to providing workers a fair workplace.

Privacy-as-practice approaches involve design principles aimed at

respectful and accountable interactions among all co-op constituents.

Subtle decisions regarding whether legal names will be required, or if

anonymous participation is possible, may impact who is able to speak

and how they are held accountable for their actions. Design principles

like “social translucence” can provide creative alternatives for linking

workers and clients without exposing their personal attributes. A code

of conduct is also essential and should accompany technical mech-

anisms—describing platform norms, promoting a safe environment,

and outlining procedures for due process.

It is crucial to privacy-as-practice approaches to design the plat-

form in such a way that makes information ows, and their potential

consequences, intuitive. If fullling a certain task has an eect on a

worker’s reputation, or if an algorithm lters work bids based on select

criteria, this causality should be obvious to the parties concerned.

135

22. HOW CROWDFUNDING

BECOMES STEWARDSHIP

DANNY SPITZBERG

Crowdfunding can seem ideal for building cooperative platforms on

the Internet.

Intuitively, this makes sense. Desperation and necessity inspire

many of us to form co-ops. And because co-ops can only accept

non-extractive investment, crowdfunding can look like a great way to

start—a digital barn-raiser that builds community without tapping it

out. In practice, however, many co-ops struggle with crowdfunding.

I believe this is because marketing has skewed our view of crowd-

funding by inuencing how we think and feel about community.

What does “community” really mean here? Community is collective

action with a shared story. We join clubs, co-ops, and campaigns that oer

material benets—things that matter to us on a daily basis—and we stay

because of solidarity with our peers and a purpose we can achieve together.

The more we act collectively, the more we strengthen these incentives.

Incorporating as a co-op is a long way from building community.

While there is a grain of truth to the idea that co-ops are the orig-

inal crowdfunding, people experience co-ops through organizing and

campaigns, not bylaws or business plans. More important, we can’t

extract generosity. That is what marketing tries to do in platform cap-

italism. However, we can form relationships rooted in reciprocity and

generosity through cooperative arrangements.

I learned these lessons last year, when I partnered with Loconomics

to crowdfund their platform and grow their membership. On paper,

Loconomics had a beautiful model: a local services co-op owned by

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the freelancers doing the work. The user-owners get tools for booking

clients, a growing marketplace, and a dividend based on the co-op’s per-

formance. But the appeal of joining a co-op needed as much validation

as the platform itself.

To research needs, I interviewed a representative group of a dozen

freelancers—some with their own client base, and others nding odd

jobs on platforms like TaskRabbit. Nobody felt misinformed, much

less exploited, with what they get through on-demand service plat-

forms. However, they craved the feeling of belonging to something

bigger. A part-time plumber with a philosophy degree described the

ideal as “less a client base, more a partner base”—in other words, a

co-op. But would anyone pay to join one?

People give endless feedback on ideas, but only commit if they see

value. A sure way to make this shift is through opportunities for people

to test a prototype and express their emotions.

EMOTION WITHOUT EXTRACTION

“All emotion is involuntary when genuine,” according to Mark

Twain’s casual wisdom. I believe this rings true for anyone building

co-ops, maybe more than the rst cooperative principle of “voluntary

and open membership.” And for anyone who has run a crowdfunding

campaign, mobilizing genuine emotion can sound like dicult,

draining work.

After working in dozens of campaigns, I’ve seen a tension play out

between crowdfunding and membership. Crowdfunding is a one-o

moment of collective action, but when the projects that we care for

also take care of us, people come together and stay together.

How might we reinvent crowdfunding so that collective action

continues?

It’s tempting to search for answers on the Internet. But before

going online, consider the case of a real-life forest. Neera M. Singh,

author of a 2014 forest conservation study in Odisha, India, found

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a region that challenges the logic of paying individuals to manage

resources as market goods. She observed how villagers harvest only

what wood they need from the forest, and sing songs celebrating its

cool breeze, too. Singh concluded that community stewardship sus-

tains thousands of villages because people organize their labor both

eectively—forming accountable relationships around their work—and

aectively—developing shared identity in the process.

The story of stewardship in Odisha shows another side of crowd-

funding. While starting a project might depend on pooling nancial

contributions, sustaining it requires emotional investment.

Query your favorite search engine for images of “women laughing

alone with salad,” and you’ll see a cliché used to evoke health and happi-

ness. I suggest taking a look if you haven’t recently—partly because it’s hard

not to laugh at the fake emotions, but mainly because a similar caricature

shows up in how on-demand service platforms market themselves.

TaskRabbit, for example, portrays images of smiling helpers

cleaning kitchens while women hold babies. Unlike stock photos,

however, we meet TaskRabbit in real life. Their marketing may be

full of clichés, but on-demand service platforms are also full of oppor-

tunities for us to become emotionally invested.

Platforms like TaskRabbit leverage our emotional investment to

grow their user base. Their user experience is designed to delight us,

especially at key moments around transactions. When interacting with

a chef, host, or any service provider who loves their job or gig, we

enjoy acts of kindness that have little to do with rating systems. But

platforms do not support self-organizing. Instead, they leverage com-

munity activity to increase user engagement, and resist attempts to

leave. TaskRabbit charges $500 if you move any consumer-provider

relationship o its platform.

This is the norm in platform capitalism: products extract value

from transactions for outside investors. The platforms connect us to

resources more than they operate as a resource themselves or a place

to gather. In this context, our emotions are more like “laughing alone

with salad” and less like singing together in Odisha’s forests.

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The real issue with emotions lies with the conditions in which

they are extracted. Emotions on the Internet can be better under-

stood with Arlie Hochschild’s theory of “emotional labor,” which

describes how we adapt our emotional expressions in deep and

supercial ways to align with workplace rules. While Singh found

villagers laboring happily, defying market logic, Hochschild argued

more than thirty years ago that emotions get commodied in a cap-

italist service economy.

Looking at how emotions change over time, however, shows

how people become invested. Elizabeth Homan’s 2016 study of

worker co-ops found that embracing emotion ultimately benets

democratic participation. As individuals get comfortable expressing

themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners—their workplace and

co-workers feel like “home” and “family.”

Such transformative, humanizing experiences contrast with how

we relate to one another through marketing. These are also how

investment grows into stewardship.

BARN-RAISERS FOR STEWARDSHIP

Happily, my partnership with the Loconomics team ended with their

focusing on community before launching a product. To see what

invitation attracted people most, they swapped their full website for

a simple sign-up page. And to learn about user experience, they wel-

comed service providers and clients to events where they could try the

app, volunteer, or become owners. Getting together nally made it

possible to experience what a community might feel like.

At a minimum, community is a shared feeling of belonging. These

feelings well up when people come together, through book clubs and

parties, and they evaporate when the organization shuts down, puts

up a pay-wall, or simply has a change of heart. This precariousness is

easily overlooked, however, when a platform manages to balance user

satisfaction and extraction.

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Building community through crowdfunding plays out in a sim-

ilar way. It starts with a goal of mobilizing contributions from many

individuals. With enough incentives and excitement, the possibility

of passing a funding threshold triggers collective action. This usually

happens only once. Very few campaigns lead to what Hochschild calls

“deep acting”—our genuine emotions at work. Most campaigns fall

back on “surface acting,” the kind of behavior associated with fake

smiles. These campaigns strain volunteers, scare supporters, and fail at

their goals. And if a project does get funded, any future collective action

depends on whoever owns and controls the value created. Without

emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run

the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations.

For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-

raisers—regular activities in which guests can co-create with the gifts

they bring, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again.

Marketing strategies extract generosity by developing an audi-

ence, message, and call-to-action, leveraging one-way relationships. A

barn-raiser is an organizing strategy for a cooperative alternative that

involves people, invitation, and engagement (think p-i-e):

• Connect with people. Audiences are passive, but people put

emotion at the core of cooperation. Learn who might join the

eort, and what they’re trying to get done.

• Make an invitation. Messages are static, but invitations culti-

vate voluntary and open membership. Dene what you want

to celebrate, together—in person or online.

• Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but

engagement supports democratic ownership and control.

Seek participation more than nancial contributions.

By starting small and learning along the way, barn-raisers can

“grow the pie” for co-ops. This is how crowdfunding becomes stew-

ardship: raising expectations, embracing the challenge, and sharing the

value as community grows.

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23. ECONOMIC BARRIERS

AND ENABLERS OF

DISTRIBUTED OWNERSHIP

ARUN SUNDARARAJAN

In May 2015, I chatted with OuiShare’s co-founders Antonin Léonard

and Benjamin Tincq during their OuiShare Fest, the annual gathering

of over a thousand sharing-economy enthusiasts in Paris. I sensed a

tension at the Fest between the purpose-driven and prot-driven par-

ticipants: those who saw the sharing economy as a path to a more

equitable and environmentally sensible world, and those who were

excited by the massive infusions of venture capital into hundreds of

burgeoning sharing-economy platforms.

Léonard spoke of the confusion and disappointment he detected

from those who had hoped that the sharing economy would really

change the world. “And because there was so much hope, the ones that

were once so hopeful are now so disappointed, in a way,” he said. “But

maybe the problem is not so much how much money was invested, but

why did we have this hope?”

Tincq, while agreeing with the perception of growing disen-

chantment, was focused on a simpler point: that the shift away from

purpose and toward prot was driven primarily not by a change in

philosophy but by a need for growth capital. In his view, at the time,

for a nascent platform to bridge the early-stage gap and get to critical

mass, there was no practical alternative to venture capital.

Tincq’s point echoed a theme from a panel discussion I had organ-

ized about new ownership models at the 2014 Social Capital Markets

141

conference with Janelle Orsi, Lisa Gansky, and Adam Werbach. A

frequently raised theme was how the model of corporate ownership

lends itself naturally to the acquisition of large amounts of capital in

exchange for outside ownership. In particular, Werbach, a long-time

social entrepreneur and co-founder of Yerdle (a shareholder-owned

platform that facilitates the ecologically responsible exchange of house-

hold assets using a virtual currency), reected on the challenges he

faced looking for ways in which he could structure Yerdle as a coop-

erative while still preserving the ability to raise the external nancing

he knew would be necessary to realize his vision.

In light of these and other conversations, I nd the excitement about

platform cooperatives—especially in the form of sharing-economy

platforms owned by their providers and funded through mechanisms

other than institutional venture capital—both inspiring and conta-

gious. Presented with these new possibilities, it seems instructive to

examine why worker cooperatives mediate a relatively tiny fraction of

economic activity in the United States today. There were over 30,000

cooperatives operating in 73,000 U.S. locations in 2009, holding assets

over $2 trillion, and generating revenues of over $650 billion. While

this scale is not trivial, it is dwarfed by the corresponding success of

shareholder corporations. The Fortune 500—the ve hundred largest

corporations in the United States—collectively generated over $12.5

trillion in revenue in 2015, and the total 2009 cooperative take of $650

billion is less than the corresponding sum of the revenues of just the

two largest corporations, Walmart and ExxonMobil.

Economic theory suggests that worker cooperatives are more e-

cient than shareholder corporations when (1) there isn’t a great deal of

diversity in the levels of contribution across workers; (2) when the level

of external competition is low; and (3) when there isn’t the need for

frequent investments in response to technological change. This is one

reason why a U.S.–based worker cooperative like Sunkist (formerly the

California Fruit Exchange, an entity that has, since 1893, been entirely

owned by citrus fruit growers), has thrived, where other types of coop-

eratives have failed to emerge at scale. Perhaps the businesses that have

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fueled much of the world’s economic growth in recent decades have

instead been in highly competitive industries, leveraging specialized

high-variance talent and requiring large technological investments.

But if one thinks about it, today’s sharing-economy platforms

do exhibit some characteristics in common with Sunkist, and a

worker-owned equivalent to Lyft and Uber seems quite feasible.

Point-to-point urban transportation is a fairly uniform service in an

industry with a limited amount of competition. Once the technology

associated with “e-hail” and logistics is commoditized, which it will

be, the economic fundamentals for the emergence of a platform coop-

erative would appear to be in place.

More important, the network eects associated with ridesharing

are geographically concentrated. Thus, unlike platforms such as eBay

and Facebook, the barriers to entry posed by an incumbent platform

may not be onerous. True, passengers gravitate toward the platforms

with more drivers, and vice versa. However, these eects are localized.

Most potential passengers in New York care little about the scale of a

platform in Los Angeles or Minneapolis. They want the service that

has the densest supply in their own city. Furthermore, it is relatively

simple for a driver to “multihome,” or be a provider on multiple plat-

forms. In other words, each local market is contestable. The same is

true for many labor platforms, including those that provide domestic

work and home services.

As a consequence, instigating the emergence of a platform coop-

erative doesn’t involve getting millions or billions of users to switch

simultaneously. Rather, it might be seeded simply by signing up a few

thousand providers. One such eort under way as of the writing of this

essay is Swift in New York, a nascent ridesharing eort that hopes to

organize as a driver cooperative.

Despite these relatively low barriers to entry, a collective that

hopes to build a scalable platform business with a cooperative own-

ership model faces other challenges. During a panel that Juliet Schor

and I participated in at the Platform Cooperativism conference,

Schor highlighted an issue her research had uncovered about sharing

143

economy cooperatives: that their value system was often better articu-

lated than their value proposition. Put dierently, cooperatives tended

to focus too much on how the value would be shared rather than on a

compelling oer to create the value in the rst place.

Perhaps part of the solution will come from the possibility, cre-

ated by blockchain technologies, of “distributed collaborative organ-

izations,” or DCOs—new decentralized collectives that, in the eyes

of pioneers like Matan Field of Backfeed and Vitalik Buterin of

Ethereum, can use rules embedded in computer code to align the

incentives of dierent contributors, of nancial capital, of expertise, of

labor, and of participation. These DCOs are connected intellectually

to a variety of related decentralized ownership models. They range

from the FairShare Model of Karl Sjogren, which proposes a structure

of dierent classes of ownership shares for dierent contributors—for

founders, people with a continuous working role, for users, and for

investors—to the Swarm approach to “crypto-equity” crowdfunding

developed by Joel Dietz. If the rules for equitable value distribution are

well dened, generally accepted, and become “normal” in the same

way that employment for salary at a shareholder corporation was in the

twentieth century, perhaps the providers can then focus more of their

eorts on creating value.

However, as groups of motivated providers address the challenge

raised by Schor, and as experimentation and the quest for normalcy

across dierent platform cooperative and DCO models continues,

redistributing platform value using a more familiar route—stock

ownership—seem like a promising near-term prospect. In the United

States, employee stock ownership programs, or ESOPs, that share own-

ership with employees by allocating stock to them are quite common.

ESOPs create joint ownership as well as a form of prot sharing. And

the scale of an ESOP can be quite signicant. For example, in 1995,

the United Airlines ESOP owned 55 percent of the company.

Creating similar “provider” stock ownership programs—under

which providers are allocated shares in a platform—seems quite nat-

ural. An early example of a platform that aims to do this is Juno, a

144

ridesharing service started by Talmon Marco, the independently

wealthy founder of the messaging company Viber. Juno has committed

to ensuring that its drivers own 50 percent of the company’s founding

stock by 2026. And the scale of such wealth division need not be as

absolute. In early 2016, Managed by Q, a labor platform for oce ser-

vices, allocated 5 percent of its equity for its providers.

The parallel with United Airlines seems especially relevant

because its ESOP emerged as part of a negotiation between organized

labor and management, at a time when the company’s survival was

threatened by pilot unions. Sharing-economy platforms rely heavily

on motivated providers to maintain their brand by delivering a con-

sistent high-quality service experience. Granted, the prospect of auto-

mation will weaken the clout of labor in the long run. But in the near

term, dierent digitally enabled provider collectives, manifestations

of the idea of “new power” from Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms,

will likely increase providers’ bargaining power. As this happens, more

widespread provider stock ownership programs may well be a nat-

ural response, and perhaps the most pragmatic prospect for sharing the

wealth of the sharing economy.

145

24. THERE IS PLATFORM-

POWER IN A UNION

RA CRISCITIELLO

Venturing into the new world of platform cooperativism, to those of

us in organized labor, has felt a lot like making a deal with the devil.

Our new partners in the tech industry undoubtedly feel similarly

about us.

It is no secret that unions are dying. Private sector unions have

dismal density, and public sector unions are not faring much better.

Attacks in many forms—including what we’ve seen with court cases

like Harris v. Quinn, and now in Friedrichs—are legal blows that high-

light the forces assembled against workers. Organized labor has largely

retained its familiar tactics and worldview despite the reality that the

economic structures of employment have been turned on their heads.

If unions cannot solve labor’s woes, it may not be simply because

organized labor is dying, but rather because organized labor needs to

change.

That is why members of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West,

in partnership with a tech startup, are collaborating to create a work-

er-owned cooperative of licensed vocational nurses, or LVNs, who

can be dispatched on demand to patients’ homes through a mobile or

online device. Despite being skilled workers, LVNs in California—a

workforce largely of women and immigrants—have seen their work

prospects diminish, partly as a result of registered nurses expanding

their own scope of practice. LVNs can give vaccinations, treat wounds,

and deal with most low-acuity issues. But they need new tools to nd

clients and secure livelihoods. The tech company they’re working with

146

is a separate team of entrepreneurs who see the need, as the work-

er-owners do, to create an on-demand technology that values workers

as much as it values investors or the technology itself.

There are two paths emerging at the intersection of organized

labor and cooperative employment models. Both address the realities

of an increasingly casual and insecure economy that oers workers

scarce or nonexistent benets.

One is an industrial model of cooperative organizing. It looks at

how workers’ rights and protections are diminishing—benets like

workers’ compensation, health insurance, training and development,

retirement savings, and sick leave—and tries to ght that tide on scale.

This means creating a structure where those benets are not, as they his-

torically have been, contingent on a worker’s employment relationship

with a particular employer. The Freelancers Union, for instance, aggre-

gates the self-employed worker community into a visible industry. Aside

from the sheer naming and negotiating power that comes with uniting

formerly disaggregated workers, aliating with an organization enables

a self-employed worker to gain access to things like group-rate benets.

The second path is smaller-scale—fashioned after pre-industrial

guilds. Nursing within the LVNs’ scope of practice lends itself to the

guild model, where formal licensure and training is needed, and years of

apprenticeship and job placement can help advance the profession. The

worker cooperative is building the type of labor market that its members

want to see. As the members say in their founding mission statement, their

goals are “high-quality, convenient health care on-demand, to grow the

LVN profession as well as employment opportunities for highly-trained

LVNs, and to increase access to care.”

By monopolizing the labor supply in a particular narrow market,

organized labor can use the union worker cooperative model to enable

workers to own their own labor and enjoy portable benets, thanks

to a collective bargaining agreement between the cooperative and

the union. The cooperative guild can start on a manageable level by

restricting the co-op work to one classication (like the LVN), but it

can later scale to include multiple job classications.

147

What both of these paths signify is the potential for value when

organized labor and worker cooperatives team up in the “gig economy.”

Together, they can protect workers’ rights while also embracing the

exibility both in workers’ lives and in consumer demand that increas-

ingly seems to be the way of the future. On the ground, this has meant

listening deeply to workers and being honest about how employment

will continue to change.

During an early board meeting, one LVN described feeling

scared that her phlebotomist coworkers would soon be out of a job

if health care careers that require only a few months of training

become “on-demand-ed.” The truth is that she may be right.

Healthcare workers who do skilled work but whose positions

require less than a year or two of training will likely see their work

leave the connes of hospital walls. The LVNs are developing a

platform worker cooperative to get ahead of precisely that trend.

They see change coming, and they want to be in the driver’s seat so

they can make sure that workers’ rights are protected.

The LVN worker cooperative is not just about sharing ownership,

governance, and prot. It’s about worker-owners controlling their

own labor.

The need for startup capital has become complicated, however,

given the rightfully uncompromising standards of platform coopera-

tivism. In order that early investors and others oriented toward prot

maximization don’t gain undue control over the LVN co-op, the

members and their startup partner may need to negotiate an agree-

ment; they need to set up guidelines for the relationship between

them, for instance, and for how they contract with outside entities. In

the process, the co-op needs to reconcile its own democratic structure

with the venture capital model that is nancing the startup. Neither

the co-op nor the startup can succeed without the other, so any success

or prot should be shared by both.

