In the 20 years since its inception, open source has turned out to be the most successful model for building software. The world today runs on open-source software (OSS). An ecosystem has been created around OSS. Businesses and software builders use OSS directly or indirectly, while others offer services and products based on OSS.

OSS is perceived as being free, fair and/or ethical. This perception, however, may not be entirely true. That may be counter-intuitive, but it’s at the heart of the debate around OSS. As OSS is growing up, it’s becoming more successful, more complex, and ubiquitous. It seems we are entering a new phase for OSS, and it’s not without growing pains.

Commercial OSS in the cloud

The four essential freedoms are a cornerstone of OSS. They refer to what users can do with the software, but they tell us nothing about the economic cost, or benefit, related to the software. OSS is free as in speech, but not free as in beer. Someone has to build the software, and then someone has to maintain, run, and manage it.

As far as the perception of OSS being fair or ethical goes: it’s just that – a perception. The perception stems from the OSS community ethos, but in reality, the OSS freedoms are at odds with notions of fair or ethical use. Anyone can contribute as much or as little as they please to OSS. Anyone can use OSS for any purpose, regardless of contribution.

This has led to where we are today. Cloud vendors like AWS, Google or Microsoft, have built their infrastructure based on OSS. Each of them also contributes to OSS in many ways, including code and outreach for existing OSS projects, as well as establishing new OSS projects. But use of, or contribution to, each OSS project is not really accounted for.

Recently, the Apache Software Foundation, one of the key OSS institutions, celebrated its 20th anniversary. The ASF claims the value of the software under its auspices is around $20 Billion, by its own estimates. Everyone is entitled to use the software for free, and many do. But the ones who create this value are the ones who contribute to OSS, be it in code or in other ways.

As analyses have shown, many OSS contributors do this because they are intrinsically motivated: the software is interesting to them, they need it, or they feel good about their contribution. In that respect, they are not much different from vendors that have chosen to build OSS products. Those vendors have invested in their OSS, and their ROI depends on it.

Which brings us to cloud vendors. As many pundits note, cloud vendors operate on a whole different plane. If commercial OSS vendors are about taking innovation from 0 to 1, cloud vendors are about taking it from 1 to n. This brings value in and by itself. Cloud vendors also release OSS projects of their own, and contribute to existing ones. Their strategies, however, differ, and this is where things get complicated.

AWS is the leader in the cloud market. The strategy AWS has adopted with regards to OSS, however, has exposed it to criticism. Recently, an independent data-driven analysis was done on GitHub, where OSS code lives. The analysis showed that in terms of code, AWS does not seem to be contributing much to the development of the OSS products it offers as a service.

It’s understandable why vendors building those products are looking to tweak their licenses to disallow AWS from running their software as a service. It’s also understandable why the OSI, which has control over OSS licenses, is pushing back: by introducing those tweaks, the software is no longer OSS.

If this was just a clash of commercial interests, we might be getting our pop corn to watch. But for something with such high value to society at large as OSS, the ramifications are important. Is there a way everyone involved can get a fair share of the profit, and keep contributing to OSS? Let’s hear what 2 CEOs from vendors who build OSS, and work with AWS, have to say.

The co-opetition view: one big act vs. many small ones

Dor Laor is the founder and CEO of ScyllaDB, an OSS vendor with an interesting story. ScyllaDB was built on a contentious premise, as it is a re-implementation of another OSS database: Apache Cassandra. Laor has shared thoughts on OSS license changes, as well as Amazon’s latest move to offer Cassandra as a managed service on AWS cloud.

Our discussion started touching upon ScyllaDB’s latest features. According to Laor, these features (most prominently lightweight transactions) do not just bring parity with Cassandra, but go one step further. Laor expanded on the technical aspects of ScyllaDB’s solution. As these seemed technically sound, yet conceptually simple, the discussion moved to a broader topic.

Laor claimed none of ScyllaDB’s closest matches, namely Apache Cassandra and AWS DynamoDB, have such features. When asked why he thinks that is, given the nature of those features, Laor offered 2 answers.

For Cassandra, he mentioned that for the last few years its former main contributor, namely DataStax, has taken a step back. Naturally, this has stalled Cassandra’s development considerably. As for AWS, Laor noted that AWS has the tendency to offer products that are good enough, but not necessarily the best in their league.

As ScyllaDB is also available on AWS, and Laor was present at AWS’s main event, re:Invent, in 2019, he offered a metaphor to explain this. Laor said there were a number of stages set up for various acts in the re:Invent after party, and he found all of them mediocre. Laor went on to add that he sees that as a metaphor for AWS’ philosophy of going wide, rather than deep in its undertakings. This is a point shared in other OSS vendor strategies, too.

But ScyllaDB went beyond that, to do something no other OSS vendor we know of has done before: offer a compatibility layer for one of AWS’ products, namely DynamoDB. ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB API support will be officially available soon, and it will enable DynamoDB users to migrate to ScyllaDB. Laor said there is a waiting list for this.

This is technically feasible, and legally permissible. Unless things change, there are no restrictions on using APIs, as per the famous Oracle vs. Google case verdict. While some of AWS’ own people questioned this move, Laor claimed users are better off using ScyllaDB. In turn, this opens up some interesting questions. What about ethics, and contribution?

Building a new implementation of an existing API seems cleaner than using someone else’s implementation, but it still means benefiting from a userbase others built. Laor acknowledged that, as well as the fact that ScyllaDB leverages contributions from Amazon, Cassandra, and DataStax. He also pointed out that this spurs innovation and benefits users, and measuring contribution is very hard.

ScyllaDB has an open core strategy. Some features are proprietary, while the OSS core is licensed under AGPL, which Laor said AWS avoids. So far this has worked in deterring AWS from offering ScyllaDB as a service, although it could also be that ScyllaDB has not reached critical mass yet. In any case, as Laor said, these things change.

