But no matter how much we try to ignore the corporate machine it ploughs on regardless and at various points in all of our lives we are forced to interact with the unsustainable, greed-based economy whether we like it or not. We all need to travel, buy energy, we like presents and holidays and now we are buying more and more of these goods and services online, from people we do not know.

As local banks close in favour of apps, local taxis are driven out by Uber and the likes of Airbnb and other holiday and comparison websites offer us ‘guaranteed savings’ – the brave new world of digital platforms is being thrust upon us, whether we like it or not.

The dominant form of business in our economy has not changed, but the method of delivery has. Platform businesses which reach further and wider than conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses, that are able to ‘scale up’ and attract customers in their millions are forcing out the smaller players, just like supermarkets killed the traditional garden market. Except these “platform monopolies” are taking things to a new level – often unbeknown to us they’re gathering our data and using sophisticated algorithms to work out how to sell us more things, that quite often we don’t need or want. They’re aggregating data and dissintermediating in ways that we never knew were possible. Uber is valued at over 60 billion dollars but does not own a single taxi…

From monoculture to platform co-ops

To someone practicing permaculture, there is something almost offensive about vast fields where businesses cultivate the same single crop and, in a similar way, the exponents of ‘peer to peer’ and ‘open source’ technologies get equally offended by monolithic platforms that dominate the digital landscape.

Peer to peer, (where individuals share content with other people, rather than relying on centralised servers) and open source software (which is free to use and adapt, without requiring a licence fee) are like the digital community’s own versions of permaculture. They provide a pathway to greater independence, autonomy, diversity and resilience than is offered by the dominant system.

David Holmgren’s ideas about creating small scale, copyable, adaptable solutions which have the power to change the world by creating decentralised, diverse, and more resilient systems have huge parallels with open source, collaborative software projects, which are developing as a response to the monolithic, proprietary and profit driven enclosures that dominate today’s Internet.

The end goal of this work is to create ‘platform cooperatives’, as alternatives to the venture capital backed platforms. Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed. Co-ops are an inherently different form of organisation than Limited or Public companies, which place community before profit, hence have entirely different principles than their corporate rivals. For this reason they are more resilient in downturns, more responsible to their communities and environments and more effective at delivering real (not just financial) value to everyone they interact with.

Platform co-ops provide a template for a new kind of economy built on trust, mutual aid and respect for nature and community. By placing ownership firmly in the hands of the people and applying democratic forms of governance they offer a legitimate alternative to the defacto form of business. There are several platform co-ops that already provide comparable, and often better services than their corporate rivals and with more support others will continue to develop.

On 26 and 27 July the OPEN 2018 conference at Conway Hall in London will showcase platform co-ops such as The Open Food Network – which is linking up local food producers and consumers through Europe, Resonate – the music streaming co-op, and SMart from Belgium which provides support for a network of thousands of freelancers throughout Europe. The beginnings of a viable, self-supporting and sustainable economy are stating to emerge and OPEN 2018, along with similar events in the US and across Europe, is bringing together the people with the ideas, the tech developers and the legal experts to help catalyse the transition.

Shared values and the network effect

By Dmgultekin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8273108

There are so many similarities between permaculture’s philosophy and principles and the works of other progressive groups that hope to encourage a more sustainable, more resilient and equitable future. From Occupy to Open source, Permaculture to Peer to Peer and Collaborative Technology to the Commons Transition groups there are clearly overlapping values.

David Bollier, writing on the Peer to Peer Foundation blog has suggested that “…permaculturists and commoners need to connect more and learn from each other…” and the idea that these communities are ultimately working towards the same objective seems especially important to recognise if we are to accelerate the development of a more sustainable world.

There is already an evolving “shared narrative” between these various, disparate initiatives, but it is often sidelined by our self-selecting filters which lead us back into the communities we know and trust. Collaboration and cooperation can be hard work and as groups get bigger they can become harder still but that’s no reason not to try. The fact that Wikipedia provides a better encyclopaedia for free in more languages than Britannica ever managed proves that online, open source collaboration can deliver greater value than proprietary, closed source systems.

The true value of a collaborative, open networks only really manifests when its members communicate, and work together, through connected systems. Sharing ideas, discussing problems and addressing challenges in larger networks creates positive feedback loops via the network effect – a term which describes how the value of something increases in proportion to the number of people using it (like a phone, or social media network) – something all the various ethical and progressive networks could benefit from enormously.

Parallels between collaborative, open source software development and permaculture principles:

1. Observe and interact

Progressive software projects often utilise ‘user focused’ design strategies to ensure they meet people’s needs. Taking time to understand how users interact with software systems via user experience testing groups and an ongoing, iterative design processes are recognised to deliver higher quality solutions which suit specific user needs.