When members of the co-op and startup met with a venture

capital rm early on, the LVNs described feeling how the investor’s

drive to extract capital could easily become antithetical to the co-op

148

model, which should allow members to decide how best to reinvest

their earnings. Several potential venture capital partners explained

that they would require a signicant role in the co-op’s governance

as an assurance for their investment. The co-op board has struggled

with what amount of outside control it should be unwilling to give

up. Democratic, one-worker-one-vote principles feel, at a gut level,

at odds with the capital that the platform needs to grow. Through its

bylaws, for now, the co-op has carefully drawn lines around demo-

cratic decision-making and reinvestment. It may go without saying

that union members are used to threats from those who want to eradi-

cate or exploit them, so they know how to guard the castle.

What unions oer platform cooperatives is possibly the greatest

remaining power of any union: the ability to leverage collective

power. This may mean the collective buying power to purchase port-

able employee health care insurance on scale, or the capacity to grow

a skilled workforce by providing training and apprenticeship opportu-

nities, or the possibility of creating a worker-centered marketplace like

the LVNs’ platform. If worker cooperatives and platform cooperatives

are the employers of the future, also, union revenues will come from a

dierent source: the cooperative worker herself. The new model moves

unionized labor away from entrenched us-versus-them labor relations

and lets workers take power directly instead of negotiating for it.

One thing is very clear: all the stakeholders in this new model are

taking a leap of faith, trusting that our shared vision of a new employ-

ment model will come close enough to satisfying the ethical impera-

tives of each group. So here we go. There’s a little bit of devil in all of

us, but maybe we can still cooperate.

149

25. MAKING APPS FOR

LOW-WAGE WORKERS AND

THEIR NEIGHBORHOODS

SASKIA SASSEN

How can digital cooperative platforms contribute to better work

lives of low-income workers by addressing the specic needs of these

workers, at their workspace and in their neighborhoods? What I

describe here is inspired by the concept of platform cooperativism: an

ecosystem of apps that could address common needs of low-income

workers and their neighborhoods.

Such an ecosystem of apps would be one more step toward mobi-

lizing localities around initiatives concerning both workplace and

neighborhood issues. This matters, given settings where hardships

and losses do not always facilitate trust among neighbors. One way

of thinking about my argument is that it is a search for material con-

ditions (e.g., access to cooperative platforms within and across neigh-

borhoods) upon which more complex non-material relationships can

be built (e.g., backup support at the workplace, and more aspirational

aspects such as trust and solidarity).

The high-end worker is already a full and eective user of

these technologies; in the United States, most digital applications

have been geared toward high-end workers and households, and

to scientic collaboration. Very little has been developed to meet

the needs of low-income workers, their families, and their neigh-

borhoods. This is a bad and sad state of aairs given the needs of

these workers and families, especially since the data indicate that

150

they have digital access and are willing to spend on apps; but they

are mostly conned to mass-market goods, notably music. We also

know that digital access is overwhelmingly through their phones.

We need more innovations that meet the needs and constraints of

low-wage workers. Platform co-ops like Coopify are stellar exam-

ples of that.

TRANSFORMING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

INTO A SOCIAL BACK-UP SYSTEM

My argument and proposal regarding low-wage workers is the exten-

sion of digitization to the larger space within which these workers

operate: not only the workplace narrowly understood, but also, and

very important, their neighborhood. Apps for low-income workers

and their neighborhoods can become part of the larger ecosystem

of platform cooperativism. This is already a fact among high-end

workers: digitization has become a way of restructuring the con-

nection between work and home. It is inconceivable today that the

high-end worker can or does simply leave it all behind when closing

the door of her oce for the day—on those few days every week

when s/he might actually work in the oce. We might say the cor-

relation for the low-wage worker is that it is a ction that s/he can

simply leave it all behind when s/he closes the door of her home and

goes to work.

The home and the neighborhood have long been support spaces

for the working class. Today this is rarer, mostly due to changes in the

condition of low-wage workers. Digitization can help rebuild some

strength in these spaces. For instance, in the case of trouble (a sick child

of a parent who is at work, police violence, etc.) an app on all residents’

phones can enable quick deployment of stationary neighbors— grand-

mothers, hairdressers, and shop-keepers. This is also a rst step toward

greater neighborhood integration and expanded use of diverse digital

capabilities.

151

UNDERUTILIZATION OF DIGITAL TOOLS AND

APPS IN LOW-INCOME NEIGHBORHOODS

This underutilization is a sharp contrast with the case of high-end

workers. It constructs a radical dierentiation between workspace and

neighborhood for low-wage workers. This is disabling and adds to the

diculties in their daily life at and o work.

We must ask what can we do with current technologies but are not

doing because of diverse reasons: lack of resources, lack of motivation,

lack of interest in low-income households, individuals, and localities,

and so on. Important, and too often overlooked, is that the types of

applications that are being developed mostly do not address the needs

and limited resources of low-income workers, their households, and

their neighborhoods. That is why platform co-ops should rethink their

value proposition.

In a recent overview, the Pew Center found that 45 percent of U.S.

households with less than $30K per year and 39 percent of those with

$30K–$50K use mobile phones as their primary digital access. Email at

home is rare, and often relies on low-bandwidth dial-up. Researching

the use of digital technologies by women across the world on behalf

of the United Nations Development Program, I found extensive use

of mobile telephones by modest-income and poor women in Africa: it

allowed them to run their businesses, mostly diverse small-scale trading.

USEFUL APPS FOR LOW-INCOME WORKERS AND

NEIGHBORHOODS

Several eorts are beginning to address these needs. Here are a few

examples of mostly recent applications geared to modest-to-low-

income households and neighborhoods. Kinvolved is an app for

teachers and after school program leaders that makes it easy for them

to connect to parents in case of a student’s lateness or absenteeism.

Many poor neighborhood schools lack easy communication with a

152

student’s home; this has allowed self-destructive conduct to worsen,

damaging a student’s chances for a job or acceptance to college. This

app is simple and straightforward: when a teacher, or a coach, or who-

ever is part of the student’s adult network at school, takes attendance or

sees something of concern, the family is immediately notied via text

messages or email updates—whichever they prefer. The low-income

worker knows that if there is trouble s/he will be alerted.

Another app, developed by Propel, simplifies applying for

government services, a notoriously time-consuming process. Now

there is the option of a simple mobile enrollment application. Yet

another such application is Neat Streak, which lets home cleaners

communicate with clients in a quick non-obtrusive way. There

is also a money-management app for mobiles that combines cash

and loan requests, again simplifying the lives of very low-income

people who need to cash their paychecks before payday, and can

avoid the high interest rates charged by so called “payday sharks.”

A very dierent type of app from the aforementioned is Panoply

(presented by Robert Morris): an online intervention that replaces a

health professional with a crowd-sourced response to individuals with

anxiety and depression. What I nd signicant here is that it has the

added eect of mobilizing a network of people, which may be one step

in a larger trajectory of support that can also become a local neighbor-

hood network. Panoply coordinates support from crowd workers and

unpaid volunteers. It incorporates recent advances in crowdsourcing

and human computation, enabling timely feedback and quality vet-

ting. Crowds are recruited to help users think more exibly and objec-

tively about stressful events.

Another useful tool seeks to develop new ways of working

together online. This is something quite common among middle-class

users and in certain professional jobs, but far less likely among low-

income workers. But it could be useful to the latter; it can enable a

sense of the individual’s worth to a network (“I matter to my commu-

nity”), and thereby feed solidarity and mobilization around issues of

concern to low-income neighborhoods, families, and workers.

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NEW CHALLENGES THAT CALL FOR NEIGHBORHOOD

COLLECTIVE ACTION

Neighborhoods are important spaces for low-wage workers. In

the past they often enabled union organizing and the formation of

mutual-assistance organizations. Much of this is lost today. There

is work to be done to strengthen this neighborhood function. But

this can only happen if the neighborhood is a space for connecting,

collaborating, and mutually recognizing each other. Given the devel-

opment of apps geared to low-wage workers, platform cooperativism

could enable signicant scale-ups in the deployment of such apps and

in their spread. One key mode of scale-up would be shared own-

ership and shared governance. This would have the added eect of

enabling collaboration among workers and among residents within

and across neighborhoods, joining hundreds of years of the history

of cooperatives with the digital economy. I see here beginnings of

possibly new social histories.

154

26. THE CROWD:

NATURALLY COOPERATIVE,

UNNATURALLY SILENCED

KRISTY MILLAND

When you think of a crowd, you’ll likely envision large numbers of

people, many voices, and the wisdom of a variety of viewpoints. In

crowd work, all of these features are what makes the platforms so

useful; work is done quickly by many with a variety of skill sets and

abilities, and their group wisdom leads to a high-quality product.

It only makes sense that the future should bring us self-governing

crowds, those who run their own platforms to ensure that their needs

are respected equally with those of the businesses that leverage their

labor for a prot. To date, however, not only has no such collabo-

rative crowd work platform emerged, but the voice of the workers

themselves has mostly been ignored in the discussions about cre-

ating these platforms. If we are to move forward into a future of

labor where many existing jobs are displaced by robots or algorithms,

relegating us to work on crowd platforms, we must design online

workplaces that are run collaboratively, or we will all be beholden to

exploitative companies who do not have the workers’ best interests

at heart.

As a worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk), I know insult

and exploitation rsthand. For example, this week I decided to set

aside an entire day in order to make as much money as possible. Out

of the eight hours I spent on mTurk, I was able to complete 166 tasks,

called “HITs,” and I earned only $19.64.

155

The rst problem is how much eort it takes to nd work; I can’t

just restrict myself to good work, I have to instead do any work that is

available in order to make money at all—but even that is limited as

I’m Canadian and most HITs are qualied only for U.S. workers. This

discrimination makes no sense for most work on the platform, since

Canadians can tag photos, categorize sentiment, or transcribe text just

as well as their American neighbors, but I’m excluded regardless.

Next, accepting just any HIT exposed me to some horric content,

such as a survey with at least eight videos of either really happy or really

sad or violent content, the title of which was something along the lines

of, “Does this make you cry?” It took me at least an hour to recover

emotionally and physically from that HIT alone, which means that I

had an entire hour of wasted time. The pay? $2.75 for 50 minutes. Had I

realized what the content was about and how long it would take, I would

have never accepted the HIT, but the content was not fully described

upfront. In the past, I have been faced with HITs that included ISIS

murder videos or animal abuse, or worse. This is what I have to do to

generate income as an mTurk worker, and it is damaging to my soul. Yet

if I have no other avenue for income, it is my only option.

One of the platform’s most egregious abuses is allowing workers

to go unpaid for work completed to the best of their ability. Amazon

not only condones this wage theft but has made it a feature, since the

employer who posts work gets to see what is submitted in order to

adjudicate it. All employers have to do is reject the worker, denying

them payment, and they get to keep both the work and their cash. It is

scraping the bottom of the barrel when a worker not only has to face

being paid pennies per hour for their hard work, but also the possibility

of not being paid at all.

Many people assume that workers such as myself are all from

developing countries, are unskilled, barely speak English, have no

education, and will cheat to steal money from those who post work on

the platform. It gets worse, with comments about the fact that we are

literally the unwashed masses in our pajamas doing work for pennies

an hour, the lumpenproletariat so clueless that it is a favor to pay us

156

even a pittance in order to give us any job at all. This is utter garbage,

as studies clearly show we are highly skilled and educated workers (see

“Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) workers are highly educated” at

TurkerNation.com), the bulk of whom come from the United States.

We are now awakening to a class consciousness. We are beginning to

push back against the drive to put us to work so unethically.

In attempting to speak out about the horrors we face on the job,

we’ve realized that those outside the system have no idea what is going

on inside. Journalists seem oblivious to the fact that while a robot may

not yet be able to perfectly replicate the writing style of a talented

human author, a group of humans can, and cheaply. The job of writing

for the news is likely to be one of the rst to fall to crowd work, but

the eld will quickly eat up other careers as well. Crowd platforms

are being tested to replace doctors (CrowdMed), software developers

(TopCoder, InnoCentive), graphic designers (99designs), interior

designers (CoContest), and more. There are few jobs that require a

degree of skill or education that could not be matched by the crowd.

If we allow the status quo to march ahead, with platforms that are

designed to support abuse and no legislation to stop worker exploitation,

then it won’t just be the lumpenproletariat screaming for change. It will

be you, your mother, your sister, your daughter, and everyone you know

and love being paid pennies an hour—if they are lucky enough not to

have their work rejected or stolen. As Torben Schenk, a critical political

economist and an advisor to a member of European Parliament, put it at

a recent workshop, we must view the current eld of crowd work as a

juggernaut plowing downhill, and we can no longer jump out of its way.

I don’t claim to know what the perfect platform design is, but

when designing for a crowd, one must engage the crowd in active

dialogue in order to nd the answer. At the Platform Cooperativism

conference, the intent was for a widely varied group of people to talk,

generate knowledge, and move forward to take action. Many loud

voices were heard, and others lurked in the background taking notes.

But one sad fact I faced rsthand was that the crowd workers were not

there in force. On top of that, at the Worker Voice panel, where Karla

157

Morales and Zenayda Bonilla discussed how their own cooperatives

operated, and I described my experience with mTurk, there were very

few people in the audience. I attended many other panels and talks, and

it seemed like the audience was hungry to hear how they could create

their own cooperatives, but they mostly looked to me like experts in

business or law, or CEOs of cooperatives, although that seems like an

oxymoron to me. This must end here.

While you can copy a blueprint already created, and must consider

legalities as you strive to form, there is no voice more important than

that of the workers. Without workers you cannot have a cooperative.

I would hate to see so much eort and time put into developing a

platform, only to have it fail because it does not t the needs of the

workers it was expected to serve. If you want to know what will work,

ask those who will work on the platform.

It is clear that the labor platforms we have now aren’t working for

those who use them. Features such as easy communication and protec-

tion from exploitation are ignored in favor of isolation and wage theft,

while the companies that run the platforms continue to turn a prot.

Even though it may only be a few million people who are working

full-time on such platforms right now, the speed, low cost, and ease

of getting work done through the crowd means careers will disappear

one by one as the crowd takes over those jobs. No matter who you

are, you will see at least parts of your job taken o your desk, and that

means portions of your income will disappear along with them. We

must stand together and create places of work that allow the crowd to

set its own standards, enact its own protections, and alter the future of

work to be balanced between worker and employer rights.

We cannot do so without listening to the voices of those who are

already using such platforms—both the crowd and those who leverage

them. If you want to protect the future of labor by protecting the lab-

orers, the time to put workers’ expertise at the helm is now. Dystopian

or not, a future in which we are all forced to work on something like

Amazon Mechanical Turk is not out of the picture unless we change

the frame—by creating the competition ourselves.

158

27. PLATFORMS AND TRUST:

BEYOND REPUTATION

SYSTEMS

TOM SLEE

Do new technologies embed a set of values?

Some contributors to this book argue that platform cooperatives can

clone and change the ownership structure of existing platforms. This

assumes that the technology stack is essentially neutral; it can be operated

for private prot or it can be operated for cooperative goals, at the behest

of its owners. For others, the technology stack is not neutral. Embedded

within it are the values of the project. Even if technology does not deter-

mine outcomes, technologies have “aordances” that favor some out-

comes over others. According to this view, the networked structure of

the Internet has certain aordances for democratic politics and decentral-

ized organization; the use of free and open source software is a political

commitment to openness as well as a technological one. The enthusiasm

for the blockchain—the distributed, decentralized ledger that provides

the basis for Bitcoin and other digital currencies—is a recent expression

of the same idea, even if the particular values are dierent.

Consider, for instance, rating systems. Many see rating systems as

another technology that embeds a democratic and egalitarian politics.

Rating systems have become an alternative to experts. No longer do

we have to rely on an elite class of old-guard establishment critics to

guide our tastes: we can do it ourselves. We rate books on Amazon,

lms on Netix, restaurants on Yelp; it’s the democratization of

criticism and recommendation.

159

Reputation systems are a special case of rating systems, in which

people rate other people, conferring on them a reputation. Some see

reputation systems as the primary innovation of the sharing economy.

We can get into strangers’ cars, eat at their tables, stay in their homes,

or lend money to people we will never meet—all because rat-

ings-driven reputation systems seem to have solved the problem of

trust between strangers. For their proponents, these systems come with

particular embedded values of democratization and decentralization:

Tim O’Reilly, for instance, believes we may be entering a new era

of “algorithmic regulation,” in which reputation systems replace cre-

dentials and inspections once provided by public agencies. We don’t

need cumbersome regulations to ensure good behavior, we can do it

ourselves.

The promise of reputation systems, and the claim that they

democratize trust, are largely mirages; they do not embed values that

some think they do.

Even though reputation systems look and feel like product-rating

systems, it turns out that we act dierently when we rate people to

when we rate products. The dierence shows up in the rating distribu-

tion: on Netix or on Yelp, reviews on a ve-star scale show a peak at

a value between three and four stars, and tail o to either side, with a

smaller but signicant number of ones and ves. On sharing economy

platforms, most ratings are in the four-star or ve-star range. We can

call these “Lake Wobegon systems,” after the town in the Garrison

Keillor short stories where “all the children are above average.” Such

systems fail to discriminate among good and bad service providers,

and researchers have conrmed that there is often no real relationship

between rating and quality. There is no evidence that an Uber driver

with a rating of 4.9 is better than one with a rating of 4.6, even though

the latter is in danger of being kicked o the Uber platform.

One underlying reason for the Lake Wobegon eect is that when

we are unhappy at an interaction, many people follow the maxim

“if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all.” Some leave no

rating after a substandard Airbnb visit because they do not want the

160

awkwardness that may go along with putting out a negative evalu-

ation for the world to see. A reputation system acts as a guestbook

at a bed-and-breakfast or a small museum: we leave comments and

it looks nice, but it does not solve the hard problems of establishing

trust. On eBay, a pioneer in online reputation, 99 percent of ratings

are positive, even though one investigation put the number of dissat-

ised participants at about 20 percent. When people rate each other

on reputation systems most are generally being polite, not rendering

judgment. This is perfectly appropriate behavior, but it makes the

reputation systems useless.

The distorted rating distributions serve the interests of the platform

owners, making the platform appear to be a higher-trust environment

than it really is. Because of missing reviews and our tendency to be

polite, reputation systems hide the level of dissatisfaction on a platform.

A second problem with reputation systems is that, even if most rat-

ings are positive, providers live in fear of the occasional bad review that

pushes them down in the search results or gets them removed from the

platform entirely, depriving them of their livelihood. Service providers

on a platform with a reputation system live in a Panopticon—always

being watched, always being assessed. It’s like living in an environ-

ment covered by unreliable CCTV cameras, which record images that

may or may not reect reality. Faced with the threat of a bad review,

some service providers engage in compliant, indulgent, “emotional

labor,” catering to the whims of their most entitled customers. Drivers

may or may not be good drivers, but they probably will not show it

if they are in a bad mood. Bad reviews often have little to do with

an objective evaluation; such systems have been shown to reect and

hence perpetuate patterns of prejudice among those doing the ratings.

Are there ways to tweak rating systems so they work better? It’s

a tempting proposition, but I think it is a dead-end. Most of us avoid

giving bad ratings for good reasons: mutual assessment and reporting is

a snitch system, incompatible with friendly and collaborative peer-to-

peer relationships. It’s a set of behaviors that belongs in a police state,

and which has little place in an open and democratic society.

161

So how else could we deal with trust on platforms? While there

are no simple and reliable answers, there are many sources of inspira-

tion inside and outside the world of technology. Here are a few.

Some platforms avoid the problem completely. Craigslist and

Kijiji make no claim to vouch for the parties in an exchange, and they

expect buyers to beware. Like other listing services, they avoid getting

involved in the actual transaction between buyer and seller, and take

only a small fee from advertisers as their income. Stocksy United is

another site that does not have a big need for a trust system because

there is little room for deception; a photograph is what it is, and can be

displayed and seen on the site before purchase.