The collaboration view: balancing OSS makers and takers

Most OSS products fall under one of two categories. Many products are largely driven by a single vendor, whose employees contribute most of the related effort and drive its directions. Other products leverage contributions that cross-cut organizations who employ the contributors; often, OSS work is the main activity for such contributors.

But there is an OSS product in which the vendor commercializing it only contributes 5% of its code while still being the largest contributor. The product is commercially successful, has a community-driven decision making process, and is a distinguished AWS partner, too. And these are not the only reasons why Acquia, the vendor commercializing the Drupal CMS, and Dries Buytaert, its founder, stand out.

Recently, Buytaert shared his thoughts on balancing OSS makers and takers in an elaborate blog post. In our discussion, Buytaert confessed it took him a couple of weeks to put his post together. This is understandable, considering how many aspects of OSS it touches upon.

Drupal started in 2000, while Acquia was founded in 2007. As Buytaert highlighted, Acquia and the Drupal community have a unique relationship, which is formally documented in a charter. The community includes about 80.000 contributors, while Aquia employs about 1.000 people.

Yet, Drupal’s governance is not with Acquia. The community sets Drupal’s roadmap, and elects people in leadership roles. People choose to contribute to areas that matter most to them, and Acquia does this, too. Buytaert said that even when there is a decision Acquia does not agree with, the decision is carried through, if there is substantial backing for it.

Buytaert builds on the notion of OSS as part of the Commons, introducing an important distinction. For end users, OSS projects are public goods; the shared resource is the software. But for OSS companies, OSS projects are common goods; the shared resource is the (potential) customer. Makers invest heavily in the software, takers are mostly interested in customers.

Buytaert, leveraging Elinor Ostrom’s work in addition to his own experience, seems to have gotten to the heart of the issue. Research shows that when the Commons are left unchecked, without governance or rules for contribution, they collapse: shared resources are either engulfed or exhausted.

Organizations like the ASF and the OSI have done a good job in making OSS successful. But now that OSS is successful, without a mechanism for fair reward in place, we have no reason to believe OSS will not have the fate of Commons that preceded it. This is why we wondered whether the OSI should perhaps reconsider. Apparently, we are not the only ones, and the OSI seems to be listening.

Ethical software

First off, there seems to be an ongoing debate within the OSI itself as to what should constitute an OSS license today. This goes to show that what worked 20 years ago is not necessarily what works today. In addition, more and more people seem to be realizing the OSS conundrum, and are sharing ideas to move forward. Buytaert, on his part, offers 3 concrete proposals.

One, don’t just appeal to organizations’ self-interest, but also to their fairness principles. Two, encourage end users to offer selective benefits to Makers. Three, experiment with new licenses. Those points were also backed by Laor, who prompted users to consciously vet their OSS providers for fairness, and pointed to precedents like the Open Invention Network.

One thing is clear: AWS should not be excluded, it’s a vital part of the OSS ecosystem. The fact that this is a complex ecosystem with many actors that need to strike a balance is something many people agree on. This includes Buytaert, Laor, and AWS VP/Distinguished Engineer Matthew Wilson, a self-proclaimed “OSS romantic”, to name but a few.

Buytaert also agreed with Laor that while AWS is a good partner to have, if it decided to start offering ScyllaDB or Drupal as a managed service on its own, there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Buytaert was also clear on something else: making OSS sustainable may require a break with OSS as we know it. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

This also seems to be the gist of Wilson’s position as stated in a number of Twitter threads: this is how OSS works. If you are not happy with it, do it differently – just don’t call it OSS. This is a fair point, made by others, too. Recently Stephen Walli, principal program manager on the Azure engineering team at Microsoft and an OSS veteran, shared his ideas on Software Freedom in a Post Open Source World.

Walli went through the history of OSS, the four essential freedoms, and the ways and reasons people challenge how OSS works. Walli’s message is along similar lines: “I am happy for people to challenge the ideas that define our software collaborations and culture of outbound sharing. But I want them to be bold. If you want to define a new movement then do so.”

Some people call it Commercial OSS, others Cloud Native OSS. Either way, it’s not just commercial interests that question how OSS works today. It’s also people concerned about the ethical implications of OSS. Although it could be argued that fairness touches upon ethics too, Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Ethical Source Movement (ESM) have a somewhat different angle.

Ehmke, who founded the ESM, is a software engineer, a public speaker, and has been an active OSS participant since the early 2000s. Ehmke, who previously stated that “OSI and FSF are not the real arbiters of what is Open Source and what is Free Software” is now running for the board of directors of the OSI, and the OSI’s VP seems open to engaging with her. The ESM states:

“Today, the same OSS that enriches the commons and powers innovation also plays a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racist policing, the deployment of cruel and inhumane weapons, and other human rights abuses all over the world.

We want to do something about this misuse of our software. But as developers we don’t seem to have any recourse, no way to prevent our work from being used to harm others. We want to change that”.

Fair software

The definition of Ethical Software breaks with the four essential freedoms of OSS, creating licenses such as the Hippocratic or the Atmosphere Licenses. This raises questions, including how to enforce such licenses. Though a definite answer is not readily available, for the time being the thinking seems to be that fear of exposure of illegal use should work on a first level. People seem sympathetic to the notion.

Ethical software licenses are not the only OSS variant around, however. There is also the Fair Source License, allowing users to view, download, execute, and modify code free of charge. Up to a certain number of users from an organization can use the code for free, too. After an organization hits that user limit, it will start paying a licensing fee determined by the software publisher.

Fair Source was created by Sourcegraph and drafted by Heather Meeker, a prominent OSS lawyer who also drafted the Commons Clause for RedisLabs. Fair Source got featured on Wired, and received praise from GitLab, but it does not look like it got much traction. The reason is probably that as things stand, Fair Source is also not an OSS compatible license.

This all seems to be pointing somewhere: perhaps we’ve reached the limits of what OSS in its current form can do. People are realizing it, and questioning the status quo. Whether that will lead somewhere, remains to be seen. But some first steps are taken, and the potential seems to be there. OSS was a bold step in its time, too, and its pioneers paved the way.

