A new feudalism is on the rise. From the internet to service and care, more and more industries expect people to live gig to gig, while monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich. But as Nathan Schneider shows through years of in-depth reporting, there is an alternative to the robber-baron economy hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look.

Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. Co-ops have helped to set the rules, and raise the bar, for the wider society.

Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution—from taxi cooperatives that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.

Endorsements

“Everything for Everyone lives up to its title. As Nathan Schneider documents, cooperative movements are everywhere—from Barcelona to Bologna, Nairobi to New York, Jackson, Oakland, Boulder, Detroit, and points in between. And they are struggling to bring everything in common—electricity, healthcare, tech, transportation, banks, land, food, knowledge, even whole cities. Spoiler alert: this is no paean to the neoliberal ‘gig economy’ but rather an historical and contemporary tour of the radical potential of cooperative economics to disrupt capitalism as we know it. It is a book for everyone and a book for our times: read it, share it, but don’t just talk about it. Commons for all!”

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“People have always fought to forge economies based on cooperation and creativity, rather than domination and exclusion. But that work has never looked so urgent as it does today. Charting a wealth of renewable ideas, tools, and commitments that are poised to reinvent democracy, Schneider tackles an immense subject with precision and grace.”

—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

“The time has never been better for cooperative enterprise to change how we do business. This is a guide to how a new generation is starting to make that promise into a reality.”

—Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society and lecturer at the Wharton School

“Everything for Everyone proves how our vested interests are best served by addressing our common ones. In Schneider’s compelling take on the origins and future of cooperativism, working together isn’t just something we do in hard times, but the key to a future characterized by abundance and distributed prosperity. We owe ourselves, and one another, this practical wisdom.”

—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, professor at Queens College

“Nathan Schneider is one of our era’s foremost chroniclers of social movements. Always engaging and analytically insightful, there’s simply no one I’d trust more to guide me through the latest iteration of the longstanding, international, and utterly urgent struggle to build a more cooperative world and reclaim our common wealth.”

—Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform

“A gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make—spiritual, technological, and communal.”

—Krista Tippett, host of On Being

Photo by HeatherKaiser

The post Book of the Day: Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Platform cooperativism is the radical idea that the internet would do more good if its major properties were democratically owned and governed.

The second Platform Cooperativism conference took place last week in NYC, and to coincide with the event, Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider launched a new collection of essays on the topic, called Ours To Hack and To Own.

I work at Loomio (a kind of platform co-op) and Enspiral (a kind of co-op platform), so Trebor offered me a sneak peek at the book so I could offer my thoughts.

I devoured it in two sittings.

Selected Quotes

I’ve selected a few quotes, almost at random, to give you a taste of the tone throughout the book: critical, urgent and hopeful. The critique is razor-sharp, but always delivered along with something to say “yes!” to.

Melissa Hoover

Melissa Hoover from the Democracy at Work Institute sets up the problem and solution quite precisely in What We Mean When We Say “Cooperative”:

“Workers’ needs clearly are not being met by current platforms. Platform capitalism removes any accountable mediator between capital and labor: there is no management to petition, no corporate structure to organize against, just the platform with its built-in discipline of user ratings and a contingent labor pool fathoms deep. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss — except without, you know, any actual boss, just the unmitigated imperative of capital to return value to investors. Cooperatives actually connect investors directly to markets, too, but in a very different way: the investors are members of the cooperative itself. This alignment of interests can capture the promise of the platform — direct connection to distributed markets — while centering worker benefit as its reason for being.”

Rachel O’Dwyer

In Blockchains and Their Pitfalls, Rachel O’Dwyer, delivers the perfect one-line takedown of techno-determinism:

“The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically.”

Astra Taylor

There’s plenty of diversity of opinion between the dozens of contributors. Take for instance Astra Taylor‘s piece Non-Cooperativism:

“Centralized public options need to be on the table along with decentralized cooperative or commons-based ones. We need to think creatively about how they complement each other and how they can be combined. (Consider Janelle Orsi’s proposal for a municipally owned alternative to Airbnb.)”

A new space

The most exciting thing about Ours To Hack and To Own is that it opens a space for conversation between two groups that have been basically ignoring each other.

In the first camp you have the start-uppers, techies, entrepreneurs and blockchainers… people focused on the future. They’re motivated by what’s new. In just about every innovation they can see the promise of a more equitable society, right around the corner.