Other successful technology-oriented communities have adopted

a mixture of approaches. Internally, personal recommendations or

one-on-one mentoring can play an important role, as in the Debian

community that produces a leading Linux distribution. Personal invi-

tations can also help to lter out unwanted members, as in the arXiv

community that maintains an important pool of scientic papers and

working papers. Wikipedia has its messy hierarchies and occasional

lapses into efdoms, but remains remarkable for all that—or maybe

because of all that—and its graduation of articles where trust is needed

(“controversial places”) helps to limit the need for formality.

Platform cooperatives share a problem with VC-funded platforms:

the platform owner has an incentive to make the platform community

appear to be working well, and to downplay or hide problems that

arise. Any trust system needs to be externally auditable to have any

credibility. We know very little about how (or if ) Airbnb or Uber rep-

utation systems really work, because they are hidden. The incentives

to cover up failures become particularly strong when fortunes depend

on a successful IPO. If there is not a signicant tension between an

independent auditor and system owner, then the system is probably

not doing its job.

Unlike VC-funded platforms, platform cooperatives should accept

independent external audits of what actually happens on the platform.

The experience of fair-trade activists provides a source of inspiration:

162

consumers pay a premium for products that support a fair supply chain,

and economists Kimberly Ann Elliott and Richard Freeman have

looked into the fair trade certication systems that seek to establish

trust (how do we know the producers are following through on their

claims?). They went into their study expecting that the most eective

system would feature one well-recognized certication system, and

were surprised to nd that an ecosystem of competing certicate pro-

grams had many benets.

There is a need for similar independent certication programs

around platform cooperative oerings. The best forms for such pro-

grams will be discovered by experimentation, and here cooperatives

have a real advantage. Venture-funded platforms are impelled to

deliver a successful IPO exit for their investors, and so have too much

to lose from a bad report. Maybe platform cooperatives can avoid the

closed and secretive character of those companies, and experiment in

the open.

163

28. WHY PLATFORM CO-OPS

SHOULD BE OPEN CO-OPS

MICHEL BAUWENS AND VASILIS KOSTAKIS

“What if this was no longer capitalism, but something worse?”

McKenzie Wark’s statement, which opens his chapter in this book,

eloquently summarizes the growing criticism of prot-maximizing

business models within the so-called collaborative sharing economy.

That “something worse” appears to take the form of a new kind of

feudalism. If feudalism was based on the ownership of land by an elite,

the resource now controlled by a small minority is networked data. We

cannot, therefore, be content with cooperative alternatives designed to

counter mere capitalism.

Commons-based peer production, a term coined by Yochai

Benkler, has brought about a new logic of collaboration between net-

works of people who freely organize around a common goal using

shared resources, and market-oriented entities that add value on top of

or alongside them. Prominent cases of commons-based peer production,

such as the free and open-source software and Wikipedia, inaugurate

a new model of value creation, dierent from both markets and rms.

The creative energy of autonomous individuals, organized in distributed

networks, produces meaningful projects, largely without traditional

hierarchical organization or, quite often, nancial compensation.

This represents both challenges and opportunities for traditional

models of cooperativism, which date back to the nineteenth century,

and which have often tended to gradually adopt competitive mentali-

ties. In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing

commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright

164

system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or

national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be

dominated by large corporations. Arguably, these characteristics have

to be changed, and they can be changed today.

The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an eort

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 com-

mons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of

the cooperative and solidarity economy movements on the other.” To a

greater degree than traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives are statu-

torily oriented toward the common good. This could be understood as

extending, not replacing, the seventh cooperative principle of concern for

community. For instance, open cooperatives internalize negative exter-

nalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the

creation of immaterial and material commons; and are socially and politi-

cally organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

We will outline a list of six interrelated strategies for post-

corporate entrepreneurial coalitions and a mode of value creation that is

autonomous, fair, and sustainable. The aim is to go beyond the classical

corporate paradigm, and its extractive prot-maximizing practices, toward

the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented,

ethical economy.

First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are

based on articial scarcity. Though knowledge can be shared easily

and at very low marginal cost when it is in digital form, closed rms

use articial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digi-

tized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological sabotage,

naturally shareable goods are made articially scarce so that extra

prots may be generated. This is particularly galling in the context

of life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowl-

edge. Open cooperatives, in comparison, recognize natural abundance

and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources arti-

cially scarce.

165

Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves

various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute. For

instance, in open software projects, participants contribute code, create

designs, maintain the websites, translate text, co-develop the marketing

strategy, and oer support to users. Salaries based on a xed job description

may not be the most appropriate way to reward those that contribute to

such processes. Open co-ops, therefore, practice open-value accounting or

contributory accounting. The Sensorica project, which produces scientic

instruments, expects contributors to log their contributions and, after peer

evaluation, they are assigned a certain amount of “karma points.” Any

income the contributions generate then ow to contributors according

to the points they accrued. This model is an antidote to the tendency in

many rms for just a few well-placed contributors to capture the value that

has been co-created by a much larger community.

Third, open cooperatives can secure fair distribution and bene-

t-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses.

Existing copyleft licenses—such as Creative Commons and the GNU

General Public License—allow anyone to reuse the necessary knowledge

commons on the condition that changes and improvements are added to

that same commons. That framework, however, fails to encourage reci-

procity for commercial use of the commons, or to foster a level playing

eld for ethical enterprises. These shortcomings can be met through

CopyFair licenses that allow for sharing while also expecting reciprocity.

For example, the FairShares Association uses a Creative Commons

non-commercial license for the general public, but allows members of its

organization to use the content commercially.

Fourth, open cooperatives are able to make use of open designs to

produce sustainable goods and services. For-prot enterprises often aim

to achieve planned obsolescence in products that would wear out pre-

maturely. In that way, they would maintain tension between supply and

demand and maximize their prots; obsolescence is a feature, not a bug.

In contrast, open design communities, such as these of the Wikispeed

car, the Wikihouse, and the RepRap 3D printer, do not have the same

incentives, so the practice of planned obsolescence is alien to them.

166

Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives reduce waste. The lack of

transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises

means they will have a hard time creating a circular economy—one

in which the output of one production process is used as an input for

another. But open cooperatives can create ecosystems of collaboration

through open supply chains. These chains can enhance the transpar-

ency of the production processes and enable participants to adapt their

behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. There is

no need for overproduction once the realities of the network become

common knowledge. Open cooperatives can then move beyond an

exclusive reliance on imperfect market price signals and toward mutual

coordination of production, thanks to the combination of open supply

chains and open-book accounting.

Sixth, open cooperatives can mutualize not only digital infra-

structures but also physical ones. The misnamed “sharing economy” of

Airbnb and Uber, despite all the justied critique it receives, illustrates

the potential in matching idle resources with demand. Co-working,

skill-sharing, and ride-sharing are examples of the many ways in which

we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-govern-

ance, a genuine sharing economy could achieve considerable advances

in more ecient resource use, especially with the aid of shared data

facilities and manufacturing tools.

How, then, does the concept of platform cooperativism relate to

the notion of open cooperativism? Cooperative ownership of platforms

can begin to reorient the platform economy around a commons-ori-

ented model. We highlighted six practices that are already emerging in

various forms but need to be more universally integrated. We believe

that a chief ambition of fostering a more commons-centric economy

is to recapture surplus value, which is now feeding speculative capital,

and re-invest it in the development of open, ethical productive com-

munities. Otherwise, the potential of commons-based peer production

will remain underdeveloped and subservient to the dominant system.

Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and

unnecessary waste; they must become open.

PART 4

CONDITIONS OF

POSSIBILITY

169

SHOWCASE 2 : ECOSYSTEM

The “killer apps” of plaorm capitalism didn’t come out of nowhere.

The big companies that rule the Internet aren’t coming to dominate

just because of a good idea and a charismac founder; they grow out

of supporve ecosystems, including investors, lawyers, sympathec

governments, and tech schools. Perhaps most important is their cul-

ture—the fesvals, the meetups, the memes, the manifestos—that

share norms for what kinds of pracces are expected and celebrated.

To change these norms, we need to culvate an ecosystem for plat-

form cooperavism. These projects demonstrate that this eort is

already under way.

170

Project Name: Loomio Cooperave Ltd.

Completed by: Mary Jo Kaplan

Locaon: Wellington, New Zealand, and Providence, Rhode Island

URL: loomio.org

Loomio is a worker-owned cooperave that is building a tool for

collaborave decision-making used by thousands of cooperaves, com-

munity organizaons, social movements, and government iniaves

across the globe. Loomio enables people to contribute to decisions

that aect them, to drive self-determinaon, beer decisions, stronger

communies, and engaged workplaces. Loomio’s users are incredibly

diverse and so are the ways they use the tool, from day-to-day oper-

aonal decisions in companies, to collaborave policy development in

government, and community engagement by NGOs. In late 2015 we

released Loomio 1.0, a mobile-rst interface with a focus on interop-

erability and an automated subscripon system designed for growth.

Loomio is a robust social enterprise with an ethical business model

that was started four years ago. As a worker-owned cooperave, Loomio

is owned collecvely by the people building it. The current board of

directors is made up of four members and one former member. As an

open source tool and global social enterprise, we acvely engage devel-

opers, contractors, acvists, investors, customers, advisors, and other

stakeholders to work with us to make a beer product and company.

We’ve aracted talented people to work well below market rates

without issuing tradional equity. We bootstrapped for four years

through consulng revenue, loans, crowdfunding, grants, and dona-

ons. Also, we’ve aracted extremely valuable advisors by being gen-

uinely mission-driven. In November 2015 we raised $450,000, using

redeemable preference shares as an investment instrument that

aligns with our social mission and cooperave structure while pro-

viding a fair return to investors.

Loomio is poised for growth in the second half of 2016 and beyond.

Our vision is for Loomio to be a ubiquitous technology, seamlessly inte-

grated with other tools people use every day. By growing revenues

based on providing value to our customers, not selling user data or

adversing, our success will be based on serving customers’ needs and

realizing workers’ collecve values and commitment to social impact.

171

Project Name: The FairShares Model

Completed by: Rory Ridley-Du

Locaon: Sheeld, England

URL: fairshares.coop

The FairShares Model is a suite of intellectual properes devel-

oped during social enterprise research programs at Sheeld Business

School in order to support the creaon and development of solidarity

cooperaves. The working assumpon is that the exclusion of primary

stakeholders from enterprise ownership and governance harms the

well-being of members and their host community. The associaon’s

model rules encourage four classes of membership: founders, labor,

users, and investors.

FairShares IP is owned by the member(s) who contribute to it.

Members license it to the FairShares Associaon for use in charitable

and commercial projects. If members leave, both they and the asso-

ciaon retain non-exclusive licences. Policy decisions are taken by

members. Decisions on markeng are usually taken by members and

supporters in a Community Forum (on Loomio.org). Members com-

municate with supporters and each other via MailChimp, Facebook,

and Loomio.

FairShares IP is freely available in PDF format from fairshares

.coop (with editable versions that can be supplied directly by email

or through a shared Dropbox). Supporters can join a MailChimp list,

make regular nancial contribuons, and join the Community Forum

at fairshares-associaon.com. Some help is provided free at the

point of use or via Loomio discussion boards, and some members

oer paid consultancy services.

A 2015 survey showed that FairShares IP is being acvely used in thir-

teen countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia,

and New Zealand, and has global reach through its inclusion in a social

enterprise textbook. Clients in the United Kingdom, the United States,

and Ireland created FairShares enterprises in 2015, and we are sup-

porng new projects in Australia and Croaa. We currently have 1,629

subscribers on MailChimp, 885 followers on Facebook, 69 supporters in

our Community Forum, plus 11 labor, 6 user, and 4 founder members.

172

Project Name: Swarm Alliance

Completed by: Joel Dietz

Locaon: Palo Alto, California

URL: swarmalliance.com

Swarm Alliance is a network of aligned organizaons that are

dedicated to creang a world of abundance. We’ve been especially

involved in the world of collaborave governance and the commons.

Most of the technology developed through our network has involved

blockchain in some fashion.

The Swarm Alliance uses the Distributed Collaborave

Organizaon model that we co-invented at a legal conference at

Harvard University. This model was designed to have two levels, one

for rapid decision making (delegates) and another for approval of

large decisions (members). The Swarm Alliance currently has three

delegates and approximately one thousand members. It is the rst

and largest operaonal example of an organizaon hosted enrely

on a blockchain.

We started with an approximately $1 million crowdfunding cam-

paign around our own blockchain-issued asset, the Swarm coin. Aer

much of the funds were exhausted in the process of our own legal

research and the coin’s price uctuaons, we nanced development

through corporate partnerships. At this point we are re-engineering

our inial proof of concepts (developed on Bitcoin) to release ready

concepts on Ethereum.

We are currently building a global ambassador network through

training events in various cies across the globe. We are also currently

exploring other projects that might bridge to a mainstream audience

and serve as a proof of concepts for both the future of governance

and community abundance. As with our original concept, we expect

new forms of crowdfunding to have a major role in this, especially

around blockchain-hosted organizaons.

173

Project Name: Ms., The Madeline System

Completed by: Eden Schulz and Brendan Marn

Locaon: New York City

URL: hp://theworkingworld.org/us

The Madeline System networks local, cooperave investment

funds, giving them the ability to stay community-controlled and yet

gain the benets of scale. Through pooling the investments of a net-

work of funds, Madeline dramacally increases the market leverage of

each fund and allows it to command far beer investment terms. By

joining the funds into a network of mutual accountability and sharing,

Madeline also brings high-quality business assistance to even the

smallest partners. The result is a distributed, non-extracve nancial

system with communies in the posion of power.

Organizaons using Madeline become members and own their

assets together cooperavely. Decisions are made democracally,

with the governance structure designed to minimize central control

and maximize local autonomy.

The inial development of Madeline was made possible by a gen-

erous donaon. As members become operaonal, they share the cost

of maintaining Madeline using income from their local investments.

Cooperaon is the heart of Madeline, and it is the only way that the

scaled benets of the system can be brought to small loan funds at a

reasonable price-point. Cooperaon is also the key to bringing capital

to small funds at terms paent and low enough to allow the nurturing

of local businesses.

In the past year, we have brought together our rst cohort of

member funds who will form the foundaon of the Madeline user-

member base. Over many years, we have successfully built and used a

prototype of the Madeline plaorm, and we have designed and begun

building the launch version of the system. We expect to begin using

this version with our rst members before the end of 2016. By the end

of 2017, we project a robust network of members using the system

across the country.

174

Project Name: Purpose Fund

Completed by: Alexander Kühl and Armin Steuernagel

Locaon: Berlin, Germany

URL: hp://purpose.ag

Purpose Fund is a startup fund for an ecosystem of purpose-driven

entrepreneurs. The fund invests in companies that have a “purpose

ownership” form, which means that the company owns itself.

There are two basic principles of purpose ownership: (1) vong

rights are decoupled from dividend rights and are held by those who

lead the company or are acvely involved; (2) prots are a means to

an end and not an end in themselves. In pracce this means that divi-

dend rights are held by investors without vong rights. Dividends are

capped and prots are reinvested or used to pay back investors. We

call this the self-determinaon of the company. Because of this own-

ership structure, decisions are not driven by shareholder value maxi-

mizaon, and the company is not an object of speculaon.

Purpose ownership—which can take dierent legal forms,

including cooperaves—is a clear signal to employees, investors, cli-

ents, and other potenal collaborators that their contribuon ben-

ets the purpose of the company rather than the private wealth of

equity holders. This enables close cooperaon between the startups

because they know that the value that is thus created cannot be pri-

vately extracted. Purpose companies voluntarily share employees and

code, creang benets similar to those found in large corporaons

while retaining decentralized ownership.

The fund invests in plaorm tech companies that are working on

the future of work, insurance, the sharing economy, decentralized

internet, and open data. It leaves vong rights with entrepreneurs

and its investment strategy is evergreen rather than exit-driven.

Rooted Internet, itself a self-owned company partly controlled by its

startups, raises money by selling non-vong shares. It promises never

to extract more money out of the startup ecosystem than a certain

capped dividend.

175

Project Name: rCredits

Completed by: William Spademan, Execuve Director of Common

Good Finance

Locaon: Western Massachuses

URL: rCredits.org

The rCredits® system is a complete alternave banking system

for the common good, using a local credit/debit rCard® with incenve

rewards and no fees for buyers or sellers. This system empowers any

community to decide together what’s best for them, with money to

fund it, using an innovave parcipatory decision process.

Anyone can open an rCredits account with a member invitaon.

Transacons, decisions, and funding are managed independently and

transparently within each region or community. Every member gets

one vote and can vote directly on any substanve issue.

About three person-years have gone into developing a smart-

phone app and backend server. In addion to that me and eort,

hundreds of private donaons provided about $300,000 to cover thir-

teen years of work. We built a self-funding mechanism into the design,

so as the rCredits system grows, it becomes more and more sustain-

able. For the past year, we have been preparing for growth by auto-

mang administraon of the system and segmenng it by community,

so each community can manage its own aairs. The system includes

protocols for essenal cooperaon and mutual oversight between

rCredits communies.

We now have active rCredits pilot projects in western

Massachuses, southeastern Vermont, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. We

are inving interested individuals in other communies to begin pro-

mong rCredits locally. In April we expect to release a revised rCredits

app that works on both iPhone and Android. The rCredits system has

handled three-quarters of a million dollars in transacons, and we

have freed up tens of thousands of dollars for our parcipang com-

munies to use for grants, incenves, and investments in sustaina-

bility. Our top achievement is the nearly seamless integraon with the

mainstream economy, allowing the system to grow smoothly in order

to provide a democrac, community-centered replacement for our

unjust and destrucve global economic system.

176

Project Name: External Revenue Service

Completed by: Max Dana

Locaon: Brooklyn, New York

URL: externalrevenue.us

The External Revenue Service (ERS) is a peer-to-peer tax system

designed to make it easier for people to share their disposable income

with the things they care about most. The rules of the ERS are simple.

Givers pledge a percentage of their income to be automacally redis-

tributed to a porolio of receivers each month, and receivers must

make a giving pledge of their own in order to receive the funds that

have been pledged to them. In the ERS, everyone is a philanthropist.

The ERS is a distributed collaborave organizaon and is not

owned by anyone. It is a network of contributors and users invested

in the maintenance and development of the system. We currently col-

laborate via an open Slack team that is modeled on similar Slack teams

piloted by OpenBazaar and Backfeed.

We have had the good fortune of having some very smart people

come forward to help dene and rene the vision of the organizaon.

As we transion from concept to product, we are acvely seeking

more developers to contribute to the codebase as well as legal experts

to help us navigate the complex regulatory landscape (parcularly

with respect to digital currencies). Financially, the organizaon is

bootstrapped with a small pool of funding from the community and

is commied to forgoing tradional investment in favor of voluntary

funding from the network.

In May 2015, the ERS was just an idea born out of frustraon with

fundraising and income inequality, but under the mentorship of Gary

Chou at Orbital NYC we were able to validate some early assumpons

and raise money via Kickstarter to bring together a seed community

for the Weird Economics Summit in NYC in November 2015. In 2016,

we hope to develop a minimum viable product of the plaorm and

pilot it in partnership with like-minded organizaons.

177

Project Name: Data Commons Cooperave

Completed by: Noemi Giszpenc

Locaon: Massachuses

URL: datacommons.coop

The Data Commons Cooperave brings together cooperave, sol-

idarity, social, generave, “new” economy organizaons that are cat-

aloging or mapping some slice of that space. Many organizaons want

to publicize the existence of alternaves and enhance the connecons

among them; the data-sharing cooperave makes it easier for mem-

bers to gather, share, maintain, display, and deploy informaon about

the economy they care about.

The DCC is owned by its data-sharing members. It is incorporated

in the state of Massachuses and has an elected board of directors.

The bylaws are at member.datacommons.coop/bylaws. Decisions are

consensus or super-majority. The membership raes yearly budget

and capital plans. The board of directors receives membership appli-

caons and votes on accepng new members. Each member chooses

what data to share and how or with whom. When we have permanent

sta, we’ll have a democrac workplace.