To wrap up, let us revisit the “quantifying OSS contribution is hard, and it’s not only about code” argument. This is true beyond the shadow of a doubt. But before dismissing quantification as mission impossible, we should consider a few things.

Commercial OSS vendors are building platforms to power today’s data-driven economy. As a 3rd party analysis on GitHub data shows, they -expectedly- seem to be key contributors to their own codebases. While there may be communities of practice built around the products, in most cases we would assume vendors do much of the non-code work too – promotion, support etc.

OSS vendors have people who contribute to these tasks in their payrolls. Presumably, these people leave the digital footprint of their work on all sorts of systems. From OSS code repositories to issue trackers, HR, project management tools and spreadsheets, to social media. Nobody should be more motivated or better positioned to develop a holistic, data-driven model for OSS contribution, than commercial OSS vendors.

Doing this would make their claims much more grounded. To be entirely fair, commercial OSS vendors should also apply this to external contributions, be it from individuals or from organizations such as cloud vendors. And to back claims about putting OSS sustainability and the common good first, changing their status to B Corporation to reflect that might help, too.

To get over the OSS midlife crisis, and make software great again, leadership is paramount. There is no doubt the amount of legal, social, software, and data engineering needed to evolve OSS is staggering. But OSS is so important, that it would be irresponsible to shy away from it. Some OSS leaders are showing the way. Opinions may vary, but the issue is being acknowledged. Who would not want to have ethical, fair, open-source software available on demand in the cloud?

This is a chance for everyone to put their data to good use. Amazon, as well as commercial OSS vendors, are leaders, each in their own way. They have great power, which comes with great responsibility. The way other cloud vendors deal with OSS vendors may not be perfect, but it’s a start. We’d like to see that taken to the next level, and involving the entire industry.

Coming up with a way to fix commercial OSS by measuring and rewarding contribution is something that will not just benefit vendors, but the world at large. So if not them, who? If not now, when?

Originally published on Linked Data Orchestration under CC BY-SA 4.0

The post Make software great again: can open source be ethical and fair? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

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Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growing influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon on commercial and political life. Stoller argues that these large firms have too much power over our options as consumers and creators as well as having a large impact on our access to information.

About Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He was a producer for MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, and served as a writer and actor on the short-lived FX television series Brand X with Russell Brand. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Header photo by GrungeTextures

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Holo: The evolution of cloud computing

Holo Value Proposition

Holo is launching a peer-to-peer app hosting marketplace.

Today, application developers usually pay Amazon or some other big corporation to serve their app or website to visitors.

Holo enables anyone to compete with Amazon for this business by offering the spare computing capacity on their own laptop, desktop or other computer. When their computer hosts an application, the developer pays them instead of Amazon.

Just like Airbnb enables people to rent spare bedrooms to help pay their mortgage, Holo enables people to rent their computer’s spare storage and processing power to help pay for their internet access, or even their computer itself.

Holo does to spare computing capacity what Airbnb did for spare bedrooms

And there is actually a LOT of spare capacity out there. In fact, globally, the idle storage and processing power sitting unused in our laptops and desktops dwarfs even the infrastructure of the largest cloud computing company.

Holo will do to that enormous spare computing capacity what Airbnb did to spare bedrooms.

Except, with Holo, you won’t find yourself cleaning sheets all the time. Here, your computer does the work and you reap the reward.

Application hosting is the cash cow of the third most valuable company on earth

And this isn’t a small market. For instance, Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet, and though their app hosting division, AWS, accounts for just 10% of their revenues, it generates more profit than the entire rest of the company… combined. In other words, AWS is the cash cow of Amazon. And they are just one of several gigantic companies in the space. So… yes, hosting is a big business — and getting bigger.

Why you should Participate

If you are trying to decide whether you want to participate in this ecosystem, we can make it even more blunt:

Holo might do to the cash cow of the third largest company on the planet, what Uber did to Taxis.

Except, unlike Uber, with Holo, 99% of the money goes straight to the people whose machines are doing the work. That’s right. In exchange for orchestrating all of this, we take just a 1% cut.

Sound familiar? It might. People have dreamed of this for years. It was even the plot of an HBO show last season. But two new innovations from Holo are enabling us to, as Forbes recently put it, “turn internet fiction into reality.” Those two innovations are Holochain and Holo Fuel.

Holochain

First, Holochain is a new way of running truly peer-to-peer applications that makes it so that my computer doesn’t necessarily have to “store” all of the content in an application in order to be able to serve that content. Instead, my machine can quickly retrieve anything I need right when I need it. It’s “just in time” content delivery. And when my computer then serves that content to a visitor, I get paid.

Folks around the globe have been building apps on Holochain Alpha (“the adventurer” release) since October. Holochain Beta is coming soon.

Holochain is live now and apps are actively being built and run on it. Holochain gives Holo a competitive advantage by giving it a collaborative advantage. And thanks to the care with which we designed Holochain, the World Economic Forum called Holochain one “of the most integral technology projects” in the blockchain space, pointing out that we “aren’t just putting lipstick on clones of existing projects” but have actually gone “back to the drawing board and created mission-driven roles for coders, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, regulators and policymakers.” We’ve taken some of the most widely used technologies of the last two decades and combined them in a novel way. Holochain combines the efficient peer-to-peer data storage model (DHT) that bitTorrent uses with the tamper resistant logs (Hash Chains) that blockchains use and the agent centric approach (each agent has their own perspective and signs their own actions) that Git uses. We think of Holochain as an evolution of blockchain, because it solves so many of the problems that have plagued blockchain over the past decade, including scale, speed, cost, adaptability and composability.

One thing to note is that unlike Holo, Holochain itself is not a platform. It is a pattern. Like HTML. We are giving it away to the world for free. It is open source. It does not require web servers. Or miners. Or cryptocurrency. Every user of a particular app, runs that app, showing up as both user and host. Holo is making use of this “holochain” pattern and is reaping the efficiency and resilience benefits that result.