In the second camp you have the political activists, academics, and labor organisers… people who have read enough history to understand that nearly all these innovations are doomed to be absorbed by the logic of capitalism.

I have a lot of friends in each camp, but know very few people who operate comfortably in both arenas.

I think this inability to talk with each other is kind of a major problem: that first group is holding a huge amount of influence over the future, but the second group holds all the lessons from the past.

So I go into one room, and the blockchain fanatics are telling me about distributing power, but not one of them has read a single book about the history of feminism, Marxism, or civil rights! Then I go into the next room, and the political radicals are having a great time dismantling all those shallow techno-utopian ideas, but they’re completely silent on the positive potential of new technologies.

That’s the genius of this book: it brings the futurists and the historians into the same room.

The book is equally relevant to my friends who are struggling to bring the union movement into the 21st century, and to my other friends who are starting up their third business this year.

Having digested the essays about this new platform cooperativism, and the showcase of dozens of new platform cooperatives, I’m left with one abiding question: are we looking at the front edge of a new insurgent movement? or the fringe of an idea that’s doomed to be permanently marginalised by powerful incumbents?

For me, the jury is out, but this impressive collection of thoughts, experiences, resources and new collaborators is likely to have a significant impact on the outcome.

If you want join the conversation, grab your copy of the book, join us at the 2nd Platform Cooperativism conference in NYC in November, or drop me a line on Twitter, I’m @richdecibels.

The post Ours To Hack and To Own: a Review appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Joining team human are debt resisters Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. Her films include the documentaries Zizek! and the Examined Life. Taylor’s recent book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age takes a hard look at the persisting and embedded inequalities in today’s digital media landscape. Thomas Gokey is a visual artist, adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and activist. Gokey’s piece entitled, Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper reimagined his own student debt as art. Both Thomas Gokey and Astra Taylor seized the momentum of Occupy Wall Street to help launch a direct action campaign of debt resistance. Working through the collective force of Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and the Debt Collective, Gokey and Taylor are fighting back against the economic injustice of debt in America.

Visit our resources page to learn more about debt, to connect with a network of support, and learn ways to resist the oppressive systems of debt in our society.

Cross-posted from TeamHuman.fm

The post Team Human 1: Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey on Debt Resistance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Order your copy today!

Momentum is building. Just last week, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a manifesto that explicitly calls for creating platform co-ops. We hope that this book will help show that online democracy is both a live option and a moral necessity.

Cooperative advantages

I’ve been continuing to follow a bunch of different leads along the cutting edge of economic democracy. In The Nation this week, read about Denver’s 800-driver taxi cooperative vying to turn Uber’s disruption into a push for worker ownership. If they keep

Meanwhile, in the September issue of Vice, I return as economics columnist with a report on Enspiral, a remarkable co-working network based in Wellington, New Zealand, which shows how trust can become not only a cooperative advantage, but a competitive one. If you missed it, also, I recently reported for Vice about the latest on ColoradoCare, the controversial ballot proposal poised to bring cooperative, universal medical coverage to all the state’s residents—now, with the help of Bernie Sanders.

Utterances

Upcoming talks and trips:

• 2016.09.29: Alma, MI – Alma College
• 2016.09.30: Grand Rapids, MI – Aquinas College
• 2016.10.06: Omaha, NE – IGNITE at Creighton University
• 2016.10.12: Quebec, Canada – Collaborative economy session at the International Summit of Cooperatives
• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.12.08-09: Cambridge, MA – Harvard Religious Literacy and Journalism Symposium
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Un-branding

You might have noticed that I’m writing from a different email address. Over the past few months I’ve pivoted from a public self-presentation heavily weighed toward modes of transportation: nathanairplane, The Row Boat, etc. As much as I enjoy transportation, I’ve decided to reorient my self-presentation around the name my parents gave me when I was born. So now this is where you can find me and my stuff:

• Website: nathanschneider.info
• Email: [email protected]
• Social media: @ntnsndr

And watch out, because I’m still playing around in various ways, like for instance with a shorter form of the URL; both http://ntnsndr.in and [email protected] work right now but we’ll see if it really seems worth keeping. In the meantime, see y’all there!

Photo by The Preiser Project

The post Ours to Hack… appeared first on P2P Foundation.