Making it work is a struggle. This feels like necessary infrastruc-

ture, but that’s about as sexy as paving a road. We’ve had devoted

tech volunteers, and received support from foundaons, donors, and

the government—but, it hasn’t been enough to cross the threshold

into sustainable operaons. Our current plan is to focus on fundraising

and cross-subsidizaon from commercially viable products.

We have thirty members, an elected board of ve representa-

ves, a user-friendly search-and-display codebase (Stone Soup), and

the beginnings of a technical soluon to the directory-updates chal-

lenge (da). We’ve been featured in Grassroots Economic Organizing,

Shareable, and Community-Wealth.org; helped shape a map of the sol-

idarity economy in the United States (solidarityeconomy.us); and will

play a role in shaping a census of co-ops in the Northeast. In the next

few years, we hope to raise enough money to pay sta and provide

more tailored member services.

178

Project Name: Coliga

Completed by: Pedro Jardim

Locaon: Berlin, Germany

URL: coliga.co

Coliga is a plaorm that helps any network create a vercal mar-

ketplace and become more self-organized and nancially sustainable.

We make it easy for networks, like coworking spaces and coopera-

ves, to share in any revenue generated from jobs and connecons

they facilitate for their members.

Many networks have strong local and global brands, and they

regularly receive job requests and oers for their members. Coliga

improves how networks capture and channel these opportunies to

their communies, with tools to nd the best people for the job and

split the value with them once the job is complete. That way value is

created and shared within the network, rather than being taken away.

We’ve structured the ownership of our company in a way that

maximizes our long-term social impact. We’ve separated vong shares

(allocated at nominal value to company managers) from income-

paying shares, which means investors get dividends but not the right

to inuence the business strategy in a way that sacrices purpose in

favor of short-term prots. Our bylaws also dictate that all prots are

to be reinvested into the company.

Coliga is the latest project of people behind Apoio, a self-organ-

ized community cleaning service, and Agora Collecve, a leading crea-

ve space in Berlin. We’re part of the OuiShare community and won a

2015 OuiShare award in the category of collaborave economy. We also

belong to Rooted Internet, which invests in purpose-driven companies. In

the coming years we are going to build a diverse global community of

like-minded peers to enable new forms of collaboraon and resource

sharing among networks.

179

Project Name: CommunityOS: Callicoon Project

Completed by: Ashley Taylor

Locaon: Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York

URL: futureculture.how/community-os-callicoon-project

CommunityOS is a layer in the blockchain operang system. It is a

community network for exchanging resources, creang added value,

and developing cooperaves using complex barter systems and repu-

taon calculators. It will rst be used at scale in the agricultural com-

munity of Sullivan County, New York, for the Callicoon Project, and for

event communies in New York City.

The project collaborates closely with ConsenSys, a blockchain

company developing tools that allow cooperaves to easily form and

manage their resources, make decisions, collaborate, transparently dis-

tribute equity and shares, and evolve themselves. These include board-

room.to (governance and decision making), inekt.us (community net-

work and events), weifund.io (decentralized crowdfunding and equity

distribuon), and uPort.me (cryptographic identy and reputaon con-

tainer). The Inekt plaorm serves as the interface to CommunityOS.

On January 16, 2016, we had a potluck event with interested people

in the Callicoon community at one of the well-known farms. We intro-

duced the ideas of cooperave management and resource banks. We

are currently developing a cooperave model for a red-meat processing

facility. It will include day-to-day management, community investment,

and community insurance, all contractually secured on the blockchain.

We are also building a resource bank that will allow communies

to idenfy, search, exchange, barter, and gi between each other. Our

goal is to develop new metrics for value and new marketplaces to rec-

ognize that value for each community, creang a diverse ecosystem of

community-based support and connecon.

We are currently supported by ConsenSys and simultaneously

applying for grants for the research on the cooperave economic

models that will be prototyped alongside the implementaon of

CommunityOS in context, specically in Callicoon.

180

Project Name: Backfeed

Completed by: Julian

Locaon: Tel Aviv, Israel

URL: backfeed.cc

Backfeed is an engine for decentralized collaboraon. It builds

upon the power of open-source collaboraon and enhances it with

a distributed governance system for decentralized value producon

and distribuon. We’ve developed an algorithm that allows large

groups of users to contribute freely and spontaneously to an enter-

prise, determine the perceived value of each contribuon, and allo-

cate inuence and rewards accordingly. Backfeed makes it possible

for decentralized networks of peers to coordinate themselves indi-

rectly in order to achieve the full potenal of collecve intelligence.

Backfeed is a privately held company founded by Matan Field and

Primavera de Filippi.

Backfeed is currently funded exclusively by angel investments.

We are now raising funds in order to support our operaons. Later

this year, we intend to launch a crowd-sale of Backfeed tokens that

will serve to fuel the Backfeed protocol and plaorm.

We are already at an advanced stage of development of our core

technology—the Backfeed protocol engine—which provides an out-

standing breakthrough in the eld of decentralized collaboraon.

We’ve built an API layer that lets others connect to and operate our

protocol, which is currently used by our partners at Slant News to

enable collaborave eding for arcles on their plaorm. There are

various other companies and organizaons interested in using our

system, and we’re currently establishing partnerships and collabora-

on opportunies with strategic partners and like-minded individuals.

In parallel to that, we are also developing our own app, as a tesng

ground for experiments and for the development of further compo-

nents of the protocol stack.

181

Project Name: My User Agreement

Completed by: Anna Bernasek, D.T. Mongan

Locaon: New York City

URL: myuseragreement.com

Myuseragreement LLC oers individuals terms and condions

intended to protect their legal rights in the data they create. For the

rst me consumers have a real opon; it’s no longer necessary to

blindly accept unfair terms from service providers. By adopng myus-

eragreement, consumers can protect their rights in just a few easy

steps. Individuals sign up by subming their email, and when we have

reached a stascally signicant number of sign-ups we will go live. At

that point, we send each user an email with a link that allows installa-

on of a simple digital marker alerng anyone interacng with a user’s

device to your terms and condions.

Myuseragreement was founded as a public service in 2015 by

Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan, the authors of All You Can Pay:

How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets (Naon Books,

2015). Anna Bernasek is a journalist and author based in New York.

Among other publicaons, she has wrien for The New York Times,

Newsweek, Fortune, Time, The Australian Financial Review, and The

Sydney Morning Herald. D.T. Mongan is a lawyer based in New York. He

wrote the terms and condions for myuseragreement. Those terms

and condions are laid out on our website in a simple and straighor-

ward way.

Myusergreement is in the sign-up phase and our focus is on

spreading the word about this new Web tool for consumers. We wel-

come any interest and suggesons from the public. Please be in touch

through the website or with the founders directly. We believe that by

acng together we can develop a beer and safer Internet.

182

29. BEYOND LUXURY

COOPERATIVISM

JOHN DUDA

The long neoliberal revolution in the psychology of advertising made

it possible to mistake the atomized actions of consumers for commit-

ment and authenticity: cool becomes commodity, and the production

of the individual consumer replaces the project of collective liberation.

This process of recuperation—in which individuals realize themselves

primarily in and through the choices they make in the marketplace—

can also inltrate our visions of alternatives, with our utopian imagi-

nation all too often already colonized by its own undoing. The success

or failure of platform cooperativism may lie in whether it can escape

becoming absorbed into the consumerist colony.

Neoliberalism’s cultural revolution arguably began in the coun-

terculture of the 1960s, in which opposition to systemic injustice and

alienation found expression in new patterns of life. But choosing to

live dierently could all too easily mean prioritizing a new form of

“empowered” consumer identity over collective political engagement.

It’s no coincidence that this historical moment gave rise, on the one

hand, to the early visions of a networked economy, and on the other,

to the rst signicant wave of cooperative development in the post-

WWII period. In both, the individual, reduced to a consumer, stands

in for the collective subject of political action, and alternatives become

spaces of withdrawal, not engagement.

Consider the expansive vision of the Whole Earth Catalog, inviting

the people at the intersection of the thriving counterculture and a nas-

cent cyberculture to take up the “tools” they will need to rebuild

183

Spaceship Earth. The project of liberation, in the Catalog, is quite liter-

ally a shopping exercise: one picks out the ideas and technologies that

construct and conrm a new identity in (nominal) opposition to the

mainstream—hence the mélange of yurts and primitive computers,

cybernetics, and new age theology that oats across its pages. This

early cyberculture shares more than we might expect with the closed

corporate networks of the 1980s—in an infamous CompuServe ad,

we see the way utopian promise feeds on (literally white) fear of urban

space—a retreat from political community into networked consumer

identity. Today’s app-mediated landscape, despite some innovations

in network topology, and a new relationship between economic and

racial privilege and urban geography, oers another iteration of the

same: digital platforms allow us to pick and choose the communities

we connect with and commit to, replacing the messy work of political

solidarity with the frictionlessness of “disruption.”

The collective and cooperative workplaces emerging from the

late-1960s counterculture followed the same neoliberal logic. These

alternative institutions were an escape route—a way for those with the

requisite privilege to construct bubbles of autonomy, outside the alien-

ating corporate workplace and market. The most prolic and enduring

cooperatives of the era were the various food cooperatives that sprung

up across the country, quite literally built on the idea of aligning con-

sumer choices with new values.

It isn’t that cooperative consumer purchasing can never result

in powerful or inclusive collective institutions—Japan’s Seikatsu

Cooperative, built largely by women and an inuential force in food

policy, shows otherwise. But where Seikatsu is premised around

rejecting “choice” as illusory in favor of a limited set of sustainably

farmed staples, the food co-ops of the 1960s (or at least the ones that

were viable nancially) promoted a mode of opposition to the status

quo mediated by consumer choice. Taking stock of this wave of coop-

eratives in 1979, David Moberg wrote, “Many alternative institutions

were rendered relatively harmless as another market choice.” Much

as the counterculture technologists unwittingly prepared the way for

184

the corporate Internet, the food cooperative movement largely fueled

the commodication of natural and organic food as an upscale market

segment, not the development of a just and sustainable food system.

The budding movement for platform cooperatives should avoid

recapitulating this trajectory. One place to look for guidance can and

should be the current wave of cooperative development, which looks

very dierent from its 1960s and ’70s counterpart, especially when it

comes to worker cooperative development. While the worker cooper-

ative sector remains quite small, the movement to expand it is robust,

dynamic, and incredibly instructive when it comes to thinking about

building a more inclusive economy.

For one thing, the contemporary worker cooperative movement

is a lot less white than most people imagine. The largest worker coop-

erative in the country is the two-thousand-person Cooperative Home

Care Associates in the Bronx, whose worker-owners are overwhelm-

ingly women of color. Strong networks of interlinked worker coop-

eratives are developing in historically marginalized communities of

color across the country—like the house cleaning and food processing

cooperatives incubated by Prospera in Oakland, or the Evergreen

Cooperatives in Cleveland, with worker-owners running a multi-acre

urban greenhouse, a green energy company, and a large-scale com-

mercial laundry. Such developments did not arise automatically, but

resulted from the careful work of organizers, community advocates,

and nonprot developers who have started from the premise that the

point of building worker cooperatives is rst and foremost to create an

economy owned by the people who have been traditionally locked out

or pushed to the side—immigrants, the poor, the formerly incarcer-

ated, and other victims of business as usual.

This kind of shift in focus means leaving behind some of the cher-

ished emphasis that the last cooperative wave put on autonomy and

independence; instead, cooperative developers have been enthusiasti-

cally exploring ways to partner with city governments, labor unions,

forward-thinking philanthropy, and impact investors to create mecha-

nisms to nance and support the work of building a more democratic

185

economy. Cooperative purity can easily become an obstacle to

achieving meaningful scale and inclusive impact. For instance,

insisting that members self-nance their own enterprise risks creating

a closed circle of relative economic privilege rather than a movement

to truly democratize capital. Similarly, insisting on autonomy from

government intervention and support means that the policies behind

traditional economic development will continue to grind away, sub-

sidizing corporations and leaving cooperatives to fend for themselves.

The point, as cooperative advocates have come to realize, is not to

create maximally pure alternatives that help a few escape an alien-

ating system, it’s to take seriously a long-term project of actually trans-

forming what counts as business as usual—in the direction of equity,

democracy, solidarity, and sustainability.

What can a movement for platform cooperativism learn from all

this, then? Perhaps the most crucial lesson is to understand why a deep

commitment to inclusion needs to be a grounding principle, not an

afterthought. In the absence of institutional designs and development

processes that put the needs and aspirations of the marginalized rst,

platform cooperatives might very well create new spaces of exciting

digital freedom for their members, but in so doing only put a new spin

on the existing patterns of inequity.

Part of this involves tackling the question of nancing. Worker-

cooperative developers have been very busy identifying pathways to

scale their eorts by making public, philanthropic, and impact capital

available to new and existing democratic workplaces. Platform coop-

eratives looking to reach a scale comparable to that of the dominant

platforms are going to need to follow the lead of the worker coopera-

tive movement and get creative and intentional about their nancing

strategies.

Similarly, there needs to be a recognition among platform co-op

developers that no matter how good your intentions are or how tech-

nically sophisticated your project might be, market dynamics alone

tend toward inequitable outcomes. Changing this equation means

nding ways to connect cooperative initiatives to resources that

186

aren’t completely constrained by the logic of prot. The Evergreen

Cooperatives, for instance, leverage the procurement dollars of large

place-based nonprots like universities and hospitals to create a par-

tial shelter from the market—building the foundations of a long-term

eort to create worker-owned jobs in severely distressed communities.

Above all, it’s imperative that people drawn to platform cooper-

ativism realize that the smooth space of disruption is not where real

collective power can be built. No matter how shiny its apps or how

ostensibly democratic its process, an institution built on a foundation

of individual privilege to opt in will do nothing to challenge and

transform the underlying dynamics of our economic system. Instead,

we need to look past the mirage of supercial alternatives and get busy

building real relationships across sectors and throughout our commu-

nities. This means committing to investments in deep collective edu-

cation, long-haul transformative organizing, and intentional eorts to

shift resources to and building power in the communities that today’s

economy locks out. While technology might help facilitate this work,

it cannot magically replace it.

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30. MONEY IS THE ROOT OF

ALL PLATFORMS

BRENDAN MARTIN

To use the term “platform cooperativism” is to sum up an incredible

swath of economic theater in just two words. The term, rst, presumes

the concept of a platform as a common infrastructure people use. But

putting the word “cooperativism” after it is to suggest the central ques-

tion of a platform is who owns it: is it owned cooperatively by all those

who use it, or by just a few who extract value from the rest? I contend

that, despite the great advances in technology that have made Internet-

based platforms explode into our lives, the contest over who owns our

platforms is not at all new. It is, rather, one of the central struggles of

civilization, from the rst wars over the Fertile Crescent to the present

battles about Uber.

Money, or nance, is not just what people use to buy platforms;

it itself is a platform. Finance is the infrastructure of exchange as old

as history, and the battle for its control has been raging since the rst

coins were minted and the rst debts recorded. Finance is so funda-

mental to our economy that we can easily miss it, as a sh may not be

aware of the water it swims in, but we cannot aord to do this. Finance

is not just one of the oldest platforms, it is perhaps the root that so

many other platforms are controlled by. This means that challenging

the structures of nance may be the key to challenging the ownership

of any platform. Recent advances in platform technologies oer new

tools for doing just that.

To put into perspective the role that nance plays in the owner-

ship of other platforms, consider what keeps any of us from making our

188

own Uber or some other large platform. Our attention is focused on

the breakthroughs in technology, like smartphones and the Internet,

that have made these platforms possible. But technology is not the

barrier to making a platform; if anything, the advances in technology

have made platform-building easier. The barrier is nance. How else,

but with mountains of money, could a few unelected men—as most

platform owners are—command hundreds of programmers and thou-

sands of marketers and lawyers to build a platform they alone own

and which millions depend on? It is the platform of nance, and the

intensely unequal control of that platform in our world today, upon

which so many other unequal platforms have been built.

Privately held money is not the only way to build a platform,

however. Platforms have been built through government—such as a

highway system, or an electrical grid, or the Internet itself—and these

are generally controlled (in theory at least) not by investors but by cit-

izens. Platforms can also arise from the spontaneous eorts of people

organized by unions, communities, or movements, such as farmers’

producer cooperatives. But, by and large, the new platforms suddenly

impacting our lives are mainly built on the platform of private nance.

BREAK THE BANK AND LIBERATE THE PLATFORM

It might be tempting to conclude that, given the domination of private

nance in society as a whole, building a cooperative platform would

require something like a revolution. But this is not true, and every

cooperative in the world proves this every day.

Consider a worker-owned factory. In the “standard” inves-

tor-owned factory, finance gets pooled together; it buys the labor

and materials to build and run the factory, it hires and res workers, and

it keeps whatever prot comes in. In a worker cooperative, however, the

workers gather together; they borrow the money to build and operate the

factory, they pay it back when they don’t need it, and they keep whatever

profit comes in. This worker cooperative turns the platform of

189

nance on its head. It was in Mondragon, the great mecca of cooperatives

in northern Spain, that the workers declared that capital must be subor-

dinate to labor to allow cooperatives to ourish. We must do the same if

we want to build platform cooperatives. No plan to build one will make

sense unless control over nance is a key part of its strategy.

The logical conclusion of this is to turn the platform of nance

itself into a cooperative. Then, each new cooperative enterprise would

not turn into a struggle to resist centralized nance, but cooperatives

could be built repeatedly on their shared platform of cooperative

nance.

Mondragon built its cooperative nancial platform the

old-fashioned way: the members made a brick-and-mortar bank,

the Caja Laboral, put all their personal and corporate savings into

it, and built it into a nancial powerhouse over decades. Upon this,

they built an extraordinarily expansive and vibrant cooperative

economy that has impacted their entire region and turned a tiny

mountain village into the headquarters for many multi-billion-dollar

worker-owned businesses.

We can follow Mondragon’s example and build institutions that

directly compete with centrally owned nance. This is what credit

unions, public banks, and cooperative lenders like my organization,

The Working World, have been doing for a long time. But the struggle

to gain ground against the U.S. nancial system is much harder than in

the isolated village of Mondragon in the 1950s. So far, the promise of

nancial cooperativism for all remains a very uphill battle.

This is where the disruptive power of technology could become

an opportunity. The Internet’s capacity for enabling transactions

among disparate people, for sharing information about products and

investments, and for creating new currencies and decentralized means

of exchange—each of these creates opportunities to subvert traditional

nance. We have a window for taking advantage of them, and this is

exactly what The Working World and our allies are trying to do. (For

more about this eort, see our showcase on The Madeleine System in

this book.)

190

THE GUERRILLA WAR OF PLATFORM COOPERATIVES

Cooperative businesses have managed to succeed in a world of central-

ized nance, and cooperative platforms can too, but it isn’t always easy.

Here are some lessons that we at The Working World have learned in

our experience supporting cooperatives, both online and o.

1. Build on cooperative nance. Most cooperatives start with

pools of money from people and communities. In this way, coopera-

tive businesses carve out a bit of cooperative nance to build them-

selves on, and any would-be cooperative platform builder will have to

do the same.

If you imagine getting nancing for a platform, consider the

relationship being oered to you by those who control the nance.

Is it extractive? Will ownership, control, or rewards mostly go to

the sources of money? What if things go at all wrong, and you can’t

meet your targets or make a payment—do you lose control? Resist

the seduction of larger oers of money that come with extractive

strings.

Look for cooperative lenders, credit unions, or CDFIs. Find

impact investors, community investors, or crowdfunding opportuni-

ties. But don’t assume these sources mean you don’t have to pay atten-

tion; structure your deals to make sure the people most involved—the

workers or users—are the owners and nance is the element that gets

hired or red.

2. Don’t just build—convert. If you need to own a house, do

you always need to build a new one? It is usually much easier to nd

an existing house and buy it—or, to put it another way, convert who

owns it. The problem with many of our platforms is also simply who

owns them, and we may nd it is far easier to make cooperatives,

including platform cooperatives, by converting existing businesses

rather than building them from scratch.

It is predicted that a million protable small businesses will close

in the next decade because their baby-boomer owners are retiring. A

growing body of entrepreneurs and policymakers is looking to save

191

these business by selling them to their workers, thereby converting

them to worker ownership.