Holo fuel

Holo fuel. It isn’t actually fuel. It’s for fueling hosting.

Second, Holo fuel is a new crypto-accounting system that enables us to process transactions in parallel, rather than in sequence. That means that Holo can handle millions or billions of simultaneous transactions. Moreover, because Holo fuel is so efficient, we can process transactions for even very small amounts such as a payment of a penny. And though this might look foreign if you are only familiar with blockchain “token” based types of cryptocurrencies, it isn’t exactly untested. We’re applying a centuries old double-entry accounting system called Mutual Credit. And now we’re getting to use Holochain and cryptography to distribute, secure and extend the capabilities of this tried and true accounting system.

Holo Currency Pricing

We’ve been compared by others to Ethereum, the blockchain based computing network that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars at present. So we did some benchmark testing. We built and tested several applications so we could see how costly it was to perform computation on Ethereum vs. Holo.

The result: depending on the app, Holo is somewhere between one-hundred-thousand and one-million times more efficient than Ethereum. For more details, check out our benchmarking walk through.

So when we decided to pre-sell Hosting services on Holo with an Initial Community Offering, we wanted to accomplish two things:

First, put our money where our mouth is. Second, create a margin gap to enable a two-sided marketplace to emerge.

PUTTING OUR MONEY WHERE OUR MOUTH IS

We have drawn a line in the sand and are offering to host applications WITH OUR OWN COMPUTERS for 10,000 times cheaper than Ethereum.

This makes visceral just how much more elegant the design of Holo and Holochain are relative to Ethereum and Blockchain.

If computing services were cars, for the same amount of money that it would take to buy a Remote Control car on Ethereum, you could buy a real car on Holo. And that car would be a Lamborghini. That is what a 10,000 times price difference looks like ($40 vs $400,000).

CREATING A TWO-SIDED MARKET

Second, It also makes visible that we are UNDER-PROMISING what our network can deliver. We wanted to ensure that there was room for those who step up to participate in Holo as developers and hosts, to get rewarded for doing so. The gap between our “100,000 x” or “1,000,000 x” better benchmark performances and our “10,000 x” offer leaves room for Hosts to enter the market and underbid our price.

We expect that a competitive market will form, and because it will cost hosts five or fifteen or fifty times less than our price point to provide hosting, other hosts will be able to underbid us and win hosting contracts.

And when those hosts price their offerings competitively in order to attract more business, holders of Holo fuel will likely be able get two, or ten or twenty times as much computing power as even the price at which we were offering to provide it ourselves.

In other words, that same amount of Holo fuel that would have bought you an RC car on Ethereum, starts to deliver two, or five or ten Lamborghini’s worth of value (not that we’d spend our money stockpiling Lambo’s, but you get the point).

That creates a win-win-win. A win for hosts. A win for developers. A win for us.

Of course, it won’t exactly be a win for everybody.

Ethereum for instance. It probably won’t be a win for them. If a competitor enters the market and starts offering similar services for, let’s say 50,000 times cheaper than you are able to provide, what do you think will happen to demand for their services. And what would a drop in demand for ETH services do to their currency?

How HOT is related to Holo fuel

Because Holo isn’t live yet (our ICO is focused on funding the software development for it), we needed to raise funds through an existing, and established channel. Ethereum ERC20 tokens have been the standard way of running an ICO for the last year or two. The Holo Token or HOT is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and will be redeemable for Holo fuel once Holo goes live. This redemption will happen at a conversion rate of 1 HOT = 1 unit of Holo fuel (HOLO). Holders of HOT will need to redeem HOT for HOLO within 6 months of the launch of the network. You can think of it like a coupon that expires if you don’t redeem it in time.

Again, Holo fuel is the utility credit currency that application owners can use to pay for hosting services on the Holo network.

We estimate that the Holo network will go live sometime in Q3 of this year. In other words, we are aiming to launch Holo in July, August or September.

When a host provides hosting services for an app, that app’s owner pays for that hosting using Holo fuel. So if you have an application and want it hosted (served to non-peer visitors) via Holo, you need to buy Holo fuel from somebody so you can pay your hosts. The Initial Community Offering we are currently running is a pre-sale of the currency that will be used in our system. The purchase and redemption of ERC20 HoloTokens is how people are acquiring Holo fuel. After the close of the pre-sale, people will buy Holo fuel from others that have purchased it from us, earned it themselves through hosting etc. For more details, see our Green Paper. People with Holo will be able to use it themselves, or sell it to others who want hosting services, or, if they earned it through hosting, redeem it with the Holo organization in exchange for other currencies.

To be clear, Holochain applications do not need to use Holo when they are just interacting amongst peers (others who are also running the same application).

But not everyone is going to install Holochain on day one.

So how do you reach “the masses” when the masses have not yet installed the new empowering peer-to-peer apps of the future? You let them interact with those apps through a pattern they are familiar with: opening a browser and typing in a URL.

Holo hosts serve out websites to anyone with a browser, thus creating a bridge back to the “old” internet that everyone, even my grandparents are used to by now. (To be fair, Jerry, Jacqueline, George, and Algreta are fairly savvy when it comes to the internet, but I digress).

When a host creates this sort of bridge by hosting on behalf of an application, the app owner pays them, just like that app owner today might pay Amazon Web Services to host their app.

Some describe this hosting process as being similar to the mining that happens in Blockchain. However, whereas “mining” is an arms race to see who can waste the most electricity doing useless work in hopes of winning a lottery, hosting consists of serving applications or webpages on behalf of customers that are willing to pay for that hosting service. It is way more useful, way more cost effective and vastly more environmentally friendly. For instance, the HoloPorts that we have been making available through our top trending IndieGoGo campaign, use about as much electricity as a lightbulb.

