To what degree are we, digital workers, contributing to the welfare of society by helping these information corporations spread their network effects and consolidate ever-larger monopoly information platforms? This is one reason why we have to organize ourselves as cooperative workers in a way that demands, leverages and generates dividends based on our production, distribution and use of the commons.

Another reason is that a social movement is waiting to be developed for creating commons and commoning practices around digital labor. Platform cooperatives are a start, but only when we use them in the development and management of municipalized and bioregionalized communities (through the mutualization of ownership and participation in these commons cooperatives). Digital labor and traditional/industrial labor are not opposing poles, but part of the continuum of evolutionary human labor. Digital labor has to get this right, because it forms our motive power in organizing the commons. This integration represents a complete liberation of technology from the industrial age (and the notion that we are mere information service workers destined for marginal wages), yet also reveals the roots of our mental work in physical work. We can’t think, write, plan, organize, or take social action if we don’t eat and our bodies are not supplying energy for these activities. As digital labor integrates the mental and biophysical, ending the socially determined mind-body split, it will also be breaking through the industrial forms of the division of labor and the modern social control, generating a new social contract for a sustainable economic and social system. This is entirely in the lineage of the traditional/industrial labor of our ancestors, who produced the commons which we have inherited, and from which we have greatly benefited.

A third reason for a digital labor movement is the influx of robotics in production. If AI manages to lower production costs, drive out a large portion of human labor, and destroy jobs and income, is the commons community adequately prepared to either embrace or stand against the social revolution that this will bring? This is where we now need to put our attention by developing a new understanding of labor. Obviously, our labor is both physical and mental, for it is the biology of our bodies that keeps both forms of labor in motion. This is why digital labor is a dead-end path if it is not grounded in, and vitally interconnected with, the biophysical labor that it takes to build thriving ecosystems from the commons of our current social economies. This integration must be taught and practiced if we are to join together for sustainability. That is why I say that digital labor for the building of commons cooperatives is how, why and what we must organize.

Photo by Tim Proctor

The post How the Commons Can Reconcile Digital and Biophysical Labor appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Save the Date
November 10-11, 2017 The New School

Experiments with cooperatively owned online platforms are demonstrating that democratic business models can be a dynamic force in building a more equitable economy for people across various income, race and class strata, starting with the most vulnerable populations.

The platform co-op movement disrupts Silicon Valley’s disruptors by shifting the focus toward fundamentally fairer forms of ownership and governance. The retirement of Baby Boomer business owners presents an opportunity for mass conversions of those businesses into co-ops. Existing cooperatives are increasingly eager to join the digital economy. Over the past few years, the burgeoning of platform co-ops, community currencies, worker’s tech, the solidarity economy, B-corps, and credit unions have shown us that alternative economies are not only necessary but possible.

Since the first platform cooperativism event at The New School two years ago, an ecosystem of people, knowledge, and tools has developed around this model. Now, some platform co-ops reverse-engineer the technologies of the “sharing economy” to create worker-owned rivals to Palo Alto’s most dominant tech firms. Others are developing enterprises of a kind the tech billionaires in California have not even considered.

To think and act our way out of the current crisis, we need to understand the roots of these extractive business models. With such insight, we will be able to build alternatives that best meet the needs of workers, consumers, and citizens.

The challenges that we are facing right now are hardly new; they have intensified over the past forty years. Managerial pay has increased prodigiously; income inequality has sharpened, affecting women and marginalized communities most acutely, and trillion of dollars of individual wealth have been tucked away in tax havens. Beyond that, there has been a general shift away from direct employment, leaving more and more workers vulnerable to stalled worker rights, as well as declining wages and benefits. At the same time, the Web has not made good on its cyber-utopian promises of democracy or social well-being; the rise of the digital commons and practices of peer production, while profoundly important, has not succeeded in generating business models that can deliver livelihoods for practitioners. With artificial intelligence on the rise, highly concentrated ownership of robots seems the likely outcome. The decentralized Internet has given way to an unprecedented centralization of data and platforms ownership.

Platform co-ops have emerged in areas like child care, art, journalism, transportation, social media, and food. Now, it is time to determine in which sector this business model works best and develop strategies for turning these experiments into robust answers to pressing challenges. How can public policy spur and protect cooperative platforms? What kinds of financing and legal support do they need?