2. Catch and store energy

Peer to peer networks don’t rely on centralised servers but instead make use of the latent capacity of other user’s machines. Imagine how much more efficient it would be than deploying huge server farms if our computers were not shut off at night, or left idle, when they could be providing valuable processing power for others. The Holochain project aims to make it simple and secure for anyone to join a truly peer to peer network and to share files and processing power in this way – and to even earn credits for hosting other people’s files and applications.

3. Obtain a yield

The Peer Production License provides a means by which open source developers can make the code they develop available for free and still benefit from it’s use. Sites like the Internet of Ownership, which contains a directory of cooperative platforms use the PPL to “permit reuse exclusively for non-commercial and worker-owned enterprises” thereby helping to grow the commons. The ultimate goal of the PPL is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This principle is particularly integral to open source development since the concepts of ‘user focussed’ and ‘agile development’, ‘branching’ and ‘forking’ are all designed to ensure that software projects are self-regulating by listening to the users needs, driven by user feedback and that they are able to be adapted to changing needs.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services

Open source technology is inherently more renewable in the way it enables the reuse and repackaging of code for new purposes. Ethically minded hosts and developers such as Green Net power their servers with renewable energy.

6. Produce no waste

As above, open source code is often re-used and repurposed but progressive developers still have a lot to gain from better collaboration. There are often multiple teams working on identical problems and ideas and whilst this has benefits in terms of developing strength and resilience through diversity it also leads to waste, mainly in terms of time. At least the waste ‘product’ of web development is only digital and so old technology and code doesn’t littler the streets or pollute the environment as much as physical products can, especially if archives are stored on renewably powered servers.

7. Design from patterns to details

Genuine online collaboration has been slow to evolve, with the best examples being Linux (the open source operating system), Firefox, the open source web browser and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. It is only recently, with the rise of monolithic capitalist gardens such as Google and Facebook and Amazon that the hive mind of the internet is recognising the need to step back and redesign its’ systems according to new patterns. The push for “Net neutrality” and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project are examples of this in action as is the Holo project, a very exciting and truly peer to peer “community of passionate humans building a distributed cloud, owned and run by users like you and me.”

8. Integrate rather than segregate

The move from centralised to decentralised, to distributed and federated technology is a a key element of open source and collaborative technology design. The entire Peer to Peer philosophy is based on the recognition that the connections and relationships between nodes (people or computers) in a network is what gives it strength and value. Collaborative technologists still have a lot to gain from developing deeper and wider integrations, like we see in nature, and which permaculturists know so well.

9. Use small and slow solutions

Designing a computer system to be slow is not something you will normally (ever?) hear a programmer talk about but they often talk about small, in many guises. Small packages (of code), small apps, “minified” (meaning compressed) code and even small computers, like the Raspberry Pi are key features of collaborative technology which all aim for increased efficiency.

10. Use and value diversity

Diversity is intrinsic to open source and collaborative technology. The plurality and adaptability of open source solutions ensures a highly diverse ecosystem. Users are free to adapt open source code to their needs and the open nature of most open source projects values contributions from anyone, irrespective of race, gender, age or any other factor. It is true that the majority of contributors to open source projects are normally young, white and male but the reasons for that seem more to do with societal inequalities and stereotypes rather than any specific prejudices or practices.

11. Use edges and value the marginal

The explanation of this principle places most value on “the interface between things…” and this is a central component of web design. Web services have now realised the necessity of providing intuitive user interfaces, to allow users to navigate complex data and to investigate deeper informational relationships but, more interestingly the latest developments in linked open data enable users to interface with more specific, more granular and more timely data to provide increase value. The Internet Of Things will facilitate a massive increase in the number and type of products which can interact over the internet. Whilst it is not the norm, drawing diverse information from the edges and valuing the marginal is something the open internet can really facilitate.

12. Creatively use and response to change

Most open source, collaborative projects use some kind of agile development, which advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Permaculture and open source see eye to eye on this principle which bodes very well for a growing, symbiotic relationship in our rapidly evolving world.

Lead image by Dmgultekin, Wikimedia Commons.

The post Building a Cooperative Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Dear Birdies,

The tweet-powered t-shirt vending machine in the room at Twitter’s shareholder meeting didn’t work at first. A Twitter employee attending to the machine walked me through the three hashtags required to get the shirt, but the machine wasn’t recognizing my tweeting. So, after 10 minutes of small talk with the employee about our proposal, I told her “Thank you” and started to go. But then the employee opened the vending machine door and handed me a shirt. Such a simple fix!

At Monday’s annual meeting, Twitter shareholders did not approve our proposal.

But by winning 4% of the vote, we can – and very likely will – resubmit a better proposal next year to democratize Twitter.

