Over the past few years, journalist Nathan Schneider has become a leading advocate for “platform cooperativism.” Together with the scholar and activist Trebor Scholz, Nathan co-organized the first conference on platform cooperativism at the New School in 2015 and co-edited the collective manifesto Ours to Hack and to Own (2017).

We spoke to Nathan about the internet’s democratic deficit, and how it facilitates Trumpism. We also discussed how cooperatively owned digital platforms can help us fight fascism—online and off—by fulfilling the internet’s utopian potential.

For readers who may not be familiar, what is “platform cooperativism” and where did it come from?

There’s long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about “democratizing” some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet’s openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.

Thank goodness there is a long, offline tradition of a real “sharing economy”—the cooperative economy, in which people own and govern the enterprises they depend on. This includes credit unions, mutual insurance companies, farmers’ buying clubs, housing co-ops, worker-owned factories, and more. It’s Associated Press and Organic Valley and REI.

What if our online platforms, which are increasingly the medium of our relationships and culture and work, were organized that way? Platform cooperativism is a movement of people doing just that. At a time when large-scale, political democracy is under dire threat, this is a way of working for a democratic future that starts with the tools we rely on to do the stuff we care about.

The term “platform cooperativism” was coined by my colleague Trebor Scholz in late 2014. At the time, as a reporter, I’d been writing stories of people who were already doing this. We teamed up, organized a conference, and edited a book called Ours to Hack and to Own. Meanwhile, for a wide variety of reasons, creative people all over the world have been turning away from digital feudalism and starting to build a better, cooperative internet.

To bring the conversation to Trump, how does “digital feudalism” facilitate Trumpism? Is there something about the ownership model of the internet that makes it especially fertile ground for fascism?

The internet so far has come with a growth model, and an accompanying ideology, that puts a halo on what Donald Trump has sought to be all his life. It is the Great Man theory of history—that only the lone, irreverent genius makes important things happen, and that exploiting lesser beings in the Great Man’s service is defensible for the greater good of all.

Trump and Steve Jobs have different aesthetics—black turtleneck versus golden combover—but their bedrock assumptions about how the world works are essentially the same. It has been convenient for some tech CEOs to adopt apparently progressive politics, because that has been a way to obtain the immigration policies, educated workforce, and general goodwill they need to consolidate their power. But they’re not programmed, so to speak, to care about democratic process. Fascism—in the classical sense of a strong-arm alliance between government and industry—aligns much more neatly with the culture of startup bros and venture capital and unicorns. We can already see the CEOs starting to line up behind Peter Thiel in their embrace of Trumplandia. It is a kind of homecoming. It probably feels quite liberating for some.

Other kinds of origin stories can be told about the internet, of course—that it was built with the fruits of public research funds and infrastructure, that it depends on open-source code shared freely among geeks for decades, that what made it awesome was its decentralized, open, ungovernable nature. These are the kinds of prehistories that platform cooperativism builds on. And they point to forms of ownership and governance that stand at odds with the Great Man theory. Functioning, effective democracy is illegible to the worldview Trump seeks to impose. And that’s precisely what makes it so powerful.

I also see platform cooperativism, and cooperation in general, as a much-needed reminder that democracy doesn’t begin and end with the president. We need it in the systems that we interact with every day. The more we exercise those democratic habits and muscles, the less we need of strongmen to sweep through and save the world.

In the past, fascists have attempted to co-opt cooperative movements. Mussolini gave up and repressed them instead. Peron made co-ops so Peronist that they were hardly co-ops anymore. And in Spain, cooperators led the fight against Franco; when they lost that war, the Basque people got their revenge by building Mondragon, the largest worker cooperative in the world, a living and working act of resistance to fascist rule. When there is no Big Man for the fascists to “make deals” with, their model of the world doesn’t compute. We need digital Mondragons that can drown out Trump’s tweets.

Can you speak a bit more specifically to how these “digital Mondragons” can fight Trumpism?

It starts with becoming less governable. The tech monopolies are very convenient for governments that want to control and manipulate, because the points of control are highly centralized. Building a backdoor to Google may be hard—whether through intrusion or social engineering of its leadership—but once you’ve done it, that’s pretty much all you need to do. But if the ownership and governance of the network is more distributed, more shared among a wider community of users, that’s a whole lot more backdoors you have to figure out how to open.

Cooperative ownership is a way of protecting ourselves. It’s a way of ensuring that these platforms are less easy to hijack, and that the decentralized promise of the internet can be finally manifest not just in the protocols but in the economy that flows through them. Right now, the internet is pretty well organized to support fascism, and already does so to the degree that it has already arisen. Shared ownership is a way to halt this process, and to gird ourselves against its allure.

We need to become less governable in many areas of our lives. Technology is one area in which, I’m afraid, we’re especially vulnerable.