There is no reason why we cannot consider conversion for online

platforms as well, although many of them have become so overvalued

that the nancial barriers are considerable. It probably won’t be pos-

sible to buy the biggest companies at the peak of their market value,

but opportunities to change the equation exist. What if the users—

aka, content-creators—of Facebook organized to demand ownership

under threat of a strike? What if municipalities trying to fend o Uber

allowed it to operate in exchange for some form of ownership for

drivers? What if governments and organized groups of people acted

in concert to depress a platform’s market value to a price we would be

able to pay? We could start by going after a platform most susceptible

to this type of pressure, converting it to cooperative ownership, and

making it an example for future conversions.

This is certainly not an easy strategy, but it might be easier than

trying to build and nance a massive platform from scratch.

3. Organize. That brings me to my nal recommendation in the

guerrilla war against centralized platforms: organizing.

The practice of social-justice organizing is evolving these days.

Rather than mostly combating businesses and demanding conces-

sions, organizers and the organized are learning to create and control

businesses. The work of organizing—surprisingly to some—develops

many of the skills needed in a functioning business: communication,

understanding the needs of others, and leading others toward common

goals. Organizing is not the opposite of business, it is just the opposite

of business for the benet of a few. When attempting to build not just a

cooperative business but a cooperative platform, the ability to organize

large numbers of people becomes perhaps the central skill necessary

for success.

In the eort to oppose centralized platforms, now is a time not

just to ght, but to create. The most fundamental challenge may be to

rebuild the underlying platform of nance itself.

192

31. FROM PEOPLE-CENTERED

IDEAS TO PEOPLE-POWERED

CAPITAL

CARMEN ROJAS

As we begin to realize the promises of platform cooperativism, the

challenge we face is not a lack of imagination or of ideas for gen-

erative enterprises. We also don’t lack people who are motivated to

create platforms, networks, or products for what we need to become

better, more complete, and deeply loving human beings. We don’t

lack leaders, doers, technologists, or organizers. What we often think

we lack is capital. But this doesn’t need to be the case, and there is no

time like the present to prove that the resources exist to make platform

cooperativism real.

I speak from experience. I work for The Workers Lab, a labor-

backed innovation lab focused on supporting and investing in

organizers and entrepreneurs to create enterprises that have the

promise to build power for working people. We recognize that the

United States has become a low-wage nation where millions of

workers invest hours into jobs with little hope of meeting their

basic needs. The result has been a social and economic crisis marked

most distinctly by the meltdown of 2008. We believe that workers

should be able to thrive and play an active role in our economy and

democracy. We’ve even learned some lessons about how to make

this happen.

193

THE STATE OF PLAY

There is a perceived mismatch between ideas and capital in the conver-

sations surrounding platform cooperativism. Many people have great

ideas for creating platforms that promise to powerfully connect people

with what they need. But they often struggle with testing their ideas

or developing a prototype because they don’t know where to nd the

capital necessary to shift from ideation to creation.

I would argue there are two reasons for this perceived mismatch

between ideas and capital. The rst is that well-meaning technologists

and entrepreneurs often are not connected with those who might want

to use, adopt, and own their platforms. This leads to the creation of

boutique solutions distant from the people who would most benet

and most likely pay for their existence. If there were a closer connec-

tion between the creators and the potential users, there would be more

ways to resource, create, and validate platforms.

The second reason for the perceived mismatch between capital

and ideas is not unrelated to the rst: the expectation of somehow

obtaining traditional capital resources to support work that ultimately

challenges the existing system. Instead, we need to tap into a radical

imagination that starts to undo the alignments of power that dominate

the nancial landscape. To do so, we should begin with ourselves.

WHO IS THE “WE”?

The creators of platforms and their end users are usually very dierent.

Most people today who are exploring the creation of platforms co-ops

are still white men who have few to no relationships with those they

would like to see governing and owning the platforms they are creating.

If they’re serious about considering their users as true members and

partners, the perceived capital mismatch is actually a customer mismatch.

This reminds me of an experience we had at The Workers Lab. A

young white entrepreneur had created a platform to connect recently

194

trained truckers with quality jobs with benets. Still new to the world

of investing, we were anxious to prioritize employers’ needs over

those of workers, based on an unspoken assumption that any job was

better than no job. We approached the entrepreneur, and he was easily

swayed to refocus his business to meet the demands of employers, as

opposed to persisting in his ambition to connect skilled workers to

quality jobs that they could validate.

This is not an uncommon story. The promise of platform coop-

erativism is to create something new, where those who are most mar-

ginalized and exploited on traditional platforms have another place to

go. But the allure of old-fashioned capital can close that door before

it even opens.

A number of leaders have recognized this mismatch and are

working tirelessly to address it head-on—for instance, the creation of

a training, monitoring, and certication enterprise by the Workers

Defense Project in Austin, Texas. After organizing for ten years to

address the rampant exploitation and lack of protection among immi-

grant workers in Texas’ construction industry, it created a business

where immigrant workers are both the providers and beneciaries of

safety training, can act as on-site monitors, and have co-created the

terms to certify construction projects. By investing in communities of

color and immigrant communities to act as leaders within their busi-

ness, they are demonstrating that the “we” of this work can look like

the “we” of the world.

WHOSE MONEY?

It is possible that we could end up creating platforms that are owned by

the users without truly aligning them with our values. True alignment

means aligning the enterprise with the capital that drives it.

At The Workers Lab, we’ve seen a number of reasons for the dif-

culties that people have in creating bridges between their ideas and

the resources they need. For one thing, those of us who see ourselves

195

working on the side of justice have often become convinced that cap-

ital can’t be a positive tool in this quest. We’ve heard this time and time

again from the kind of organizer who is meanwhile funded by major

foundations, which are subsidized by the state as nonprots. Despite

the contradictions involved, eschewing capital has become a matter of

activist identity.

Others, meanwhile, expect that the same sources of capital that

back exploitative platforms should or would fund their more coop-

erative work. This prospect is not only unlikely, it is also destructive.

Such an approach reduces our expectations to changing the rules of the

game without changing the game itself.

At The Workers Lab, we are looking to marry our ambitions of

platform cooperativism with cooperativist nance. The Securities

and Exchange Commission has enacted new rules on crowdfunding,

through the JOBS Act, that are opening up the ways that everyday

people can invest in the companies that best align with their values.

These new rules allow non-accredited investors to invest, and they also

allow for investments to occur without the intervention of brokers. It

has become easier, in this way, for us to be responsive to the people we

hope to serve and partner with.

Of course, these rules will also allow for the creation of and

investment in more exploitative platforms. But our ability to expose

those who are using this opening for those purposes can be addressed

by organizing and exposing the bad actors. Doing so will help align

us with our collective worries and dreams. When we are the ones

investing in us, new kinds of change are possible.

As we look back at the movement for platform cooperativism

years from now, my hope is that we will see a moment that stemmed

the surge of platforms that exploited working people, devalued human

well-being, and placed prots over all else. My hope is that we will

have created alternatives that became the norms for how platforms

could be used, owned, and shared. My hope is that we will also have,

more broadly, reset the terms of capital and creation for our world.

196

32. CAN CODE SCHOOLS GO

COOPERATIVE?

KAREN GREGORY

As public universities continue to weather attacks on funding and on

their curriculums, the phrase “learn to code” has become something of

a mantra in higher education. It is as though uttering the words to stu-

dents might be a cure-all for what ails the current job market. Across

the United States, public universities are currently struggling to revise

and revamp curriculums in the face of the infamous “skills gap”– a gap

that is presumed to exist between what college students currently learn

and what skills are required in the market. Despite evidence that such

gap claims are overblown, the narrative and rhetoric of the skills gap,

which banks on a feeling that university curriculums have not kept

pace with advances in digital technologies, has nonetheless become

a powerful weapon in the assault against the public university. Yet,

while much ink has been spilled over the value of learning to code,

the conversation seems to miss a fundamental issue: learning to code is

often entangled in a larger privatizing, entrepreneurial mission. If we

stand any hope for an equitable digital future, we will need to situate

a new gure of labor at the heart of learning to code. We will need a

new gure of labor working to design and develop digital platforms.

Yet, while public universities struggle to nd their place in the

emerging higher education economy, a new entity has emerged on the

scene—that of the code school, which oers an independent, stand-

alone set of intensive programming courses to students. I would like to

argue that we can learn a lesson from these code schools, but we can do

them one better. We can bring such projects into the public university

197

as a way to teach new forms of cooperativism, as well as contextualize

such digital work in the larger story of labor history.

Code schools, such as General Assembly, which is a global pro-

vider of intensive digital skills courses, currently oer courses such

as a twelve-week “full-time career accelerator” training program in

Android development. They do this at an additional cost to an indi-

vidual student, as code schools currently stand apart from the tra-

ditional liberal arts students. The schools explicitly link coding and

career. Udacity even goes so far as to guarantee job placement to stu-

dents in their machine learning courses. If students do not land a job

after they complete the course, they are entitled to a refund on the cost

of the course. Rather starkly, Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun has

been quoted as saying, “The ultimate objective of education is to nd

people a job.”

Code schools strike a chord and they capitalize on a relatively

recent social development—the emergence of the educated underem-

ployed or unemployed. Code schools are able to prot from a relatively

well-educated pool of potential students who are now job seekers in a

depressed market and who are willing to pay out of pocket for addi-

tional skills. In many ways, the existence of the code school legiti-

mately raises the question of what “skills” colleges and universities

should be imparting to students. If code is to be our shared lingua

franca in an increasingly digital and connected world, then more of us

will need to learn to speak in its vernaculars not only in order to “get

to work” but to continue the necessary project of critical, theoretical

scholarship. Coding or programming skills need not be counterpoised

to the work of thought, despite the insistence of some in Silicon Valley.

Yet what interests me here is not debating the merits of learning

to code. What interests me, rather, is the social gure of the private

(and entrepreneurial) laborer who is often brought into being by such

coding projects, particularly when such projects are brought into the

public university and sold back to administrators as a way to embolden

their curricular oerings and recruit students. When the code school

returns to the public university, perhaps as a “coding boot camp” or

198

a “startup incubator,” it is with the explicit expectation that students

will be taught how to be entrepreneurs—how to embrace and identify

with an entrepreneurial model of work and with an expectation that

private risk and debt will eventually be rewarded with the riches of

the entrepreneurial digital market. Yet if the educational context and

conditions of learning to code simply rearm the privatization of risk

and debt, then what expectations can we have that the digital world

will reect more than prot interests? Furthermore, such an emphasis

on entrepreneurialism threatens to duplicate the known gendered and

racial biases and structural inequalities that already plague the digital

economy.

As long as the context of learning to code or program requires

an embrace of the heroic gure of the lone, privatized individual, the

digital world will continue to be built in its image—it will continue to

reify the very notion that the digital economy is a site of “ownership”

and “reward” rather than collective, shared, and public resources.

While the language of digital “making” has entered the univer-

sity, it has come with a curious disinterest in labor and labor history,

which, for all practical purposes, have been radically abandoned in the

contemporary university. Yet, as the university continues to grasp at

entrepreneurial straws, it overlooks an opportunity to reconnect public

higher education to the (rather unknown) future of work. While

coding may sound like a solution to current market woes, in truth, it

will only delay the eventual degradation of such digital labor. When

everyone can code, those jobs too will go the way of other forms of

work—outsourced, undervalued, underpaid, or automated. However,

a digital skills curriculum anchored in labor theory and labor histo-

ry—a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of col-

lectivities, organizing, and worker agency—has the potential not only

to generate a new app or platform, but to recongure how digital labor

is brought into being and how we imagine continuing to live in and

through digital platforms, networks, and infrastructures.

Such a digital skills program could be built in and through working

with institutes such as the Murphy Institute at the City University

199

of New York. Students would be introduced to a broader world of

labor organizing, cooperative structures, community rights, and labor

politics as they also learn to design, develop, and program. It is also

essential that such a program be designed in and through the public

university as it is precisely public university students, such as CUNY

students, who currently stand very little chance of entering into the

elite world of Silicon Valley. A cooperative code school would not only

help to resituate the public university as a vital tie between students

and the failing job market, but it stands to oer a chance to rethink the

social demographics of digital labor.

Code schools and their ilk are emerging at this time because

they are responding to a need for a trained workforce, but they are

succeeding because they tap into the very real sense that the labor

market in the United States, even for the highly educated, is broken.

As coding projects return to the public university in the guise of entre-

preneurialism, we are losing a valuable opportunity to rethink how

digital “skills” might become a fertile ground for a new, potentially

cooperative-based, labor consciousness. It is time to bring labor history

back to the classroom so that students may begin to rethink technology

and infrastructure in order to build a more equitable world.

200

33. A CODE FOR GOOD WORK

PALAK SHAH

Once every few generations we have a momentous opportunity to

make big changes, to reset norms and culture and to reinvent our-

selves. That’s why the emerging platform cooperativism movement—

as an opportunity to create an economic system that is empathetic

and ecient, a system that solves for equity—is an exciting and rad-

ical development. As we embark upon building these new models,

dening our core values can provide useful guidance to the emergence

of a new economic system.

The essence of platform cooperativism is a rejection of uneven

extraction and an emphasis on cooperativism. This movement is

rightly asking: Who are we problem-solving for? What is the impact

of the new economy on the workers who are the engine that drives

it? Will the new economy be more or less equitable than the old

economy? Will there be more empathy in the new economy? Will

the new economy work for all of us, or is it an online version of the

economy that worked for just a few?

At the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we already know

what it looks like when the economy optimizes for some of us and

extracts value from the least visible of us. We’ve been working on pro-

moting respect and dignity for some of our most invisible and under-

valued workers in the oine economy for years, and what we’ve heard

from these workers about the online economy echoes those injustices.

Workers in the on-demand economy tell us that they like the ex-

ibility of their work, but they fear being cut o from their platforms

without warning after they have to cancel a shift to care for a sick

201

child. Many workers like the economic possibilities of these emerging

sources of revenue, but instead found themselves being paid less than

minimum wage to clean a completely trashed house.

So far, we have little evidence that Silicon Valley will build an

online economy optimized for equity and dignity. While new plat-

form technology presents us with entirely novel ways of organizing

and working together, and a strategic opportunity to reimagine our

economic relationships to one another, the tech businesses have largely

focused on enriching investors’ returns and delighting customers, often

at the expense of the workers who power these platforms. Algorithms

can handily resolve supply and demand imbalances or competing cus-

tomer preferences, but the ruthless pressure to pursue growth and prot

still overpowers the moral case of treating workers well, limiting how

equitable these models can be. While our technological advances can

make life easier for all humans—isn’t that the point of technology?—it

is not yet clear that we will use it to design an economic system that

works for all of us.

What would it mean to build platforms that go further than e-

ciency, style, or convenience? How would we integrate compassion,

dignity, or fairness? How would we write algorithms that optimize

how we treat one another, how we truly connect, and how we sustain

the very people that sustain us? How do we write that into operational

code?

It’s important that we ask these questions, but it’s vital that we

answer them. A political agreement on collective ownership or ide-

ological agreements on worker power can be the rst, essential step.

But the real work is in building models that pick up where commercial

platforms have left o. That means we must roll up our sleeves and dive

into the operational details and inner workings of how labor is distrib-

uted through algorithms, phone-based apps, and online platforms.

This is not as easy as it seems, and there are no shortcuts. The

central task here is to build platforms that can operationalize our com-

mitment to fairness and cooperativism. Why? Because our values alone

won’t get us all the way there. Building a cooperative platform is also

202

a pragmatic, operational endeavor, and the devil is in the details of

seemingly unglamorous and mundane processes.

In many areas of business, technology, and even manufacturing,

organizations rely on certain agreed-upon standards to establish a set

of common operating assumptions describing what the system should

do—not necessarily how the system should do it. Whether you’re

talking about platform co-ops or Silicon Valley giants, we believe a

set of values-based specs for the new economy could serve as a guide

to embedding dignity and respect into all operations areas—a Good

Work Code for the new economy.

Our Good Work Code is a set of eight simple principles that can

serve as a framework, a guide ensuring that the new platforms are

creating good work:

Safety: Good work does not allow for us to wonder at the start

of a shift if we will be unharmed by the end. Everyone deserves to be

safe at work, always.

Stability & Flexibility: Good work is made possible when we

are not anxious about meeting life demands, whether it’s making an

unexpected doctor’s appointment or making enough money to pay

the bills. We are all at our best when our schedules allow us to balance

work and life with a stable—but exible—schedule.

Transparency: Good work means being transparent about

requirements, performance, and the rules. When everyone knows how

things work, everything works better.

Shared Prosperity: Good work rewards all of us. Workers are

the engine powering the platform, and when the platform thrives, they

should thrive too.

A Livable Wage: Good work provides a living. That’s why

we work—to live. Everyone needs fair pay and benets to make a

living.

Inclusion & Input: Good work recognizes that our value extends

beyond performing a task. Platforms are more successful when we are

heard, respected, and valued as part of the team.

203

Support & Connection: We all work better when we don’t feel

isolated and alone. Good work supports us to adapt and manage in a

rapidly changing environment and economy.

Growth & Development: Good work provides opportunity for

the most fundamental human need: to grow. Everyone wants to grow

and learn at work as they do in other areas of their life.

The Good Work Code doesn’t introduce any revolutionary new

values. It doesn’t innovate or disrupt previous thinking on good work

standards. But this framework, or a derivative of it, will be essential to

building an equitable platform. We are at the exact right moment in

time to insert this framework into the DNA of the new economy, to

correct the course so that we’re building a new economy that works

for all of us.

With the emergence of the platform economy, we have one of

those rare opportunities to reset the norms and culture of work. At

its best, technology strengthens our humanity and our connected-

ness. We shape our economy as much as it shapes us, and we have an

opportunity to make sure the digital revolution is supported by a long-

overdue revolution in values.

204

34. MEET YOUR FRIENDLY

NEIGHBORHOOD TECH

CO-OP

MICKY METTS

When I joined a web-development tech co-op, it changed my life in

wonderful ways. I am now able to bring my whole self to my work

and have a life that is not divided between work and play. My drive

and passion come from doing what I love—building community, and

enabling people to have the technical tools they need to maintain and

control their autonomy.

It is rapidly becoming easier for someone with a great idea to build

a company online without much of a barrier to entry. Websites can be

set up for free or minimal cost, and cloud services with online website

building tools are plentiful. But sophisticated, cutting-edge platforms

still require skilled people to build them. A new generation of plat-

form co-ops will need developers who understand both technology

and cooperative enterprise. Nobody is better prepared for this work

than tech co-ops.

What, you might ask, is the dierence between tech co-ops and

platform co-ops? How might they collaborate?

Tech co-ops are worker-owned development shops that build cus-

tomized tools. Platform co-ops are online tools owned by the people

who use them. They are dierent, but they will both be stronger if

they work together.

As a co-op and as individuals, Agaric is part of the vibrant, global

Drupal community, which maintains and continually improves a free

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content management system that makes it easier for people to build

websites. Some of Agaric’s projects result in new software that can be

helpful to others, or solutions to challenges that others might be facing.

When this happens, we package the software we create for free distri-

bution, usually on Drupal.org. Supporting people in building websites

that make the world a better place is rewarding, but being able to

package that free software and put it in the hands of others is nothing

short of incredible. We also collaborate with groups such as the M.I.T.

Center for Civic Media to brainstorm and build projects that benet

our neighborhoods.

Agaric is made up of ve people. We are spread around the world,

but we are all working on a level playing eld. Being a cooperative

allows us to govern ourselves through bylaws that we created. Worker-

owners can join by paying a small, monthly investment, of which a

portion can be recovered if they decide to leave. We earn the same

wage each month, and we all have overlapping skills that comple-

ment each other. We take time to teach each other what we learn

and broaden our knowledge through tutorials and collaborations with

other developers. Freelancers can gain a lot by putting their eorts

together and building small cooperative companies that can provide

services to their communities and beyond.