Matt’s Snarky Takeaway

For those that don’t want to take the time to understand this evolution of cloud computing, no hard feelings. Seriously. We played with remote control cars when we were kids too. They were fun.

But you might want to ask yourself, “if these folks are on to something, and they do manage to cut the cost of distributed computing by 20,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 times…

do I really still want to be HODLing ETH?”

More info:

Holo Website

ICO Purchasing and Stats

Holochain Website

Holochain Code

More Technical Overview of Holo

Technical Walkthrough of Holochain

The post Holo: The evolution of cloud computing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

The post Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Hello y’all, I’m representing the Tech Workers Coalition.

The TWC is a network of progressive and left-wing workers throughout the tech industry who are trying to organize and bring the labor movement into Silicon Valley, particularly parts of it that have not been grounds for labor organizing thus far. You can consider us to be a kind of workers center, that facilitates the building of new communities and new networks that are separate and in opposition to the business interests of the tech industry.

We’re mostly made up of people in various white-collar occupations in the industry: programmers, engineers, product managers, and so forth. But it’s important to note that we really want to help organize the entire industry, across all occupations and stratas: everybody from cafeteria workers, to customer service reps, to data scientists. In fact, TWC originally started as a group whose main purpose was to help unionization campaigns among service workers, and to enlist the support of the skilled technical workers at various sites. But since then, our ambitions have grown, especially as the experience of being in solidarity with service workers has lead to more of us thinking of ourselves as workers as well, as part of the same struggle.

So with regards to labor organizing in and against platform capitalism, we’re very excited and enthusiastic about considering the possibilities for leveraging the strategic position of skilled technical workers in the tech industry, in conjunction with the ongoing movements of what we could call “platform workers”. In other words, we’d like to think seriously about the potential to build a class alliance between the workers that build platforms and the workers that use – or are used by – platforms.

For example, imagine if Amazon warehouse workers were able to coordinate with Amazon engineers. Or if Deliveroo workers could organize with Deliveroo programmers. Bringing in the skilled technical layers of platform capitalism into the labor movement opens up a whole realm of possibilities for what we can accomplish.

Of course, right now, we’re a bit of a ways off from any of that. There has been a lot of spontaneous organizing and unrest happening in the industry in the past couple of years, but still the key task right now for us is to start with the basics of agitation and organizing. This is where “workers’ inquiry” comes in.

Our use of workers’ inquiry is a bit different than what’s been discussed before. We’re not academics or researchers, we the workers are ourselves doing the inquiry – on ourselves!

Our premise is that getting workers to talk to each other about problems that they have in the workplace is a powerful way to agitate, and build toward organizing; and that for would-be organizers like the core of TWC, there is no way in hell that you can have an effective campaign if you don’t know what your coworkers are actually thinking about and care about. It’s also an effective way to better understand what we can call the “class composition” of the tech industry; or in other words, where are people coming from in terms of backgrounds and occupations, where are they specifically located in the industry, what supply chains they’re a part of, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of discussion sessions can be effective is because oftentimes, especially in tech, workers feel like their gripes and grievances are their own problems. But once you start hearing other workers openly complaining and being angry about certain aspects of the industry, you start to realize that these aren’t, in fact, individual problems, but systemic problems. You also might start to realize that maybe you’re not some kind of “entrepreneur” or a temporarily-embarrassed founder or startup CEO, but that you are in fact a worker, who is under surveillance and managed and exploited. You are a cog in capitalism, just like everybody else.

And so for the Tech Workers Coalition, a lot of what we’ve been doing is grounding our organizing around creating space to simply hang out and talk, and discuss our gripes and grievances with the industry, and help our fellow workers develop some class consciousness. Or at least a bad attitude about work. And in this way we can start to build the foundation on which an alliance between skilled technical workers and platform workers and other segments of the working class can be developed.

So how do we go about doing inquiries?

Mostly, we’ve done the straightforward thing of having an event for a couple of hours where people show up, break off into groups of 2-4, and go through a questionnaire. And then maybe have a big group discussion.

The questions inquire into different aspects of working in tech, ranging from the details on specific occupations and the commodities and services that are produced, to general grievances that people have, or have seen expressed around them. So questions can be pretty simple conversational topics, like “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What tools do you use?”, and they can also be somewhat agitating, like “what do you dislike most about your workplace? How many hours do you work every week? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve seen management do?”

This stuff may seem pretty basic, which it is. This isn’t really complicated or advanced stuff here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that a key objective right now is to simply get people to talk to each other in a critical manner and engage in some mutual and collective agitation.

To this end, the general inquiry sessions have been relatively effective and there’s been some good positive feedback. Some people have appreciated just having a space where people can openly vent frustrations and gripes about the tech industry, as opposed to more mainstream networking spaces where the expectation is that you are very cheerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. So in our spaces, instead of having to spin working 80 hours a week as “oh the work is so challenging and I’m learning so much”, you can admit “yeah this actually really sucks, I’d rather have an actual life outside of the workplace”.

For others, it has been useful to have a space to ground themselves into local concrete issues, as opposed to the big-picture macro-political stuff that they are used to thinking about. A lot of us are already very politicized, but we tend to think about politics in a very abstract and global way; so it’s really helpful to have discussions that force us to think about our own lives and how politics and political economy is impacting us on a day-to-day basis and how the workplace can be a node through which you can make a difference both for yourself and for others.

There has even been at least one case where a fellow worker, who is now a very enthusiastic member of TWC, explicitly pinned a workers inquiry session as being a pivotal moment when he recognized himself as a worker rather than a professional or an entrepreneur and how suddenly all this pressure was lifted from him. I’m not special! I’m just a fucking cog! Who cares!

All in all, we’re definitely going to continue to use workers inquiry as a strategy to facilitate conversations and reflections, as well as genuine relationships.