You’ve talked about how a more cooperative and decentralized internet can help promote democracy and resist authoritarianism. But how does that extend to the economic sphere? Unified Republican control of Congress and the White House is likely to mean an even more hostile climate for labor organizing. Among other things, there’s talk of a national “right-to-work” law. What role can platform cooperatives—a ridesharing platform owned by its drivers, for instance—play in resisting the Republicans’ anti-labor agenda?

A century ago and more, before New Deal legislation enshrined a rather static (and intentionally racist) version of union organizing into law, co-ops were often a critical part of the labor-organizing business model. Unions supported co-op stores for their members, and helped set up cooperative workshops so that striking workers could keep producing when they were off the job.

Co-ops were a core part of the strategy for the nineteenth-century Knights of Labor, for instance, and they were the explicit objective of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. The Cold War arrangement, and the AFL-CIO business model, departed from these origins. After World War II, the deal was that unions would be tolerated as long as they acted as partners with capital and didn’t threaten its fundamental control.

Now, in many respects, we’re back where we were a century ago. Protective organizations for working people are falling apart or long gone. Some of the most important campaigns lately, such as the Fight for 15 and OUR Walmart, don’t even try to rely on dues paid by the workers they claim to represent; instead, they’re parasitic on other unions and philanthropy, which isn’t necessarily good for their long-term accountability. And while these kinds of models—highly distributed, involving often just a few workers in each store—are terrible for the standard National Labor Relations Act union arrangement, they’re very well suited for platform co-ops.

Already we’re seeing unions start to turn to co-ops again as a lifeline and a new hope. That includes platform co-ops. Green Taxi, an 800-driver co-op in Colorado, is backed by the Communication Workers of America. A Service Employees International Union affiliate in California is behind Nurses Can, a new app for home-care nurses. And more. Some of these are being brokered with the help of Michael Peck, the US representative of the Basque co-op conglomerate Mondragon. When unions can’t rely anymore on a fixed, cozy set of arrangements with government and capital, co-ops become—as they were from the beginning—an obvious option. And in an economy increasingly being organized online, platform co-ops are a vital beachhead.

You seem to be saying that there might be a small silver lining to Trump’s agenda: by turning back the clock on labor law, he may be creating more space for earlier forms of worker organizing like cooperativism, especially with digital platforms.

I’m never going to be one to say that things have to get worse before they can get better. That kind of thinking only throws the most vulnerable under the bus of supposed progress. And in places like Germany and France and Italy, where labor unions are still quite strong, they’re also embracing platform cooperativism. Our unions would probably be better poised to enter this new space if they were in a stronger position generally. But it’s true that platform cooperativism found some of its earliest supporters among leaders of the newer, more flexible labor organizations like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Guestworkers Alliance, and the Freelancers Union.

I’m also wondering if the fact that these cooperatives are digital makes it easier for them to elude potential repression. Certainly, platform capitalists like Uber and Airbnb have built a business model out of short-circuiting government oversight and regulations. Are those loopholes also accessible to platform cooperatives, and could they be useful for surviving a newly hostile political environment under Trump?

There definitely is this deer-in-the-headlights phenomenon by which people seem to forget all the rules of the offline world when they see a shiny new internet gizmo. Perhaps we can use that to our advantage. I do think the online-ness of platform cooperativism is drawing new people into the cooperative movement who otherwise would remain ignorant of it.

Already, many platform co-ops have had to hack the law a bit in order to operate, since most cooperative statutes were designed for very different kinds of organizations. Bending the rules is always necessary to make a new thing work. The difference is, I think we’re bending them in the opposite direction of Uber—toward solidarity, toward community-based financing.

But I also think one of the strongest things cooperation has going for it is its legacy, its tradition. This is a global movement with centuries of experience to learn from. I’ve been trying hard to learn those lessons as I try to support the emerging platform co-ops.

For instance, young people often say that there’s no financing out there for co-ops. To an extent, that’s true; in tech, almost all of the financing models are incompatible with community ownership. That said, look at the history of agricultural co-ops and electric utility co-ops in this country. As the co-ops grew, they built their own cooperative banks—banks that are themselves cooperatives, designed to lend to cooperatives. Those institutions finance hugely capital-intensive projects to this day, even if people in cities are usually blind to them. These can become resources for platform co-ops, too, if we approach them right.

We can find power in the tremendous accomplishments of past cooperators that are hidden in plain sight. Co-ops built this country, to a significant degree. Trump wants us to believe that only the likes of him can build things. Zuckerberg agrees. They want us, too, to have the attention span of a reality-TV show.

We can refuse.

This has been a free interview from Tech Against Trump, a new book by Logic chronicling the rising tide of anti-Trump resistance by tech workers and technologists.

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The post This Platform Kills Fascists: Nathan Schneider on Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

Can we transform the renting economy of Uber and AirBnB into a genuine sharing one? Platform cooperatives must become open and commons-oriented.