The first platform cooperativism event in 2015 popularized the idea, and the second event in 2016 brought together co-op and union leaders to push the model forward. This third event will zero in on ways that platform cooperatives can help to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges. The fairer digital economy we need is already emerging everywhere around us.

Convened by Trebor Scholz, Camille Kerr, Nathan Schneider, Palak Shah

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

The post The People’s Disruption: Platform Co-ops for Global Challenges appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(19 mins) Kristy Milland, TurkerNation — If Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) were a boss, one would guess that it hated its employees. This has driven mTurk workers (Turkers) to fight back in a variety of ways, some of which may be useful to those fighting their own battles in other sectors. From rating customers to writing letters to awakening class consciousness to writing rules about what is ethical customer and platform behaviour, a variety of techniques are being tried in the attempt to make online work more bearable. A good work environment does not have to remain a dream, it can be something we realize together. I will take you from today’s mTurk to what online crowd platforms could be, so we can work together to fix the future of work.

Photo by geralt (Pixabay)

The post Kristy Milland: From Digital Worker Subsistence to Organized Resistance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

• Ensure self employed and freelance workers have greater access to the basic rights enjoyed by those in employment
• Relax regulations that restrict the ability of independent workers to form legally recognised bodies for collective bargaining
• Explore how to adapt welfare and benefits systems to make sure they are fit for purpose in the unpredictable ‘gig economy’
• Clearly define the legal status of companies that crowdsource labour to allow for effective regulation
• Recognise the implications of these new forms of employment for occupational safety and health – both the physical and psychosocial risks.
• Assess risk to government finances from online employers not paying income tax or social security contributions in countries in which they operate
• Investigate innovative new ways to exploit the use of local level, not-for-profit online platforms for the benefit of both local workers and local economies

Labour in the digital economy

The post The growing precariat and the Digital Economy Wild West: Policy Proposals for Freelance Workers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from our friends at Shareable, Jay Casano reports from the recent Platform Cooperativism Conference in NYC.

“Silicon Valley loves a good disruption. So let’s give them one.”

Thus Trebor Scholz kicked off the first-ever conference on platform cooperativism to a packed auditorium of technologists, students, academics, co-op developers, and activists at The New School last Friday morning. So-called “sharing economy” digital platforms like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Airbnb have taken control of our work and our homes, making labor even more contingent and precarious than it already has been historically under capitalism.

Such apps have received widepsread attention and adoption due to their ability to deliver goods and services on demand to consumers. The conference explored how we might utilize recent technological developments toward truly democratic ends. In Scholz’s words: “Platform cooperativism embraces the technology, but wants to replace the ownership model.”

The idea of “platform cooperativism” came from the title of an essay Scholz wrote late last year. Nathan Schneider, Scholz’s collaborator and co-organizer of the conference, further expounded on similar concepts in reporting for Shareable. A panel discussion bearing the name, featuring both Scholz and Schneider alongside others, was also held in March at Civic Hall.

In Silicon Valley’s version of the sharing economy, “digital workers remain invisible, tucked in between algorithms,” says Scholz. Schneider said on Friday that what we need are “algorithms for the 99 percent.”

Janelle Orsi, co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center and one of Friday’s plenary speakers, likened the power of these new companies with their massive market (over-)valuations and aggressive legal teams to the Wizard of Oz: Once you pull back the curtain, all that is there are a few algorithms and the network effects that come from first-mover advantage. But the vulnerability of a platform like Uber is precisely the contingency of its workforce that it relies on to maximize profits. Because those workers own their own assets and are not tied to the platform, they can very easily leave it for another.

“The history of the Internet is full of hope and disappointment,” says Schneider. “Free-and-open-source software, the ‘personal’ computer, the ‘sharing’ economy — each of these aroused hope for empowerment for people, only to become tools for monopoly and extraction.”

Silicon Valley, for its part, was busy the same weekend with the O’Reilly Media “Next:Economy” summit on the future of work. That conference is succinctly summarized by Tim O’Reilly’s declaration on the conference website that “Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years.” It is this Silicon Valley mindset of transformation as an end unto itself that platform cooperativism is thinking outside of and against. While tech entrepreneurs look to disrupt in order to profit and see adoption on platforms as a bigger bottom line, platform cooperativists are focused on creating democratic ownership and governance structures and seek to adapt technology toward those ends.