So inquiries have been a great tool to help build relationships between workers, but it’s also been effective at helping us understand what kinds of grievances and gripes that people around us have, that are driving them into organizing spaces. Or in other words, it helps shine a light on why the hell we techies are getting all worked up even though we supposedly have it really good with nice salaries and ping pong tables.

We can generally categorize tech worker grievances into three areas.

The first is standard workplace issues: things like bad management, long working hours, salary disparities, etc. I think it’s noteworthy that tech workers can still be riled up about basic workplace issues despite being relatively privileged and economically secure. We still may be working 60-80 hours a week, with an abusive manager, and heavy surveillance at work, and so on. Long working hours is definitely one of the popular grievances. Another is transparency around salaries; this is especially relevant when it comes to patterns of women and people of color getting underpaid, but not having a good way to figure this out with hard numbers. All in all, with regards to organizing, the fact that basic workplace issues are still a source of unrest means that we can apply a lot of the old lessons of union organizing to the tech industry.

The second category is issues of what we could call the “social composition” of the workplace, specifically issues of diversity (or lack thereof), and racism and sexism. Sexual harassment is a particularly key point of contention in the tech industry, and a lot of workers are really keen on figuring out ways to deal with it. And the general lack of management interest in dealing with these types of issues can be a big source of disillusionment and anger. So a key goal moving forward is going to be crafting strategies for rank-and-file solutions to issues of racism and sexism. We’ve actually already had some level of organizing success in certain workplaces where people were able to put collective pressure on serial harassers and get them disciplined or kicked out.

The third category is ethical and political issues. This is mainly with respect to how a company generally fits into the larger political context. For example, a company’s management trying to smooch up Donald Trump can be a serious source of anger for a workforce which is largely anti-Trump. It’s worth noting that this kind of grievance has actually been a very visible source of unrest for some time now; for example, workers at big companies like Google and Comcast had walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration policies. The ethics of technology are also a hot-button topic right now; for example, people working for various kinds of data companies are getting increasingly uneasy with the realization that actually, they’re working for surveillance companies. Shortly after the 2016 US election, a whole bunch of tech workers signed on to a petition pledging to never work on tech that could be used for the surveillance and targeting of minority groups. There’s also a disconnect between workers and companies on issues of privacy and security; a lot of workers take seriously the importance of privacy, but of course this runs against the very reason why a lot of tech companies exist in the first place.

So, those are the three general categories of grievances among tech workers. Hopefully it’s a little more clear now why TWC is optimistic about the prospects for bringing skilled technical workers into a larger working class movement. And one more thing I would note about this is that among all those grievances, by far, the most prevalent motivation for people who are agitated and want to organize is around issues of solidarity, either with underrepresented minority groups, or with tech workers who are not in relative positions of privilege, like contract workers and temporary workers. And it’s worth repeating that TWC originally started as a group that wanted to get skilled technical workers to be in solidarity with service workers on tech campuses.

So with this in mind, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to think that we could organize tech workers to disrupt the disruption of the labor market, and resist right alongside platform workers.

And just a couple of notes about our actual organizing. I’d like to say that in general, it’s been going really well. And actually it’s going a lot better than a lot of us expected. Late last year we set some goals for the organization for 2018, and already we’re hitting those goals or surpassing them. In addition, there’s a lot of spontaneous organizing that’s happening independently of each other. At one big workplace where we have a presence, we’re discovering that there are a bunch of other informal groups who are also organizing to pressure management or subvert the company or whatever. And this gets at the concept of “invisible organization” that some people mentioned earlier today. So TWC in no way has a monopoly on tech worker organizing, which is great. It means there is a lot of energy around this stuff. Although we’re definitely the coolest.

There was also a really interesting recent case where the engineers at a tech startup ran a really successful unionization campaign, and all 15 or so engineers and programmers were on board. But then, after about a week after they told the company, they all got fired. Which is kind of hilarious; a tech startup fired all their tech workers. But in any case it’s a great example of the contradictions that we’re talking about here, and last week TWC helped organize a rally and a picket outside the company and we had about 70 people show up. And one thing to keep in mind about this kind of stuff is that even if initial attempts at organizing are met with retaliation like this, at the end of the day, that’s just going to increase the gap between management and workers in the tech industry.

So yeah. Things are going good. And we’re excited for 2018.

Photo by Berliner.Gazette

The post Tech workers, platform workers, and workers’ inquiry appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.”

Roberto Ciccarelli interviews Antonio Casilli on digital labour and platform capitalism while refuting the “end of work”. Originally published in SP’s The Bullet.

Roberto Ciccarelli: Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He is known for his pioneering research on “digital labour,” refuting the apocalyptic common-sense notion that is proclaiming the end of work as such because of automation.

Roberto Ciccarelli (RC): In Italy there has been a lot of discussion about the firing of two IKEA workers, Marica in Corsico and Claudio in Bari. They were fired because their lives could not fit into the algorithm that governs the workforce. Have we gone back to the 19th century?

Antonio Casilli (AC): The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid, as it imposes seemingly “scientific” measurements and evaluations, which can resemble the old industrial manufacturing. The key difference is that the workers, in exchange for their submission to this discipline, are not getting the social safety and the political representation that they obtained before in exchange for their subordination. This new Taylorism has all the disadvantages and none of the old benefits. The workers are caught within a contradiction in terms: subordinate and precarious at the same time.

RC: After the Amazon strike in Piacenza, you advised the unions that they should also pay attention to data politics, not only to labour policy. What does that mean?

AC: In Piacenza, only the visible tip of the iceberg was seen. That was a strike in a physical location, for better working conditions in connection to tangible assets. There is a whole other part of Amazon that for years has been engaged in struggle. I am thinking of the micro-jobbers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a system for the creation and training of artificial intelligence that is powered by micro-workers, people paid piecemeal, only a few cents, for data, image and text management tasks. These workers must organize themselves for better compensation and more humane working conditions. In this case, trade unions need to recover lost ground, because the “Turkers” perform tasks that are too small for them to take into account.