Twitter’s opposition statement to our proposal said it couldn’t be done. The truth is, even some of the strongest allies of #BuyTwitter assumed it was too complex. We’ve been through eight months of organizing, from op-ed to petition to proposal, defense, andMonday’s vote tally. Looking back, it all seems simple, like unlocking a vending machine.

Now, after the meeting, everything seems possible for our group.

A stock market analyst who helped guide our efforts emailed me, saying: “This study could be a game changer… You have legitimacy now from the shareholder vote. That carries weight. Leverage it to the fullest. Media coverage may very well be in your favor, too.”

Momentum from the vote is one way that #WeAreTwitter #BuyTwitter has succeeded so far at building organized power among Twitter users and shareholders.

Here is some more of what we’ve accomplished together:

• Advancing democratic ownership and accountability on the platforms we use, including a couple dozen individuals doing analysis, web design, advocacy with allies, and more.
• Dozens upon dozens of articles featuring #BuyTwitter including The Financial Times, WIRED, Salon, Recode, Vanity Fair, and The Co-op Water Cooler.
• Hundreds upon hundreds of tweets in the past week alone about #BuyTwitter, including an original love ballad on YouTube!
• A letter signed by major of coop allies, including the International Co-operative Alliance, Co-operatives UK, the National Cooperative Business Association, and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. You can sign it, too!
• Another letter by the International Co-op Alliance, on behalf of 2.6 million enterprises and 1 billion members worldwide.
• A poll conducted last week found that more than 2 million UK Twitter users would consider investing in a democratic Twitter.
• A Twitter Moment of selected highlights uniting #BuyTwitter, #NetNeutrality, #Coops, #corpgov, and exiting the stock market.

This is just the beginning. What’s next?

• Help build cooperative social media by joining the new Social.coop, a cooperatively owned instance of the federated, open-source Mastodon network. This is just one of many projects you can support in the #platformcoop ecosystem.
• Explore the broader movement for cooperative platforms and an Internet of Owners by attending The People’s Disruption conference in NYC and other events around the world.
• Join the organizing effort in our Loomio group. What should next year’s proposal say? Should we press on as a social media users’ union? A cooperative investment club?

I hope we can get together for an open online conversation. Until then, share our celebration tweet and have a wonderful week.

Onward,

Danny and the #WeAreTwitter team

PS: If someone you know wants a free kitten, tell them to get one here.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo

The post Twitter, you’ve been served appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(16 mins) Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado — Building a platform co-op economy is about more than just new “killer apps”—it’s about creating and connecting an ecosystem. In the wake of last year’s Platform Cooperativism conference, he and others have developed , a prototype reference and discovery tool for the platform co-op ecosystem. It includes platform co-ops themselves, as well as organizations poised to support their development through funding, technical support, and more. Already, we are starting to see strong patterns emerging among the ownership designs at work in the platform co-op ecosystem, as well as critical gaps.

Slides: https://share.mayfirst.org/index.php/s/P9JWpO4XdmmqiBQ#pdfviewer

Photo by Photographing Travis

The post Nathan Schneider on the Internet of Ownership Project appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In 2015, Nathan co-organised “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference in New York, which kick started a wave of global discussion about online democratic platforms. He recently co-edited the book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.

In the run up to the Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops conference in London, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, from The Open Co-op explores some of Nathan’s ideas.

OSB: You seem to be a fan of democracy, as am I, however, I’m not sure I have ever experienced it. What do you think real democracy is?

In 2015, Nathan co-organised “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference in New York, which kick started a wave of global discussion about online democratic platforms. He recently co-edited the book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.

Nathan Schneider. Photo: Elizabeth Leitzell, CC BY-SA 4.0 license

NS: I guess I feel I have experienced democracy. Never perfect, never complete (as Derrida put it, always “democracy to come”), but real and beautiful.

I experienced it as a teenage student, when the teachers empowered us to help govern our school, and then in college living in a housing cooperative.

And I’ve seen it in social movements, in organizations I’ve been part of, and even fleetingly in the voting booth.

I agree that one cannot call the reigning political systems any kind of complete democracy, but they do have some democratic features, and they invite us to the challenge of thickening that democracy radically.

Especially in a moment like the present one in the US, when the government is not going to be an ally, it is so, so important to build democracy wherever we can. This is something social movements have been doing for a while now. Movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter have found themselves in societies they view as undemocratic, and they responded by practicing direct democracy in the streets, and calling for cooperatives in the economy. I think this is a valuable lesson. When democracy fails at one level of society, start building it in other levels, in other spheres. It spreads like a virus.

OSB: Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops would provide an alternative system of governance.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. What do you think about the possibility of a completely new system of democracy, like the above, superseding the existing system?