Text by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis: If feudalism was based on the ownership of land by an elite, the resource now controlled by a small minority is networked data. Or, as in the case of Uber, AirBnB and TaskRabbit, it takes the form of a kind of on-demand labour system, where individuals-freelancers contribute their infrastructure and labour.

What is platform cooperativism?

The concept of “platform cooperative” has been proposed as an alternative to such “sharing economy” firms. A platform cooperative is an online platform (e.g. website, mobile app) that is organized as a cooperative and owned by its employees, customers, users, or other key stakeholders. For example, see a directory of several platform co-ops around the world.

We fully support the broader movement of platform cooperativism. However, we cannot be content with isolated cooperative alternatives designed to counter old forms of capitalism. A global counter-economy needs to be built. And this could happen through the creation of a global digital commons of knowledge.

How could commons-based peer production converge with cooperativism?

Commons-based peer production has brought about a new logic of collaboration between networks of people who freely organize around a common goal using shared resources, and market-oriented entities that add value on top of or alongside them.

Prominent cases of commons-based peer production, such as the free and open-source software and Wikipedia, inaugurate a new model of value creation, different from both markets and firms. The creative energy of autonomous individuals, organized in distributed networks, produces meaningful projects, largely without traditional hierarchical organization or, quite often, financial compensation.

This represents both challenges and opportunities for traditional models of cooperativism, which date back to the nineteenth century, and which have often over time tended to adopt competitive mentalities. In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be dominated by large corporations. Arguably, these characteristics need changing, and today, there is a way for them to change.

What is open cooperativism?

The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other.”

To a greater degree than traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives would statutorily be oriented towards the common good by co-building digital commons. This could be understood as extending, not replacing, the seventh cooperative principle of concern for community. For instance, open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of immaterial and material commons; and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

Can we go beyond the classical corporate paradigm?

We outline a list of six interrelated strategies for post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Though knowledge can be shared easily and at very low marginal cost when it is in digital form, closed firms use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits may be generated. This is particularly galling in the context of life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowledge. Open cooperatives, in comparison, would recognize natural abundance and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources artificially scarce.

Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute. For instance, in free and open-source software projects, participants contribute code, create designs, maintain the websites, translate text, co-develop the marketing strategy, and offer support to users. Salaries based on a fixed job description may not be the most appropriate way to reward those who contribute to such processes. Open co-ops, therefore, may practice, for example, open value accounting or contributory accounting. Any income the contributions generate then flow to contributors according to the points they accrued. This model could be an antidote to the tendency in many firms for just a few well-placed contributors to capture the value that has been co-created by a much larger community.

Third, open cooperatives could secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses. Existing copyleft licenses – such as Creative Commons and the GNU Public License – allow anyone to reuse the necessary knowledge commons on the condition that changes and improvements are added to that same commons. That framework, however, fails to encourage reciprocity for commercial use of the commons, or to foster a level playing field for commons-oriented enterprises. These shortcomings can be met through CopyFair licenses that allow for sharing while also expecting reciprocity. For example, the FairShares Association uses a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the general public, but allows members of its organization to use the content commercially.

Fourth, open cooperatives would make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and services. For-profit enterprises often aim to achieve planned obsolescence in products that would wear out prematurely. In that way, they maintain tension between supply and demand and maximize their profits; obsolescence is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, open design communities, such as these of the Farmhack, the Wikihouse, and the RepRap 3D printers, do not have the same incentives, so the practice of planned obsolescence is arguably alien to them.

Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives could reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises means they will have a hard time creating a circular economy ­– one in which the output of one production process is used as an input for another. But open cooperatives could create ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains may enhance the transparency of the production processes and enable participants to adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. There is no need for overproduction once the realities of the network become common knowledge. Open cooperatives could then move beyond an exclusive reliance on imperfect market price signals and toward mutual coordination of production, thanks to the combination of open supply chains and open value accounting.

Sixth, open cooperatives could mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones. The misnamed “sharing economy” of Airbnb and Uber, despite all the justified critique it receives, illustrates the potential in matching idle resources. Co-working, skill-sharing, and ride sharing are examples of the many ways in which we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-governance, a genuine sharing economy could achieve considerable advances in more efficient resource use, especially with the aid of shared data facilities and manufacturing tools.

How does the concept of platform cooperativism relate to the notion of open cooperativism?

Cooperative ownership of platforms can begin to reorient the platform economy around a commons-oriented model.

We have highlighted six practices that are already emerging in various forms but need to be more universally integrated. We believe that the major aim for fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value which is now feeding speculative capital, and re-invest it in the development of commons-oriented productive communities. Otherwise, the potential of commons-based peer production will remain underdeveloped and subservient to the dominant system. Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and unnecessary waste; they must become open and commons-oriented.

Note: This text is based on the authors’ chapter in Ours to Hack and to Own (edited by T. Scholz & N. Schneider, OR Books, 2016). Parts of this text have also been included in A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature.

Cross-posted from Open Democracy

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