RC: Are the unions doing this?

AC: Yes, although there are several different initiatives at the moment working at the national scale. In Germany, the metalworkers of IgMetall have provided a platform for these workers’ claims: FairCrowdWork. In France, the CGT has created Syndicoop, which helps trade unionists to organize employees around a campaign. In Belgium, there is SMart: a cooperative, not a trade union, which works with freelance workers and also with home delivery workers (“riders”). A process is taking place in which the classical trade unions are seeking to “platformize” themselves, while the cooperatives develop services on a mutual basis for workers on the platforms.

RC: From the struggles of Italian “riders,” the demand emerged that they should be put on the same contract as logistics workers. Is it the same in France and in other countries?

AC: In the on-demand economy, the services based on real-time platforms and products are the focus of a major legal and political dispute regarding the contractualization of workers. Up to now, the goal has been to regularize their position in a common sector contract that would apply to the area covered by the platform. In the case of Uber, in America, Europe and South Korea labour struggles are converging toward calling for their recognition as urban transport workers. For Amazon, workers are seeking the application of the common contract for postal workers. The action plan still needs to be widened further.

RC: Widened how?

AC: By recognizing all the micro-work done by the “click workers,” even those paid a few cents per piece to accomplish tasks such as managing data, images or texts. Their work is useful for machine learning, for teaching a machine how to learn and creating artificial intelligence.

RC: And how can this be achieved?

AC: Everything is tied to the quantity of information produced, and to how and to what extent the platforms are taking advantage of this production of data. Uber takes between 20 and 40 per cent on each transaction that takes place on its platform, and is fully aware of the value that is being produced. Some of the wealth produced must be redistributed to the workers on the platforms. While this wouldn’t be a wage, such a redistribution would be more equitable than the existing situation.

RC: What are other examples of digital micro-work?

AC: There are many. It is a global market that counts at least 100 million workers. In China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, platforms and services exist that are little known in Europe. These workers do a very wide range of jobs that allow Western digital economies to function. In these countries, you can find the Google search engine evaluators (raters). They are the workers who check whether the results of a search are appropriate and correct the range of results by adjusting the algorithm. There are also the content moderators on Facebook or Youtube, who spend their days judging whether particular videos or photos respect the platforms’ terms and conditions. They teach the filtering algorithms what content should be censored. We can also mention the “click workers” who are sharing, “liking,” and promoting advertising or celebrity videos, for which they are paid even less than a cent per click. These people are the real fuel behind viral marketing, which brings the most famous brands to life on the social networks.

RC: The on-demand economy is also a reputation economy and an economy of attention, where the figure of the consumer is central. How can workers involve consumers in their claims?

AC: First of all, by recognizing that the consumer performs the same type of labour as the Deliveroo delivery person or the micro-task worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

RC: What is the labour that the consumer performs?

AC: They produce data as well. This data is used to train artificial intelligence. The consumer produces a critical mass of exchanges and transactions that allow the platform to exist on the market. A consumer is an active and crucial part of the existence of the algorithm. They carry out a large amount of productive actions every day, which are similar to those of digital workers. Even the users on Youtube are doing video moderation for free, by reporting those that are not appropriate. Anyone who uses Google is training the algorithm of the search engine to learn the terms most often sought based on the words entered into it, by us and by others. The consumer is a producer. The boundaries between these economic actors are converging, to the point that we can say that when a platform doesn’t want to pay you, they call you a “consumer,” while, if they are willing to pay you (a little), they call you a task worker or micro-worker.

RC: You mentioned “free labour.” What is the role it plays in the digital economy?

AC: This “free labour” was already defined by Tiziana Terranova 20 years ago. Even then, being online was labour, because it produced content for websites and for the sites that were called “portals” at the time. Over the past decade, this idea of ​​free labour has changed, as we realized that the platforms aren’t just buying and selling our content — most importantly, they are buying and selling our personal data and personal information: which brands we like, or what time we usually listen to music; or where we are, using GPS. The free labour of the internet user is not creative work, but rather work done without awareness, and much less satisfactory, as it is invisible. As such, it is alienating, to the extent that we do not realize what the data is useful for, and how it will be used, when we solve a “captcha” on Google or add a tag to an image on Instagram.

RC: What is this data used for?

AC: It is used to produce monetary value for the large platforms that buy and sell information, but it is also used to create value for automation: to train artificial intelligence, teach the chat boxes to communicate with humans, and create virtual assistants like Siri on the iPhone or Alexa on Amazon, who speak to us and help us make choices, or even make them instead of us.

RC: So, is digital labour the common characteristic between the struggles of the bicycle messengers on Foodora or Deliveroo, those of Amazon workers and those in the countries of the “click workers”?

AC: Yes, these struggles are united by a different form of labour than those we have been accustomed to in the last century. Today, digital labour is done through digital platforms, which must be considered a type of productive organization. In addition, these platforms are both companies and markets. Amazon is a more traditional company with a brutal culture of labour discipline, as one can see, for example, in their warehouses, but also in their offices. But Amazon is also a market, a marketplace based on an enormous catalogue of products and on a less well-known form of commerce: that of data. Deliveroo is the same: It is an enterprise, with employees and tangible and intangible resources, and at the same time it is a labour market that connects customers, productive tasks and delivery workers. In this case, the platform uses an algorithmic type of matching, creating a relationship between different subjects. For Amazon, the relationship is between those who produce an item and those who buy it.

RC: You are a supporter of a universal basic income. How would it be able to protect the workforce engaged in digital labour, as intermittent and precarious as it is?