Like other cooperatives, tech co-ops cooperate with each

other. I am part of the Tech Co-op Network, which lists more

than twenty-five tech co-ops as members on our website,

TechWorker.coop. We have a mailing list where members can post

messages. We share information about our projects, and ask each other

for advice or links to resources such as example bylaws. The group is

a good source for recommendations on governance and details of how

successful cooperatives are structured. The list is also populated with

people who are not yet part of co-ops, but would like to form or join

one. It provides an informal introduction to cooperative business and

makes it easy to ask questions and stay informed.

Being part of a cooperative allows the members to have a voice

and bring projects to the group. When one of our own presented a

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sound proposal, we started Agaric Nicaragua, a project to build a

resource for developers in Managua to learn programming skills and

to be trained to take on development roles with clients. This is a win

for developers in Nicaragua and for Agaric, to grow talent in areas that

are underserved by local educational opportunities around the world.

We will extend this opportunity to the world by sharing the template

for this project.

This kind of collaboration is essential. Creating a cooperative

internet will require more than just new technology. It will no doubt

take the combined eorts of many tech co-ops to build a new eco-

system of cooperative platforms. The structures and processes we use

to work together must also change from hierarchical, linear forms to

non-linear, cooperative ones. To give a sense of what that entails, here

are some steps for starting a tech co-op of your own:

1. Find the right people. You will need to nd coworkers in your

industry that value working on a one-worker-one-vote basis. Talk

to people in your personal network about your goal. Let former

coworkers know you are forming or seeking to work in a cooper-

ative. Reach out to mailing lists you are on and ask if people are

interested in working collectively.

2. Explore dierent strategies for self-management. Learn

about your local cooperative community. If possible, go to events

where you can meet members of cooperatives (tech or other-

wise) and ask them how their organizations are structured inter-

nally. Most cooperative members are approachable and willing to

answer your questions. Ask them what they think works and what

doesn’t.

3. Consider conversion. This can be easier than starting from

scratch. If you work for a company you like that is not a cooper-

ative, talk to the owners about the possibility of selling it to the

workers.

4. Dene the parameters of your cooperative environment.

Whether through your articles of organization, bylaws, or a simple

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contractual agreement, be clear about how your cooperative will

work. Above all, a cooperative is dened by its members.

5. Join a cooperative network (or two). For those in North

America, consider the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives

and the Tech Co-op Network. Wherever you are, connect with

whatever kinds of co-ops exist in your area. If there isn’t already a

directory of local co-ops, consider starting one!

6. Invest in other cooperatives. Buy locally whenever you can.

Encourage pooled funds from successful cooperatives to help

bootstrap new proposed cooperatives. When you invest in new

local cooperatives you are investing in your community. Agaric

often collaborates with other co-ops, and we share our leads with

a pool of developers that we have worked on projects with in the

past. Once you have a healthy network, word-of-mouth referrals

go both ways.

7. Choose free tools to run the business. Free software is soft-

ware that can be used, studied, modied, and redistributed by

anyone, for any purpose. Using free software to run your cooper-

ative is not only a way to preserve your freedom, but it will allow

you to share your successes with others by sharing your code. We

recommend free software tools like GnuCash for accounting

because it doesn’t require you to trust a corporate cloud service. If

you think of ways to improve it, also, you can get involved with

the actual development if you choose to make changes. At Agaric,

we believe that cooperativism and free software go hand in hand.

Through steps like this, we really can make our own jobs, manage

our own time, and create our own online platforms through coopera-

tion. Co-ops can teach communities how to be freer from oppressive

systems by being role models. But we must be wise in how we do

it. Strong tech co-ops will make for stronger cooperative platforms.

Co-ops must work together in solidarity.

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35. BUILDING THE PEOPLE’S

OWNERSHIP ECONOMY

THROUGH UNION CO-OPS

MICHAEL PECK

Cooperatives and unions started out their organized lives together.

In gritty Northwest England, during the Industrial Age’s heyday—

Manchester in the 1840s—the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers

composed their Rochdale Principles, which became the foundation of

the modern cooperative movement. It was in this same region, around

the same time, that industrial labor unions were beginning to ourish.

Since then, diverging histories, experiences, and destinies have caused

cooperatives and unions to run along mostly autarchic paths, some-

times parallel, too infrequently connecting. Now, as we nd ourselves

in a period of the highest landlord absenteeism since America’s Gilded

Age, it’s time to bring unionism and cooperativism back together.

America’s inequality epidemic calls out for a new labor-

cooperative convergence to accelerate the end of the era of false

structural choices. Yesterday’s Hobbesian, “either-or” menu, forcing

workers to choose between sustaining jobs or a clean environment, or

between racial justice and secure employment, is being replaced with

a more positive and uplifting “all of the above”—often through online

platforms facilitating better choices and stronger, more inclusive advocacy.

Compartmentalized hierarchies are breaking down into a more egali-

tarian digital commons, overcoming imbalances between labor and capital.

Emerging communities of freelancers are exhibiting what Sara Horowitz,

founder of the Freelancers Union, calls the “New Mutualism.”

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Increasingly, these new pioneers prefer to own their labor and rent

their capital whenever possible, instead of Wall Street’s predatory opposite.

With less than 10 percent of Americans currently owning their own busi-

nesses and workplaces, today’s “new, new organizing” begins to address

the skewed imbalances between capital and labor and the power this dis-

tortion produces and exercises. Movements and policies are seeking

to extend the “sharing economy” into an ownership-enabler, and

to resist manipulative downgrades into a rental economy, where labor

becomes even more of a bottom-traded commodity without equity benets.

Yesterday’s Davos-sanctioned global marketplace for labor arbi-

trage is becoming unmasked as a cabal for corporatist buying and

selling of human beings and a contributor to global inequality, with

the excuse that labor is a disposable commodity instead of a precious

resource. This turnaround is long overdue.

Starting in the spring of 2014, 1worker1vote.org set out to demon-

strate that widespread workplace equity and democratic participation

can return America to its original system of individual and local com-

munity ownership. This initiative emerged from the historic 2009

United Steelworkers collaboration with Mondragon in the Basque

region of Spain, the world’s largest network of worker cooperatives.

We’re now developing a nationwide cadre of unionized, worker-

owned-and-managed cooperatives to overcome domestic structural

(racial, gender, geographic) inequalities of opportunity, mobility,

and income. A growing multitude of like-minded local and national

organizations are working with us to help existing businesses transition

to a union co-op structure and to launch new union co-op businesses.

Our threefold intent is to:

1. Defeat embedded structural inequalities by deploying tested and

proven hybrid ownership models (starting with the union/co-op

template);

2. Build and launch protable, worker-owned-and-managed enter-

prises in the context of inter-cooperating ecosystems, drawing on

sixty years of the Mondragon experience;

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3. Co-design projects and tools that can replicate and scale (the com-

plete 1worker1vote.org mantra is: “include, design, build, launch,

replicate, and scale”).

As a clear case in point, and after almost eight years of struggle and

action, Abdi Buni, the president of Denver’s Green Taxi Cooperative,

and Lisa Bolton, now the Communications Workers of America’s

international vice president for telecommunications and technologies

(but previously president of CWA Local 7777 in Denver), have earned

the right to claim success. As a result of their determined “learning by

doing” process and teamwork, unionized and employee-owned cab

companies will dominate the taxi marketplace in Denver.

This represents a remarkable example of how solidarity-

centric business structures can combine with determined union policy

advocacy and market-available technology to produce more holistic

business models. Green Taxi Cooperative has more than eight hun-

dred worker-owners, who are also CWA members, with a newly

signed collective bargaining agreement. Before this, CWA Local 7777

had assisted another local taxi cooperative, the two-hundred-driver

Union Taxi, which is presently not unionized, and the union learned

a lot from that process during round two.

Green Taxi is joining other taxi drivers in New York City and

elsewhere who are launching apps to step up the competition with

Uber, allowing customers to hail a cab and pay for it with their devices

of choice. The platform cooperativism movement is poised to combine

local solidarity structures with open-source technology, transforming

the Green Taxi precedent into a repeatable and scalable economic

opportunity nationwide.

These opportunities are even greater now that the California

Labor Commission has ruled that Uber drivers are employees, not

independent contractors. In more and more jurisdictions, app-based

drivers are winning the right to form a union. This makes it even

easier to align platform cooperativism with the might of organized

labor in the transportation sector.

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Other emerging economic networks are beginning to aggregate

as well. The Freelancers Union, headquartered in Brooklyn, is the

nation’s largest labor organization representing the new, independent

workforce of 260,000 members in more than twenty U.S. cities—as

well as the 53 million Americans freelancing today, more than one in

every three workers. In four years, the American Sustainable Business

Council, based in Washington, DC, has become the nation’s fastest

growing private sector trade association of over 250,000 businesses and

325,000 business leaders focused on building a sustainable economy

based on triple-bottom-line principles: people, planet, and prot.

These inter-cooperating communities are forging private and non-

prot solutions in which enlightened government is a minority partner

but not a market-maker.

We can start to see rsthand how new hybrid models such as

union-cooperatives can place worker ownership in the economy’s

center ring, enabled by technology. The online “commons” can rein-

vigorate the American Town Square and Main Street, beneting

from strong antecedents. Historically, marginalized communities

such as African Americans in the Deep South’s agricultural counties

were cooperative pioneers because, as in the churches, they had their

own spaces to democratically organize. Meanwhile, people in racially

and economically conictive zones such as Ferguson, Baltimore, and

Detroit are rediscovering that to secure their civil rights, they must

also secure local equity and ownership.

Research demonstrates that positive employee and company

performance over time correlates with high-impact participation on

all levels by workers, combined with the broadest possible equity

distribution among workers and a strong emphasis on worker edu-

cation. Employees with some form of worker ownership accumu-

late more savings than employees in non-participating rms. Firms

with some form of capital-sharing perform better in the competi-

tive marketplace than those without. Workers with prot-sharing or

employee stock-ownership and stock-purchase plans are better paid

and have more benets than other workers. These kinds of rms also

212

weather economic downturns better than their investor-controlled

counterparts.

Despite this evidence, the so-called American Dream of wide-

spread ownership is receding for a rapidly diminishing and resentful

middle class. But grass, as Pete Seeger sang, still grows through con-

crete. Enabling workers to become owners in their projects and com-

panies reects core American values of freedom, individual dignity,

self-reliance, bootstrapping, solidarity, and equal opportunity—all

reinforced by productive ownership principles and practices. These

ineluctable, hope-instilling values promise an economy that gushes

up rather than trickles down, an economy that is not rented, tithed,

leased, outsourced, or o-shored—an economy in which every par-

ticipant, every worker, has a voice, a vote, and a right to share and

participate in the common good.

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36. TOWARD A THEORY

OF VALUE FOR PLATFORM

COOPERATIVES

MAYO FUSTER MORELL

Collaboration through online platforms does not happen inde-

pendently of their design and governance. Whether or not they are

thriving depends on platform ownership. Such ownership might con-

dition how well a particular platform can trigger participation and

community interactions, and yet it has rarely been investigated. When

was the last time you heard someone ask about platform ownership?

The Platform Cooperativism event at The New School in 2015

did focus on ownership, but even there quantitative analysis of plat-

form data was largely missing. With regard to user engagement and

value creation, does cooperative ownership really make such a big dif-

ference to corporate ownership?

This chapter draws on research from the P2Pvalue.eu project,

which investigates the conditions that favor value creation in the con-

text of commons-based peer production. Our analysis, which examines

three hundred European organizations, cannot claim to be represent-

ative, due the fact that we cannot account for the entirety of the very

diverse universe of commons production. We did, however, at least

try to represent the heterogeneity of the eld—from free, libre, open

source software (FLOSS), and open data, to open design and open

hardware. Our results are freely available at directory.p2pvalue.eu.

Commons-based peer production refers to a set of activities

characterized by collaborative production, involving peer-to-peer

214

relationships and a resulting common resource. This model stands in

stark contrast to traditional, hierarchical command relationships. It

relies on access to open commons resources—favoring access, repro-

ducibility, and emulation. Some of the best-known examples are

Linux, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and SETI. Commons-based peer

production is not identical with platform cooperativism, but our study

is relevant to the larger platform co-op ecosystem, which is deeply

reliant on commons-related practices.

For a community of commons-based peer producers to operate,

there needs to be a platform—made possible by the people who create

it, maintain it, and facilitate its legal framework. Notably, there are

dierent types of platform providers. Wikipedia, for instance, is facili-

tated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprot foundation steered by

the Wikipedia community. In other cases, however, the platform pro-

vider is a corporation, which leads to far less conducive conditions for

the community. One example is Flickr, the photo- and video-hosting

site owned by Yahoo.

In our research, we identied four types of platform providers: public

institutions; corporations; nonprot organizations such as foundations,

associations, and cooperatives; and informal grassroots organizations that

may not have any legal status. Among the communities we studied, 7.2

percent relied on public institutions, 29 percent relied on corporations, 57

percent relied on cooperatives, and 6.8 percent chose grassroots organiza-

tions or community networks as their platform provider.

GOVERNANCE OF COMMON PRODUCTION

Studies of commons-based peer production have usually investigated

specic, isolated features linked to the governance of such production.

In contrast, we adopt a holistic perspective to understanding the con-

trol and direction of a platform, as well as the distribution of power.

We considered the following six interrelated factors as determinants

and drivers of commons governance:

215

Mission. It really matters who denes the mission of a platform.

Depending on whether it is members of the community or corporate

owners, the platform will develop in accordance with the initial mis-

sion statement.

Management of contributions. This refers to the extent to

which participants are able to decide their own level of commitment,

whether they can dene their contributions based on their personal

interests, motivations, resources, and abilities, and whether relation-

ships are peer-to-peer in contrast to traditional forms of hierarchical

command. Greater exibility of participants seems to be conducive to

higher degrees of contribution.

Decision-making with regard to community interaction.

Governance of commons production depends on decision-making bodies

that also address conict resolution. Consensus-based decision making is

frequent in commons-based peer production but the methods dier.

Formal policies applied to community interaction. As it

evolves, commons-based production tends to establish formal rules

that may be restricting. Such rules include the terms of use and

intellectual-property licenses.

Design of the platform. Individuals are rarely involved in direct

dialogue or negotiations among themselves. Instead, they interact with

the platform design, which steers their participation and interaction.

Therefore, the design must follow the social norms of commons-based

peer production.

Platform provision. We noticed two main axes of platform pro-

vision: open versus closed with regard to community involvement, and

user autonomy versus dependency. A platform is considered open when

participation in the provider space is possible for anyone. Participation

in these cases is regulated through self-selection. For participants,

autonomy is linked to the license held for the commons-pool resources

and the type of software used for the platform (i.e., copyleft licenses

and the use of freely available code, as in FLOSS, versus conditions

dened by ordinary copyright). If the platform can be replicated—if

it is “forkable”—the relationships created on forked versions are free

216

from the original platform provider. FLOSS and copyleft licensing

allow platforms to be replicated, while close copyright license regimes

prohibit that. In other words, the use of FLOSS and a copyleft license

creates conditions in which the community can have greater autonomy

and freedom from the platform provider.

Governance very much depends on who is in control of these six

power nodes in commons production. Each of the axes of governance

can be managed in an inclusive or exclusive way. They may encourage

involvement on the basis of participants as individuals or through the

community as a whole.

The emerging varieties of governance for commons-based peer pro-

duction are highly complex. We found that specically cooperative own-

ership leads to more self-governance among all involved and a more hori-

zontal relational structure; it favors a more peer-to-peer oriented process.

VALUE PRODUCTION FOR COOPERATIVE MODELS OF

PRODUCTION

Studies of commons-based peer production have not produced a con-

solidated analytical framework to assess the value that is produced. One

fundamental challenge for the development of such a theory of value

is the inadequacy of monetary metrics as proxies for value production,

since part of what peer producers create, exchange, and consume does

not pass through monetary exchanges. Thus, as part of our project,

we are developing our own conceptual framework that identies six

dimensions to assess and measure value:

1. Community building

2. Social use-value of the resource created

3. Reputation

4. Achievement of the stated mission

5. Monetary value

6. Ecological value and derivative processes

217

GOVERNANCE AND VALUE

Does the type of platform provision—that is, platform cooperativism

versus platform capitalism—aect the collaborative community’s

capacity to generate value? We found that cooperative structures have

a positive impact on value creation in terms of use-value and repu-

tation. The cooperatives ranked better on web-based use value and

reputation value indicators (such as Google PageRank and the global

Alexa ranking), and performed less well on reputation value indicators

linked to social networks reputation (such as Kred, which is linked to

Twitter, and likes on Facebook). Nevertheless, our analysis didn’t nd

any signicant correlation on monetary value, capacity to achieve its

mission, or capacity to build community.

This is a preliminary analysis that we will elaborate further as

part of the ongoing P2Pvalue.eu research project, but a few things

are clear. What we have shown so far is that platform ownership

models do not only determine governance but also inuence the

capacity to generate value. This should be considered when peers

or policy makers decide what kinds of platforms they are going to

build or promote. According to our analysis, platform cooperativism

will further not only self-governing processes but also the capacity

for people to create resources and services that garner a good online

reputation.

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37. PUBLIC POLICIES FOR

DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY

FRANCESCA BRIA

The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders

of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all pro-

ductive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the

individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses);

the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-

connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, net-

worked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital

services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy

as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new

economy serves more than the platform-builders’ prots.

We are seeing a shift of power, for instance, from service interme-

diaries to information intermediaries, a kind of “Uberization” of ser-

vices. The current data-driven platforms are marketplaces that match

potential customers to anything and anyone. They are able to gather

lots of data, lower transaction and coordination costs, and provide

cheaper services using a dynamic pricing strategy. Most platforms are

monopolies, quickly capturing network externalities by exploiting the

network eect and the economies of scale of their ecosystem. They

are also parasitic, since they free-ride on collective data and people’s

existing social and economic relations. The strategy of these powerful

algorithmic institutions is to enter a variety of economic sectors rapidly

and disrupt current industries. By controlling their digital ecosystems,

they can turn everything into a productive asset, and every transaction

can become an auction where they set the bidding and pricing rules.

219

Platforms are also increasingly transforming the labor market. Uber,

for instance, does not own cars and doesn’t employ drivers; it regards its

workers as independent contractors. In this way, the company external-

izes most costs to workers, eliminating collective bargaining and imple-

menting intrusive data-driven mechanisms of reputation and rankings to

reduce transaction costs (for the company). The growth of the sharing

economy has so far come with an increasing precarization of labor, and

erosion of job security, social protection, and safety nets for workers, such

as benets related to healthcare, pensions, parenting, and so on.

If you are European like myself, and you’re used to a functioning,

social-democratic safety net, what is now promised by companies like

Uber and Airbnb is not very appealing. Despite their optimistic pitch

of delivering better and cheaper solutions to solve the world’s greatest

problems—from climate change to health and education—the welfare

program oered by Silicon Valley comes with public services cuts, aus-

terity policy, nancialization of public infrastructure, increasing debt,

and a free license for tech corporations to monitor citizens twenty-four

hours a day.

Many would argue that the European welfare model is no longer

suitable or sustainable. However, there are historical and political rea-

sons that got us to the current situation. Governments forced to imple-

ment counterproductive austerity measures are left with no budget to

invest into social policies.

A common rationale used in defense of the platform economy

is that it will generate a huge wealth for the platform owners, and

they will reinvest these prots into the real economy, thus serving

the public good. Unfortunately, this is not the case. On the contrary,

the latest wave of digital innovation has resulted in excessive returns

to capital, with massive amounts of cash going to the balance sheets

and the oshore accounts of big tech companies, while very little gets

invested in welfare, social infrastructures, education, health, and clean

energy to ght climate change. This situation is exacerbated by the

apparent inability of governments to tax prots made by high-tech and

nancial giants, as seen recently in the very generous tax settlement

220

between Google and the UK government and the tax dispute between

the Italian government and Apple.

THE SHIFT TOWARD DEMOCRATIC,

COMMONS-BASED CITIES

The search for alternatives to platform capitalism should be put within

a broader framework of growing discontent with austerity measures

and the corporatization of everything. In Europe we have very good

examples of movements advocating for the collective management

of public resources such as water, air, and electricity. These represent

potential alliances when we discuss cooperative platforms.