“When people in Internet culture talk about ‘democratizing’ something, they normally just mean expanding access to something,” says Schneider. “This is a pretty gross misuse of the word. A core challenge of platform cooperativism is to make sure that the need for democratic ownership and access of online platforms never gets watered down again into mere access for the sake of capital extraction.”

This past weekend’s conference was unique because it achieved the rare feat of bringing together labor organizers and technologists in the same room and putting them in conversation with each other.

One panel on co-op development was lead by “old school” brick-and-mortar worker cooperative developers, but drew a crowd of developers interested in learning more about the ins and outs of the co-op world. Esteban Kelly, a co-executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, emphasized that platforms are really just another means of accessing markets for existing co-ops. That comment spawned a provocative hallway conversation about whether Marxism needs to be reworked in light of the platform economy given that an Uber driver and a TaskRabbit handyman both own their means of production, but what they lack are means of accessing markets.

In contrast, a session on Saturday was about the most technical of technorati topics: the blockchain — the decentralized architecture that powers Bitcoin — and how it might be used toward democratic ends. Another panel session explored the role of the state as a potential partner for the solidarity economy, while also reckoning with its role as purveyor of surveillance and repression of activists in the U.S. and around the world.

Some of the most exciting developments came from the self-organized breakout sessions, such as one on where@ — a proposal for a secure location-sharing app for activists. Other workshops focused on alternative currencies, ethical user interface design, and data science.

The most contentious moments of the gathering were around platform cooperativism’s relationship to capitalism. Cindy Milstein, author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, and Scott Heiferman, the founder and CEO of MeetUp, passionately debated the merits of a reformed capitalism. Heiferman said that he wanted to “save a certain kind of capitalism” and defended taking money from venture capitalists as a necessary precondition for making platforms that scale. Milstein, on the other hand, argued that even if MeetUp’s goal is laudable, it is part of the Silicon Valley startup culture that is raising rents to exorbitant heights and displacing ordinary people in the San Francisco Bay Area. She said we need to “start with the ethics, not the technology; determine what it is we want to produce, create, and share.”

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos said that he sees his role as a policymaker as working to restore the free market. He was quickly met with a round of criticisms from the audience. Kallos later clarified to me that what he meant by restoring the “free market” was to end corporate welfare and public-private partnerships that equate to “the government handing out monopolies.” But the incident nonetheless highlights these tensions within the formative stages of this movement.

But these disagreements will seem familiar to anyone who has spent time in the U.S. cooperative movement. On the one hand are those who consider cooperatives a kind of “ethical capitalism” and, on the other, are those who see cooperatives a form of dual power: alternative institutions that can exist within capitalism but simultaneously act as a bridge out of it toward a new economy.

At times, panelists and audience members both questioned the premise of the conference, expressing concerns about technology replacing human-to-human interaction and even doubting that a digital platform can ever foster true solidarity. At other times, the conference seemed to meander from its topical focus. Despite the emphasis on governance and ownership at the outset of the conference, there was a lack of nuanced discussion about the finer points of ownership models and what scaling up democratic ownership structures would look like with multi-stakeholder models. There also seemed to be an assumption that someone born into service work will always do service work. A discussion of how to prevent on-demand service jobs (such as those on Uber, TaskRabbit, and Handy) — even democratically controlled ones — from remaining a permanent economic underclass was absent. Perhaps that is outside the scope of the conference, but it seems important to consider. The conference participants were, also, overhwelmingly white and male. Though it is apparent that the organizers worked hard to achieve gender parity among panelists.

Still, these are the kinds of questions and debates that should be happening at the nascent stage of this movement. The incredible turnout and robust discussions that took place, combined with actually existing projects and emerging collaborations suggest that this new movement could pose a real threat to the self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

“We’re drawing on decades of critical scholarship on the political economy of the Internet,” says Schneider. We’re trying to offer an intervention that might help end the cycle that turns all our of great hopes and ideas for a truly democratic Internet into new tools for monopolies to exploit.”

All photos by Kenneth Ho

Didn’t make it to NYC? Sessions from the Platform Cooperative Conference can be viewed here: http://platformcoop.net/video-stream

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Third of a series of videos from the New School on Digital Labor. You can find the whole series here.

Alternative Forms of Labor Organizations: Union Substitutes or Something Else?

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First of a series of videos from the New School on Digital Labor. You can find the whole series here.

Algorithmic Hegemony & the Droning of Labor –

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