AC: By recognizing the data labour that goes through the platforms. This has already been argued by a report by the French Ministry of Finance in 2013, and in a report by the Rockefeller Foundation last year. The digital giants should not be taxed on the basis of how many data centers or offices they have in a country, but on the basis of the data produced by the users of the platforms. If there are 30 million Google users in Italy, it is fair to tax Google based on the profits they made from these users’ activities. In this way, one could fund a basic income, arising from the digital labour that each of us carries out on the internet or on the mobile apps we use. •

Antonio Casilli is a professor at Télécom ParisTech. He has written, among other books, Qu’est-ce que le digital labor? Editions de l’INA in 2015 together with D. Cardon; Stop Mobbing (DeriveApprodi, 2000); and La Fabbrica Libertina (Manifestolibri, 1997).

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However, this doesn’t mean that we are powerless and in a next installment, we will propose a strategy that is also learning from the innovations of platform capitalism. The following extracts have been sourced from Open Democracy:

Frank Pasquale: As digital firms move to displace more government roles over time, from room-letting to transportation to commerce, citizens will be increasingly subject to corporate, rather than democratic, control.

Economists tend to characterize the scope of regulation as a simple matter of expanding or contracting state power. But a political economy perspective emphasizes that social relations abhor a power vacuum. When state authority contracts, private parties fill the gap. That power can feel just as oppressive, and have effects just as pervasive, as garden variety administrative agency enforcement of civil law. As Robert Lee Hale stated, “There is government whenever one person or group can tell others what they must do and when those others have to obey or suffer a penalty.”

We are familiar with that power in employer-employee relationships, or when a massive firm extracts concessions from suppliers. But what about when a firm presumes to exercise juridical power, not as a party to a conflict, but the authority deciding it? I worry that such scenarios will become all the more common as massive digital platforms exercise more power over our commercial lives.

Focusing on the identity and aspirations of major digital firms. They are no longer market participants. Rather, in their fields, they are market makers, able to exert regulatory control over the terms on which others can sell goods and services. Moreover, they aspire to displace more government roles over time, replacing the logic of territorial sovereignty with functional sovereignty. In functional arenas from room-letting to transportation to commerce, persons will be increasingly subject to corporate, rather than democratic, control.

For example: Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather than having government boards credential workers, a platform like LinkedIn could collect star ratings on them.

This shift from territorial to functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy.

Forward-thinking legal thinkers are helping us grasp these dynamics. For example, Rory van Loo has described the status of the “corporation as courthouse”—that is, when platforms like Amazon run dispute resolution schemes to settle conflicts between buyers and sellers. Van Loo describes both the efficiency gains that an Amazon settlement process might have over small claims court, and the potential pitfalls for consumers (such as opaque standards for deciding cases). I believe that, on top of such economic considerations, we may want to consider the political economic origins of e-commerce feudalism. For example, as consumer rights shrivel, it’s rational for buyers to turn to Amazon (rather than overwhelmed small claims courts) to press their case. The evisceration of class actions, the rise of arbitration, boilerplate contracts—all these make the judicial system an increasingly vestigial organ in consumer disputes. Individuals rationally turn to online giants for powers to impose order that libertarian legal doctrine stripped from the state. And in so doing, they reinforce the very dynamics that led to the state’s etiolation in the first place.

This weakness has become something of a joke with Amazon’s recent decision to incite a bidding war for its second headquarters. Mayors have abjectly begged Amazon to locate jobs in their jurisdictions. As readers of Richard Thaler’s “The Winner’s Curse” might have predicted, the competitive dynamics have tempted far too many to offer far too much in the way of incentives. As journalist Danny Westneat recently confirmed,

• Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers.
• Fresno has a novel plan to give Amazon special authority over how the company’s taxes are spent.
• Boston has offered to set up an “Amazon Task Force” of city employees working on the company’s behalf.

Stonecrest, Georgia even offered to cannibalize itself, to give Bezos the chance to become mayor of a 345 acre annex that would be known as “Amazon, Georgia.

The example of Amazon

Amazon’s rise is instructive. As Lina Khan explains, “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.” The “everything store” may seem like just another service in the economy—a virtual mall. But when a firm combines tens of millions of customers with a “marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house…a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space,” as Khan observes, it’s not just another shopping option.

Digital political economy helps us understand how platforms accumulate power. With online platforms, it’s not a simple narrative of “best service wins.” Network effects have been on the cyberlaw (and digital economics) agenda for over twenty years. Amazon’s dominance has exhibited how network effects can be self-reinforcing. The more merchants there are selling on (or to) Amazon, the better shoppers can be assured that they are searching all possible vendors. The more shoppers there are, the more vendors consider Amazon a “must-have” venue. As crowds build on either side of the platform, the middleman becomes ever more indispensable. Oh, sure, a new platform can enter the market—but until it gets access to the 480 million items Amazon sells (often at deep discounts), why should the median consumer defect to it? If I want garbage bags, do I really want to go over to Target.com to re-enter all my credit card details, create a new log-in, read the small print about shipping, and hope that this retailer can negotiate a better deal with Glad? Or do I, ala Sunstein, want a predictive shopping purveyor that intimately knows my past purchase habits, with satisfaction just a click away?

As artificial intelligence improves, the tracking of shopping into the Amazon groove will tend to become ever more rational for both buyers and sellers. Like a path through a forest trod ever clearer of debris, it becomes the natural default. To examine just one of many centripetal forces sucking money, data, and commerce into online behemoths, play out game theoretically how the possibility of online conflict redounds in Amazon’s favor. If you have a problem with a merchant online, do you want to pursue it as a one-off buyer? Or as someone whose reputation has been established over dozens or hundreds of transactions—and someone who can credibly threaten to deny Amazon hundreds or thousands of dollars of revenue each year? The same goes for merchants: The more tribute they can pay to Amazon, the more likely they are to achieve visibility in search results and attention (and perhaps even favor) when disputes come up. What Bruce Schneier said about security is increasingly true of commerce online: You want to be in the good graces of one of the neo-feudal giants who bring order to a lawless realm. Yet few hesitate to think about exactly how the digital lords might use their data advantages against those they ostensibly protect.

Photo by thisisbossi

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The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master.

From the book’s website

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.

Of course, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

Read more here.

Photo by Sean MacEntee

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