A very interesting example of a city that is putting forward alter-

native policies and forward-looking regulations is Barcelona. After

the large mobilization of the 15M movement beginning in 2011, the

anti-eviction housing activist Ada Colau, a leader in the Platform for

People Aected by Mortgages (PAH), became the mayor of Barcelona,

representing the main political opposition against the elite who

brought Spain into a deep nancial and social crisis, which left hun-

dreds of thousands of families without a home.

The new coalition led by Colau has been crowdfunded and organ-

ized through an online collaborative platform that aggregates policy input

from thousands of citizens. Soon after taking oce, the coalition mem-

bers embarked on a series of radical social reforms. In particular, they

started to enforce regulations to block illegal tourism. The council froze

new licenses for hotels and other tourist accommodations, promising to

ne rms like Airbnb and Booking.com if they marketed apartments

without being on the local tourism register. Barcelona then provided

these companies the possibility to negotiate 80 percent of the penalty if

they allow the Social Emergency Housing Consortium to allocate empty

apartments to residents with subsidized rent for three years.

The city has called for a popular assembly for responsible tourism

where citizens can discuss best practices and business models. The

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new government is also promoting new policies to foster a

collaborative economy that generates social benefits locally.

Besides these types of initiatives, Ada Colau has also promised a shift

toward re-municipalization of infrastructure and public services.

This is grounded in a very critical understanding of the neoliberal,

surveillance-driven “smart city” model being promoted by big tech

corporations. The ambition, instead, is for a shift to a democratic, green,

and commons-based digital city built from bottom up.

This vision of re-municipalization of critical public services and

network infrastructures is of growing global appeal, leading to a new

alliance between public utilities and cooperative online platforms. A

number of cities and regions across the world are attempting to put

water supply, waste disposal, and energy provision contracts back into

public hands, prioritizing community interests over private commer-

cial objectives. An important innovation has been the growth of new

forms of public utility ownership, combined with more decentralized

forms of collective ownership—including cooperatives with shares

held jointly by the local authorities, labor unions, and citizens.

COOPERATIVE DATA PLATFORMS AND ALTERNATIVE

MODELS FOR DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION

We need public investment in future data-intensive infrastructure and

welfare systems for the common good. Cities and governments have

not yet fully grasped that power lies, today, at the level of data. Only

recently have we begun to view online platforms as meta-utilities,

with the information layer feeding all other services, rapidly changing

the way services are managed and delivered. Data, identity, and rep-

utation are critical in the platform economy. Silicon Valley aspires to

turn data into a new asset class—a commodity to be sold and traded

in nancial markets, with property regimes surrounding it. Shoshana

Zubo of Harvard Business School calls this new reality “surveillance

capitalism.” We have to move from surveillance capitalism to a system

222

that is able to socialize data—such as with new forms of cooperativism

and democratic social innovation.

Cities, for instance, should be able to run distributed common

data infrastructure on their own, with systems that ensure the secu-

rity, privacy, and sovereignty of citizens’ data. Cities can then invite

local companies, cooperatives, civil society organizations, and tech

entrepreneurs to come in and oer innovative services on top of that

infrastructure. One example is the European Commission’s CAPS

program, which has invested around €60 million on collaborative and

open platforms to pilot bottom-up, citizen-led projects with strong

social impact such as the D-CENT project (http://dcentproject.eu),

developing distributed and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy

and cryptocurrencies for economic empowerment. Initiatives like

these can help ensure that the data produced by platforms, devices,

sensors, and software doesn’t get locked down in corporate silos, but

becomes available for the public good. Investing public resources for

piloting innovative, cooperative platforms is necessary to enable cred-

ible alternatives to the current data paradigms exploited by the domi-

nant platforms—integrating economy, technology, society, and policy,

which would otherwise remain fragmented and lead to market con-

centration and regulatory breakdowns.

The current predatory paradigm is not the only solution. We

can harness the technology-driven transformation now under way to

improve our society and welfare for the collective benet. Building

alternative forms of public and common ownership for data-intensive

platforms will help to create an economy that transcends the logic of

short-termism and rent extraction. We are not going to be able to

improve welfare, health, youth employment, education, and the envi-

ronment by leaving the market to do it on its own. We should look

beyond immediate commercial gain in favor of long-term value crea-

tion for society. Twenty-rst century democracy depends on this task.

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38. LEGAL AND GOVERNANCE

STRUCTURES BUILT TO

MIRIAM A. CHERRY

To date, the dominant economic narrative for the gig economy has

been one in which platform owners extract a share of the income gener-

ated from the workers who use their platforms. This is troubling, since

many forms of crowd-work are situated at the crossroads of precarious

work, automatic management, deskilling, and low wages. Recent law-

suits by workers in the gig economy claiming employee status contain

the demand for better pay, hours, benets, and working conditions.

However, these misclassication lawsuits do not seek to change the

ways in which the underlying business relationship between workers

and platforms are structured.

Platform cooperatives, however, subvert the dominant economic

narrative. If workers themselves owned the platforms, then workers

would have control over important matters such as wages and benets.

Cooperatives could clear a path toward ecient and convenient use of

technology for consumers that simultaneously incorporated fair labor

standards. For example, taxi drivers in several cities are working on set-

ting up their own driver-owned platform to compete with the popular

Uber app. I want to put this new move toward platform cooperativism

into context with the underlying legal structures and also to discuss

briey the challenges to governance that platforms cooperatives will face.

Worker-owned businesses have long existed in the United States,

although they have been relatively rare and an exception to the default

224

of the traditional for-prot shareholder primacy model. Many advocates

who seek to better the status of so-called shadow (“under the table”)

workers have long advocated for worker-owned businesses through

groups such as worker centers. Why would becoming owners make

sense as opposed to unionizing and acting collectively to bargain with

an employer? With certain endeavors such as home cleaning, day labor,

and home health, there are individual contracts but no one common

employer with whom the workers can bargain collectively. Likewise,

in the gig economy there are many individual customers using the

platforms. As workers continue to struggle in the gig economy, plat-

form cooperatives have emerged as an appealing possible alternative.

On a practical level, what legal tools are available to help those

who are trying to set up platform cooperatives? Some states have ena-

bling statutes that set out tailor-made rules for worker cooperatives.

However, there is no uniform law across the states, and some states have

passed enabling legislation only for consumer cooperatives. California

faced this issue and, in 2015, amended its legislation to make it clear

that both consumers and workers could form cooperative businesses.

That said, even in the absence of a worker cooperative statute, there

are other business entities that could provide the appropriate organi-

zational structure for worker-owned businesses. One good choice of

business entity for a platform cooperative might be the limited liability

company, which combines limited liability with favorable partnership

taxation. LLCs may be centralized and run by a group of managers

(similar to a board of directors in a traditional corporation) or run in a

decentralized way with equal voting, much like our traditional notion

of a general partnership. If the operating agreement is properly struc-

tured so that the workers are made the members of the LLCs and given

management rights, then that should accommodate a worker-owned

business model.

Over ten years ago, in a paper appearing in the UC Davis Law

Review, I noted that business planning techniques (which those who

have access to nancial and accounting resources routinely employ)

could be used to improve the situation of low-wage immigrant women

225

workers. Due to language barriers, immigrant workers often are at

the mercy of the managers who arrange the work. In this scenario,

immigrant workers often work for depressed wages, are paid under the

table, and do not receive benets. In contrast, LLC structures allowed

these same shadow workers to organize and own their own busi-

nesses, hiring an English speaker—at a set wage—to work for them,

scheduling and arranging jobs. Within an LLC structure, the workers

are able to decide what benets would best serve their members. In

addition, as worker-owners who are actively engaged in managing

the business and paying taxes, LLC members may have an easier time

regularizing the workers’ immigration status or, at the very least, not

creating a tax liability issue for the workers with the Internal Revenue

Service. Finally, the experience of receiving training, and becoming

knowledgeable in running a business, can assist workers in taking what

otherwise could be seen as a “dead end” low-skilled job and trans-

forming it into a much better opportunity for advancement. Many of

the advantages for low-wage immigrant workers inherent in a work-

er-owned business form could also improve the lot of gig-economy

workers.

Another intriguing and potentially fruitful possibility for organ-

izing platform cooperatives would be for the platform to incorpo-

rate and obtain certication as a B Corporation. B Corporations are

a class of for-prot entities that simultaneously strive to create ben-

ets to the environment, workers, or communities. As such, they

operate as a hybrid, straddling the category of for-prot and non-

prot. B Corporations strive for transparency, and investors in such

rms understand that there may be tradeos—opportunities for prot

that may in fact be passed by in pursuit of social-benet goals. The

B Corporation incentives would harmonize well with worker co-ops

that already have workers’ issues at the very core of their organiza-

tion and mission. They would also resist the type of “mission drift”

of cooperatives that lose their social vision, such as electric co-ops

that continue to use polluting coal. To date, eleven states have passed

enabling legislation to recognize B Corporation status, with additional

226

states passing similar or complementary types of legislation, such as

California’s exible purpose corporation. These business forms put

social benet at the heart of the organization’s mission.

Regardless of the choice of business entity, another important

issue is designing a workable governance structure in the operating

agreement or corporate documents. There are some issues unique to

online platform cooperatives that could present particular challenges

to governance. Some of the issues include accommodating for ex-

ibility and part-time work. One of the main attractions of the gig

economy is exibility. Worker-owners in platform cooperatives may

be working part-time, and there will be a need for ease of entry or

exit. Another issue could arise around the amount of eort workers

contribute. Although one hopes that workers who work for them-

selves and other workers will dedicate themselves to building their

platform, cooperative endeavors could create moral hazard and the risk

of shirking. The other challenge with crowd-work, where the work

can be performed in any geographical location, is that there will be

participants from many dierent countries, each with its own set of

legal rules.

The fact that there are no tailor-made enabling statutes geared

specically toward platform cooperatives contributes to increased

setup costs and barriers to entry. But many businesses that do not t the

traditional mold have had to confront this issue before. Platform coop-

eratives will be eligible to seek out nancial and technical assistance

from the same worker centers and legal services agencies that have

helped set up worker-owned businesses in the past. Others, perhaps

those that seek B Corporation status, may benet from seeking pro

bono legal assistance or accounting advice from for-prot rms that

are looking to give back to the community. The basic legal structures

for platform cooperatives, while not “o the rack,” do exist. They just

require the tailoring that legal and nancial professionals can provide.

Given the turnover and exibility of online platform work, the

operating documents should be written to allow for relative ease of

entry and exit as a member. In addition, the organizing documents

227

must also set up the relationship in a way that sets out what the expec-

tations are for the members, clearly and succinctly. The documents

need to include provisions for reducing the share of prots if an indi-

vidual member is shirking, and also contain clear provisions dening

under what circumstances a member or shareholder may be disasso-

ciated. In terms of the global or international scope of many plat-

forms, the operating agreement and other documents can be written

to provide for choice of law and choice of jurisdiction. Current statutes

allow for electronic or remote voting for boards of directors or mem-

bers, so long as such procedures are set out in the corporate charter or

operating agreement. Note that running a business is riskier for the

individual worker in a platform cooperative—like any business, the

LLC members or B Corporation shareholders run the risk that there

will be no prots.

Perhaps the answer to the misclassication lawsuits and the

struggle over employee status is to work around it, regardless of the

outcome. While not the perfect solution, already-existing legal struc-

tures can be modied to accommodate platform cooperatives.

228

39. BLOCKCHAINS AND THEIR

PITFALLS

RACHEL O’DWYER

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology rst

appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system,

but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in

the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example,

when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its

ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there

is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who

manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all partici-

pants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly

broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants

collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update

the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it

cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than

monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “block-

chain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now

taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting,

le tracking, property title management, and the organization of

worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger tech-

nologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social

or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”—

until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous

drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain

229

evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridi-

culing handlebar moustaches and xie bicycles.

So let me show my hand. I’m interested in the blockchain (or

blockchain-based technologies) as one tool that, in a very pragmatic

way, could assist with cooperative activities—helping us to share

resources, to arbitrate, adjudicate, disambiguate, and make collective

decisions. Some edgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ride-

sharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of dis-

tributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures

like water and energy. Many of these activities are dicult outside

of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary.

However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the

blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that

surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects

fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here.

ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND

TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH

ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Fostering and scaling cooperation is really dicult. This is why we

have institutions, norms, laws, and markets. We might not like them,

but these mechanisms allow us to cooperate with others even when

we don’t know and trust them. They help us to make decisions and

to divvy up tasks and to reach consensus. When we take these things

away—when we break them down—it can be very dicult to coop-

erate. Indeed, this is one of the big problems with alternative forms

of organization outside of the state and the market—those that are not

structured by typical modes of governance such as rules, norms, or

pricing. These kinds of structureless collaboration generally only work

at very local kin-communal scales where everybody already knows

and trusts everyone else. In Ireland, for example, there were several

long-term bank strikes in the 1970s. The economy didn’t grind to a

230

halt. Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their

customers; the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were

in a good position to make an assessment on their credit worthiness.

Community trust replaced a trustless monetary system. This kind of

local arrangement wouldn’t work in a larger or more atomized com-

munity. It probably wouldn’t work in today’s Ireland because commu-

nity ties are weaker.

Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to

a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or,

more specically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money

supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It

did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically

veried by an entire network of peers and by linking the production

of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public

repository. More recently this cryptographic database has also been

used to manage laws, contracts, and property. While some of the more

evolved applications involve verifying precious stones and supporting

interbank loans, the proposal is that this database could also be used to

support alternative worker platforms, allowing systems where people

can organize, share, or sell their labor without the need of a central entity

controlling activities and trimming a generous margin o the top.

Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state

or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertar-

ians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it

doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function

that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust

in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all

the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that

go into building cooperation, and it never will.

The blockchain is what we call a “trustless” architecture. It stands

in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social

networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust, in other

words—something that is quite dierent from fostering or building

trust. As the founding Bitcoin document details, proof-of-work is not

231

a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social

condence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. With

a blockchain, it maybe doesn’t matter so much whether I believe in or

trust my fellow peers just so long as I trust in the technical eciency of

the protocol. The claim being made is not that we can engineer greater

levels of cooperation or trust in friends, institutions, or governments,

but that we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor

of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption is naïve, it’s true, but it also betrays a worrying

politics—or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and

things that produce connection and dierence) with economics. This is

not just a problem with blockchain evangelism—it’s a core problem with

the ideology of digital activism generally. The blockchain has more in

common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform

capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any

radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part

of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch

cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that

work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

ASSUMPTION #2: THE TECHNICAL CAN INSTANTIATE

NEW SOCIAL OR POLITICAL PROCESSES

Like a lot of peer-to-peer networks, blockchain applications conate a

technical architecture with a social or political mode of organization.

We can see this kind of ideology at work when the CEO of Bitcoin

Indonesia argues, “In its purest form, blockchain is democracy.” From

this perspective, what makes Uber Uber and La’Zooz La’Zooz comes

down to technical dierences at the level of topology and protocol.

If only we can design the right technical system, in other words, the

right kind of society is not too far behind.

The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal rela-

tionship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian

232

or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not

only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because

networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory aordances, but also

because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or

structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In

fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that

peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to

many of the impasses of liberal economics.

Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the

left—anarchism, mobility, and cooperation—even limited forms of

welfare. This can create the sense that technical xes like the block-

chain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when

this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that

are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collab-

oration with tech startups—applications to build private blockchains

for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between

banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed

network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more

eciently.

While technical tools such as the blockchain might form part of

a broader artillery for platform cooperativism, we also need to have a

little perspective. We need to nd ways to embrace not only technical

solutions, but also people who have experience in community organ-

izing and methods that foster trust, negotiate hierarchies, and embrace

dierence. Because there is no magic app for platform cooperativism.

And there never will be.

233

40. NON-COOPERATIVISM

ASTRA TAYLOR

Does digital technology make the dream of a fairer, more cooperative

world more possible? I’m not entirely sure that it does. To the contrary,

I think there was just as good a case for cooperative ownership in the

industrial age, and just as many obstacles, though perhaps those obsta-

cles have shape-shifted. We have to take honest stock of these hurdles

and confront them head on if we want to build a movement that has

a chance of truly challenging the economic status quo. Of course the

powerful don’t want us to change things, and they will go to great

lengths to stop us from doing so, whether by employing bureaucracy

or brute force.

If there’s one thing I want to say here it is that I want my cooper-

ativism—platform or otherwise—to be confrontational. I think it has

to be confrontational to really make a dierence. Or, to put it another

way, we need an inside/outside strategy: building cooperative alter-

natives on the margin while challenging the existing structures at the

center. I’d like to see positive cooperative experiments combined with

strategic campaigns of non-cooperation, of resistance to the nancial

system that promotes selshness over solidarity.

By emphasizing the need not just to create alternatives, but also

to confront the powers that be, I’m echoing longstanding concerns. At

least since Beatrice Webb’s The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain,

published in 1891, some trade unionists have criticized cooperatives for

trying to avoid the inevitable necessity of class struggle. After all, even

a giant cooperative network like Mondragon has to make concessions

to globalization; likewise, small, democratically run cooperatives must

234

play by prevailing market rules on some level or close up shop. I’m

sympathetic to the exigencies that lead to such compromises—we all

make them in our own ways. The point, rather, is that cooperatives do

not eortlessly escape the dictates of capitalism, and so they need to be

part of a broader eort to challenge the dominant economic paradigm.

Fostering an oppositional spirit is vital to the cooperative cause.

As we all know, we are building on old ideas here. Platform

cooperativism may be new, but cooperativism isn’t. Workers have

dreamed of getting rid of bosses, running their own businesses,

and creating a more just society since the earliest instances of labor

unrest. In the 1880s, the Knights of Labor represented more than two

hundred industrial cooperatives that they hoped would serve as the

basis for a “cooperative commonwealth.” There is also the rich his-

tory of black cooperative economic development, which is revealed

by Jessica Gordon Nembhard in her excellent book Collective Courage,

with examples ranging from the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance

and Cooperative Union, which had over a million members in the

late 1800s, to the many eorts compiled in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907

Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans. This tradition lives

on through myriad endeavors, including Mississippi’s Cooperation

Jackson, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, and the Oakland & the

World Enterprises, a project I’ll return to.

History abounds with rousing examples of cooperative projects,

and almost as many failures. What sabotaged many of these promising

enterprises is lack of access to capital. Workers are more than capable

of running things without the oversight of bosses or investors, but the

cash or credit to purchase equipment and pay for space, machines, and

materials doesn’t grow on trees.

Some might say that digital technology will resolve this

dilemma—you no longer need expensive heavy machinery, you only

need a website—but I’m not so sure. Digital cooperatives cannot mag-

ically sidestep the economic system that provides the perverse incen-

tives shaping the corporate online platforms many of us have problems

with. Getting rid of bosses and shareholders, with their demands for

235

short-term returns, is a big step, but only the rst one. In other words,

the project of creating cooperative enterprises is inseparable from cre-

ating a nancial system that is productive rather than predatory, gen-

erative rather than extractive. This means, in turn, that in addition to

experimenting with alternative models of business and banking, we

also desperately need to transform or reform the existing economic

apparatus.

The dominant paradigm of nance, in addition to putting cooper-

atives at a disadvantage, is what’s driving much of the inequality we see

today. Some insist that the problem is robots eating our jobs, but the

statistics don’t bear that out. The astonishing rise in inequality since

the 1980s can be at least partly attributed to the explosion of salaries in

the nancial sector, which doubled its representation in the top 1 per-

cent of incomes. Another big factor is pay packages for CEOs, which

more than quadrupled at large companies—though presumably this

won’t be a problem when cooperatives take over the world.

That’s assuming world conquest is on the agenda, of course. The

tendency to valorize the small, local, and decentralized is something

else I think we should keep debating. Decentralization is not a pan-

acea; it does not necessarily mean distributed power or equitable distri-

bution of wealth. This is something political theorist Wendy Brown is

very insightful about in her book on neoliberalism, Undoing the Demos.

She calls this kind of non-progressive or reactionary decentralization

“devolution,” and it’s a term I nd quite useful. “Devolved power

and responsibility,” she writes, “are not equivalent to thoroughgoing

decentralization and local empowerment.”

