Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet

237 Pages·2016·1.33 MB·English

by  Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz

Anthology selection © 2016 Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.
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-Duff, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushkoff, 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.
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First printing 2016
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ISBN 978-1-68219-062-3 paperback
ISBN 978-1-68219-063-0 e-book
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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 Rushkoff - 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 Different 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
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
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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 problems 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
floors. By considering the emerging platforms in light of well-hewn cooperative
principles and practices, we find an optimistic vision for the future of work and
life.
Already, this strategy is catching on. Workers, organizers, developers, and
social entrepreneurs around the world are experimenting with cooperative
platforms and forming conversations about platform cooperativism. This book,
therefore, is an effort to serve a movement in the making, to add to the
momentum we and our fellow contributors 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 efforts among young people to create ethical
livelihoods, online and off, once the protests receded. We met at OuiShare Fest
in Paris in 2014, and, at Trebor’s “Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades”
conference 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 efforts to build cooperative
platforms already underway. Realizing our common interest, we discussed these