Which brings me to one of my nal points. Centralized public

options need to be on the table along with decentralized cooperative

or commons-based ones. We need to think creatively about how they

complement each other and how they can be combined. (Consider

Janelle Orsi’s proposal for a municipally owned alternative to Airbnb.)

Hybrid models that connect governments and co-ops would be very

much in keeping with the times, as polls show more and more people

warming up to the idea of socialism. Something has shifted in a big

236

way, and cooperative solutions that involve the state should be on the

table.

But ultimately this isn’t just a war of ideas; cooperativism demands

we put our principles into practice. I was reminded of this when I

recently spent time with Elaine Brown, who is seventy-two and ran

the Black Panther Party when founding member Huey Newton was

self-exiled in Cuba. In 2013 she founded the aforementioned Oakland

& the World Enterprises, which will eventually be a network of coop-

eratively owned businesses run by and for formerly incarcerated indi-

viduals. These are the people, Brown argues, who really need to own

their jobs, because they have an even harder time nding work than

everyone else. Right now she has a fully functional organic farm in

West Oakland, but she has plans for a cooperatively owned grocery

store, tness center, nail salon, and tech incubator under ve oors

of aordable housing. What does she need to get this plan to the next

level? Capital, of course—though she has raised quite a bit by part-

nering with the city. It’s a good example of the kind of municipal

collaboration I think we need more of.

Elaine told me, in no uncertain terms, that one should never

organize or mobilize around abstract principles. When the Panthers

organized their free breakfast program, they didn’t say, “You have a

right to nutrition”—they fed people (and then the parents of the chil-

dren they fed went and demanded that schools provide meals, because

if the Panthers could do it, certainly the state could too). Likewise, she

doesn’t motivate her project’s farmers with ideological talking points

or treatises on cooperative economics; rather, she allows them to rec-

ognize how much better it is to share in the prosperity created by their

labor and to be treated like true partners.

Doesn’t the same hold true for everyone? Journalists, wouldn’t you

like to not be treated like disposable providers of work-for-hire con-

tent? Programmers, wouldn’t you like to have a say in what you build

and why you build it, and own the fruits of your labor? Professors and

students, wouldn’t you like to have a deeper stake in the educational

institutions where you teach and learn?

237

Those of us who want the concept of platform cooperativism to

spread should take this lesson to heart. We need to make our case

by building and pointing to real examples. We also need to let go of

abstractions and address concrete concerns: How will platform coop-

erativism make people’s lives better? How will it address their real

needs? How will it feed their families? Or make them feel more con-

nected? Or maybe the real questions are: How will it make our lives

better? How will it address our real needs? How will it feed our fami-

lies? How will it make us feel more connected?

Asking and answering such questions will help these important

ideas take root. But we have to remember to ght. Cooperation must

be coupled with non-cooperation—an active resistance that comple-

ments the building of the alternatives we need.

239

CONTRIBUTORS

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation and partner

with the Commons Strategies Group. In 2014, he was research

director of the FLOK Society project, which produced the rst inte-

grated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador. His

recent books are Save the World: Towards a Post Capitalist Society with

P2P (with Jean Lievens, in French and Dutch); and Network Society

and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy (with Vasilis Kostakis;

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial

Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the

Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since

the 1990s, he has played a role in characterizing the role of information

commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information

production, and freedom in the networked economy and society.

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger, and consultant who

spends a lot of time exploring the commons as a new paradigm of eco-

nomics, politics, and culture. He’s been on this trail for about fteen

years, working with a variety of international and domestic partners.

In 2010, he co-founded the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting

project that works to promote the commons internationally.

Francesca Bria is a Senior Researcher and Advisor on information

and technology policy. She has a PhD on innovation economics from

Imperial College, London, and an MSc on digital economy from the

University of London, Birkbeck. She is the EU Coordinator of the

240

D-CENT project, the biggest European project on direct democracy

and digital currencies. She also leads the DSI project on digital social

innovation in Europe at Nesta Innovation Lab. She has been teaching in

several universities in Europe, and she has advised governments, public

and private organizations, and movements on technology and infor-

mation policy and its political and socioeconomic impact. Francesca is

an advisor for the European Commission on future internet, collective

platforms, and innovation policy.

Susie Cagle is an American journalist and editorial cartoonist whose

work has appeared in The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Awl,

GOOD, and others. Cagle is based in Oakland, California.

David Carroll is an Associate Professor of Media Design at Parsons

School of Design at The New School, former director of the MFA

Design and Technology program, and former co-founder and CEO of

Glossy, an AI brain learning culture through media. His work is situ-

ated at the intersection of art, design, media, culture, policy, science,

and technology, especially in collaboration with peers in engineering,

journalism, publishing, advertising, privacy, psychology, and peda-

gogy. He’s on Twitter @profcarroll.

Miriam A. Cherry is a Professor of Law at St. Louis University and

a member of the American Law Institute. Her work focuses on the

intersection of technology and employment law.

Ra Criscitiello is a Research Coordinator at SEIU-UHW in

Oakland, California, a union of eighty thousand healthcare workers.

She is also a union-side labor attorney. She is building an innova-

tive employment model that collectivizes the employment status of

unionized workers on scale. In the new worker-driven democratic

landscape, her model allows for on-demand labor without compro-

mising traditional union values. Ra is also a surfer, triathlete, and

banjo player.

241

John Duda is the Communications Director at The Democracy

Collaborative, a national research institute developing new strategies

for the democratization of wealth and the reconstruction of commu-

nity in the face of systemic crisis. He lives in Baltimore, where he

is a co-founder of the Red Emma’s worker cooperative, and where

he recently completed a PhD project examining the way the idea of

self-organization developed in the sciences of cybernetics and in left

politics.

Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as exec-

utive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley

nonprot research and consulting organization. In her seventeen years

with IFTF, Marina has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of

organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy

to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new

products and services.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, political economist and Professor of

Community Justice and Social Economic Development (Africana

Studies, John Jay College CUNY), is author of Collective Courage: A

History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (Penn

State University Press, 2014). An aliate scholar with the Centre for

the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan, Gordon

Nembhard’s memberships include GEO Newsletter, the Southern

Grassroots Economies Project, and the Association of Cooperative

Educators.

Karen Gregory is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University

of Edinburgh. Her work explores the intersection of digital labor,

aect, and contemporary spirituality, with an emphasis on the role of

the laboring body. Karen is a founding member of CUNY Graduate

Center’s Digital Labor Working Group, and her writings have appeared

in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, Visual Studies,

Contexts, The New Inquiry, and DIS Magazine.

242

Seda Gürses is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for

Information Technology at Princeton University, and an FWO fellow

at the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC)

research group at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She works

on privacy and requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technol-

ogies, and surveillance. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at

the Media, Culture and Communications Department at the NYU

Steinhardt School and at the Information Law Institute at NYU Law

School. She is also a member of the feminist art collective Constant

VZW in Brussels.

Steven Hill is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and

the Holtzbrinck fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His latest

book is Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are

Screwing American Workers (St. Martin’s, 2015), and his articles, op-eds,

and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington

Post, Atlantic, Nation, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, BBC, Le Monde,

Politico, CNN, C-SPAN, “Democracy Now,” NPR, Salon, Fast

Company, and more. He can be found at www.Steven-Hill.com and @

StevenHill1776.

Melissa Hoover is the founding Executive Director of the Democracy

at Work Institute, which expands the promise of worker ownership to

communities most aected by social and economic inequality. Prior,

she served as Executive Director of the United States Federation of

Worker Cooperatives. Together, this national grassroots membership

organization and think-and-do tank work to build a member-based

movement that reaches a scale that has real impact. Melissa worked for

six years as a cooperative developer with the Arizmendi Association

of Cooperatives, where she assisted in the development of two new

worker-owned bakeries.

Dmytri Kleiner is a software developer and member of the

Telekommunisten art group. His work investigates political economy

243

and the social relations embedded in communications technology. He

is the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto and can be followed at

http://dmytri.info.

Vasilis Kostakis is a tenured Senior Research Fellow at the Ragnar

Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University

of Technology, Estonia. He is also Founder of the interdiscipli-

nary research hub P2P Lab and Research Coordinator of the P2P

Foundation.

Brendan Martin is founder and president of The Working World.

After studying economics and a stint on Wall Street, Brendan became

focused on the connection of nance and economic justice. In 2004,

he founded TWW in Argentina to work with the recovered factory

movement for economic democracy. Brendan now heads TWW in the

United States, implementing the same principles in a post-industrial

context.

Michele (Micky) Metts is a member of Agaric, a worker-owned

tech cooperative doing web development. She is known as an Activist

Hacker/Industry Organizer/Public Speaker/Connector/Advisor and

Visionary. Micky is the liaison to the Solidarity Economy Network

(SEN) and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives

(USFWC). She is a member of FSF.org and Drupal.org, a community

based on free software. Micky grew up in Weston, Connecticut, and

now lives in Boston with her partner, John Crisman.

Kristy Milland is community manager of TurkerNation.com. She’s

been a crowd worker, Requester, and researcher over the last decade.

She speaks about the ethics of crowd work, exposing worker exploitation

caused by a lack of legislation that would protect workers from corporate

interests. She is also engaged in multiple projects to create new platforms,

which will oer fair compensation and other benets to crowd workers,

and wants to join new projects which promise to do the same.

244

Mayo Fuster Morell directs the Dimmons Digital Commons

Research Group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open

University of Catalonia. As part of IGOPnet.cc, she is the principal

investigator of the P2P Value European project on value creation in

collaborative production. She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman

Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She also

directs the expertise group BarCola on collaborative economy, linked

to the Barcelona City Council.

The NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative (NYC REIC)

was founded in 2015 to leverage the patient investments and polit-

ical power of members to secure permanently aordable commercial

properties in NYC for community, small business, and cultural use.

Consistent with the principles and spirit of the cooperative movement,

the NYC REIC makes long-term, stabilizing, and transformative

investments for the mutual benet of our members and our communi-

ties. Find out more at http://nycreic.org.

Rachel O’Dwyer is a research fellow and lecturer at Trinity

College, Dublin. She is a member of the P2P Foundation and the

IoT Council, and is the curator of Openhere, a festival and con-

ference on the digital commons. She writes about the polit-

ical economy of communications, with a focus on digital

currencies and decentralized networks. She is a regular contributor to

Neural magazine and the founding editor in chief of the open access

peer-reviewed journal Interference. She’s on Twitter @rachelodwyer.

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on

cooperatives, the sharing economy, urban agriculture, shared housing,

local currencies, and grassroots nance. She is Co-founder and Executive

Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facili-

tates the growth of sustainable and localized economies through education,

research, and advocacy. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing

Economy (ABA, 2014) and co-author of The Sharing Solution (NOLO, 2009).

245

Michael Peck is a co-founder of 1worker1vote.org and serves as

Mondragon’s North America delegate, an American Sustainable

Business Council board member, a Blue Green Alliance Corporate

Advisory board member, and a MAPA Group founder. 1worker1vote

is a nationwide economic development catalyst, mobilizing the union-

co-op hybrid model reecting Mondragon values of single-class equity

and workplace solidarity democratically practiced in protable enter-

prises to overcome structural inequalities.

Carmen Rojas is the CEO of The Workers Lab, an innovation lab

that invests in entrepreneurs, community organizers, and technologists

to create sustainable and scalable solutions that build power for U.S.

workers.

Douglas Rushko is an author, teacher, and documentarian who

focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share,

and inuence each other’s values. He is Professor of Media Theory

and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. His new book, Throwing

Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity,

argues that digital networks are still capable of fostering a distributed

economy, but only if we can abandon the industrial-age mandate of

growth above all.

Saskia Sassen (www.saskiasassen.com) is the Robert S. Lynd

Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global

Thought, Columbia University. She is the author of several books and

the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, ranging from multiple

doctor honoris causa to named lectures and various honors lists. Her

new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

(Harvard University Press, 2014), which is already translated into thir-

teen languages, with more coming.

Nathan Schneider is a scholar-in-residence of media studies at

the University of Colorado Boulder and co-organized the Platform

246

Cooperativism conference in 2015. His articles have appeared in publi-

cations including VICE, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of

Higher Education, and YES! Magazine. His two books, God in Proof and

Thank You, Anarchy, were published by University of California Press.

Follow his work at his website, nathanschneider.info.

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture

& Media at The New School in New York City. His latest book, Uber-

Worked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy

(Polity, 2016), develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital

labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way

of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor

markets while insisting on collective ownership and democratic gov-

ernance. His next book will focus on the prospects of the cooperative

Internet. Follow him on Twitter at @trebors.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and a

member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research

Network. She is conducting a six-year project on economic inno-

vations, including “sharing” spaces. A bestselling author, Schor has

published books that include The Overworked American, The Overspent

American, and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are

Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction

Economy (previously published as Plenitude).

Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director of the National

Domestic Workers Alliance, leading experimental and market-based

approaches to improve working conditions, services, and employment

opportunities for online workers. Palak has led NDWA’s introduc-

tion into the on-demand economy with the Good Work Code, and

is driving forward the organization’s collaboration with Silicon Valley

leaders. Previously, she served as a leader at Wellmont Health System,

as a member of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s administra-

tion, and as a consultant at Accenture.

247

Kati Sipp is the Future of Work Campaigns Director for the National

Guestworkers Alliance. She created the blog Hack the Union, which

focuses on the intersections of work, organizing, and technology. She

founded the Pennsylvania aliate of Working Families, and spent

nine years working for SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, serving as

the Political Director and Executive Vice President. Kati is the proud

mother of Alina and Isaac. Follow her on Twitter at @katisipp and @

hacktheunion.

Tom Slee writes about technology and politics. His new book, What’s

Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, was published by OR Books

in November 2015. He has a PhD in theoretical chemistry, a long

career in the software industry, and his earlier book No One Makes You

Shop at Wal-Mart (BTL, 2006) is a left-wing game-theoretical investi-

gation of individual choice that has been used in university economics,

philosophy, and sociology courses.

Christoph Spehr is a politician, author, and theorist. He worked for

the German National Conference on Internationalism (BUKO), the

cultural co-op Paradox at Bremen, and the Left Party. From 1997 to

2005 he was co-editor of the magazine Alaska, and from 2008 to 2015

he was regional head of the Left Party, Bremen county. He wrote a

theory of Free Cooperation that won the Rosa-Luxemburg-Prize in

2001, and was included in The Art of Free Cooperation (Autonomedia,

2007), along with a DVD including his video On Rules and Monsters.

Danny Spitzberg is a sociologist and user researcher based in Oakland,

California. He is principal at peakagency.co, a collective that partners

with cultural and economic justice projects to build community plat-

forms. He is also helping build seed.coop, a platform for co-ops every-

where to grow their membership. Say hi on Twitter @daspitzberg.

Arun Sundararajan is Professor and the Robert L. and Dale Atkins

Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern

248

School of Business. He is also an aliated faculty member at NYU’s

Center for Urban Science+Progress, and at NYU’s Center for Data

Science.

Astra Taylor is a documentary lmmaker, writer, and political

organizer. She is the director of the lms Zizek! and Examined Life, and

the author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the

Digital Age (Picador, 2015), winner of a 2015 American Book Award.

She helped launch the Rolling Jubilee debt-abolishing campaign and

is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.

Cameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies and Doctoral

Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon. Cameron continues

to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making,

material culture studies, and sociologies of technology. Cameron’s

research and teaching focus on the design of systems that lower soci-

etal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership: in

other words, systems of shared use.

McKenzie Wark is the author of Molecular Red: Theory for the

Anthropocene (Verso, 2015), among other things, and teaches at The

New School in New York City.

Caroline Woolard’s interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagi-

nation at the intersection of art, design, and political economy. After

co-founding and co-directing resource sharing networks OurGoods

.org and TradeSchool.coop, Woolard is now focused on her work with

BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt,

and precarity on culture, and on the NYC Real Estate Investment

Cooperative to create and support truly aordable commercial space

in New York City.

249

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The insurgency from which this book stems, together with the book

itself, could only have been possible through remarkable feats of

cooperativism. Throughout this process, we have been awed by the

enthusiasm, creativity, and commitment demonstrated by those who

have come together to help make a more cooperative online economy

a reality. The book’s contributors, who oered their insights in the

essays and their ingenuity in the showcases, have been inspiring and

patient collaborators. Many other people, too, have helped support this

eort, often in less visible ways.

Micah Sifry was an early adopter of Trebor Scholz’s concept of plat-

form cooperativism, and he, together with his colleague at Civic Hall,

Andrew Rasiej, were a source of ongoing support, advice, and meeting

space. Neal Goreno of Shareable was among the rst to recognize that

a real, cooperative sharing economy was starting to take shape; he helped

guide Nathan Schneider into discovering it for himself. Palak Shah of the

National Domestic Workers Alliance and Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers

Union were among our early conversation partners who helped connect

this work to the challenges workers are facing at the front lines of the

gig economy, as did two courageous worker-organizers on Amazon’s

Mechanical Turk, Rochelle LaPlante and Kristy Milland. Natalie Foster

of Institute for the Future provided invaluable guidance as well.

We are grateful for the support of this unconventional research

project from colleagues at our institutions, especially Dean Stephanie

Browner, Karen Noyes, Alexander Drainger, and Verna De LaMothe

at The New School’s Lang College and, at the University of Colorado

Boulder’s College of Media, Communication, and Information, Dean

Lori Bergen and Nabil Echchaibi.

250

The book itself came about thanks to the willingness of John

Oakes at OR Books to say yes and ask questions later, as well as his

commitment to the challenge of creating righteous models for inde-

pendent publishing in the age of Amazon. And it is only thanks to

the rigor and guidance of Samira Rajabi that we were able to meet a

seemingly impossible self-imposed deadline.

The Platform Cooperativism event in November 2015 was

sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal

Arts, Demand Progress, the Democracy at Work Institute, the Ford

Foundation, the Freelancers Union, IG Metall, the Institute for the

Future, Internet Society, the Lang Student Senate, The New School’s

Digital Humanities Minor, The New School University Student Senate,

the Robert L. Heilbronner Center for Capitalism Studies, University

of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication, and

Information, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation NYC, and the Workers

Lab.

The event was presented in partnership with Carnegie Mellon

School of Design, Civic Hall, Democracy Collaborative, Green

Worker Cooperatives, The Laura Flanders Show, the Murphy Institute

for Worker Education and Labor Studies at CUNY, the New Economy

Coalition, OccupyWallStNYC, the Robin Hood Foundation,

Shareable, the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives,

Ver.di, The Working World, and the Yale Information Society

Project.

With far more attendees than originally planned for, we also relied

on the work of intrepid volunteers, including Lauren Mobertz, Meg

Miner, Angela Difede, and countless others.

Throughout this process we have relied on the collaboration,

guidance, and support of our families—Claire and Daniel Francis, and

Jenny, Rosa Clara, and Emma Luisa. They kindle our hope in a more

cooperative world and, for us, prove that it is possible.

251

FURTHER RESOURCES

LAUNCH EVENT

“Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy,” The

New School (November 2015), video archive: http://platformcoo

p.net/2015/video

READINGS

Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy,”

Medium (December 5, 2014), https://tinyurl.com/oj8rna2

Nathan Schneider, “Owning Is the New Sharing,” Shareable (December

21, 2014), http://shareable.net/blog/owning-is-the-new-sharing

Janelle Orsi, Frank Pasquale, Nathan Schneider, Pia Mancini, Trebor

Scholz, “5 Ways to Take Back Tech,” The Nation (May 27, 2015),

http://thenation.com/article/5-ways-take-back-tech

Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing

Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Oce, 2016, with

additional translations in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German,

Italian, and Chinese), http://platformcoop.net/about/primer

Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting

the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016)

WEBSITES

Platform Cooperativism portal, http://platformcoop.net

Platform Cooperativism Consortium, http://platformcoop.newschool.edu

The Internet of Ownership, http://internetofownership.net

Shareable, http://shareable.net

Sustainable Economies Law Center, http://theselc.org

OR Books

PUBLISHING THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNET

For more information, visit our

website at www.orbooks.com

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