NS: This vision of a cooperative commonwealth has been suggested by many, including James Warbasse, then president of the U.S. Cooperative League, in his book Cooperative Democracy from the 1930s. My own anarchist leanings appreciate any structure that reduces the capacity of some people to coerce others through unnecessary hierarchy or representation. It will take tremendous experimentation and practice to accomplish non-coercive, participatory structures like this—especially in an age when many people are actually inclined toward authoritarianism.

That said, I believe deeply in taking any steps we can to thicken our democracy—to practice it more fully in more parts of our lives. Wherever we can. Especially in times when authoritarian temptations are strong, it becomes all the more important to demonstrate that another way is possible.

OSB: At Open we are keen to see NGOs, co-ops, non-profits and even Local Authorities start to fully utilise open source software and, in return, to fund the development of a suite of open source apps which facilitate collective ownership and collaboration. What do you think about the idea of creating an ‘open source development fund’ into which users of open source software contribute, to help further open source development?

NS: There are already lots of pots of money out there for open-source development—foundations like Mozilla, Linux, and Apache. To make open-source more accessible, usable, and equitable, pots of money aren’t enough. We need better incentives built into how that money is distributed. And I think platform co-ops could enable a very positive shift in the open-source movement, supporting the development of more user-facing, user-serving tools, which in turn could make our tech economy less dependent on business models based in surveillance and extraction.

OSB: Absolutely. I wonder whether there could be some model by which the users of open source tools can easily and voluntarily make financial contributions back to the community to fund further development? Although Mozilla and Linux and Apache do fund some superb work one wonders if a new fund, backed by user contributions, to which project developers can make proposals for funding, which are then peer reviewed, so that funding is allocated to the most sought after and well planned projects, would speed up the development and use of generative, collaborative tools?

NS: Certainly that’s one strategy—one that requires users to trust the choices of the reviewers. Another is to advance platforms like Snowdrift, Gratipay, and CoBudget, which enable users to make their own allocations based on use. They, and the platform co-op movement in general, are developing a new and much-needed economic layer atop the open-source movement that is poised to make it much more inclusive and user-centered.

OSB: To me it seems odd that conventional co-ops have not embraced open source. Do you have any thoughts on why this might be?

NS: It’s complex. For one thing, tech co-ops, by and large, seem to already be strong advocates of open source. But larger, legacy co-ops may not be, probably because they’re simply following the lead of other players in their industries. For an executive anxious to digitize a business, meeting with a fellow executive offering proprietary tools probably seems less scary than trying to take on free stuff created by distributed networks of producers. I hope that, as the cooperative tech sector evolves, that will change.

I think co-ops, in the digital age, have a lot to learn from successful open-source communities in terms of how to organize and govern widespread, distributed production. However, part of what excites me about the platform co-op movement is the way in which it offers a kind of corrective to open-source so far. For one thing, people are developing licenses like the Peer Production License that create commons that only fellow co-ops can commercialize; if Linux were licensed that way, for instance, Google couldn’t use it to create the Android surveillance system.

OSB: The Peer Production License is a very interesting development which we at Open hope to see utilised more, to encourage the proliferation of open source development whilst avoiding its exploitation by commercial businesses. I know coders who have been put off releasing their code as open source after seeing their previous contributions subsumed by businesses which have been grown and sold for enormous profits, so the PPL seems like a great concept. What do you think are the biggest obstacles to it becoming widely adopted?

NS: Part of what helps good ideas spread in the online economy is a successful use case. Among the projects I’m aware of that have employed the PPL, I’m not sure any have actually been commercially (or otherwise) successful because of the PPL. If this license is going to take wings, it’ll be because it meets a need, and creates possibilities, where other licenses fall short. And, until the tech co-op scene is much more robust, the PPL’s main benefit will be a liability; precisely what enables lots of open-source projects to work is that their contributors include corporations that intend to derive commercial benefit from the tools they’re contributing to.

Platform co-ops are also developing more sustainable, user-facing business models for open-source projects, such as the Snowdrift crowdfunding platform, which I mentioned earlier.

OSB: Snowdrift looks great, their strategies to incorporate iterative functionality and social psychology seem particularly clever. I presume they would also accept PPL projects and are not focussed solely on FLO?

NS: I can’t answer definitively. But I know that some in the platform co-op community see the PPL as a counter-productive enclosure of what should be a more accessible commons. They believe platform co-ops should develop business models around open information available to anyone and any company, not around artificially limiting information flows around the co-op sector. There’s truth in that. At the same time, as long as there have been commoners, they have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords.

Cooperative de Distillation by Yann Gar, CC BY-SA 2.0

OSB: Protecting the commons from the ‘greedy hands of the lords’ seems essential to me, especially since we are now in a kind of race to deliver a sustainable, generative economy before the extractive economy exhausts our finite planet. Michel Bauwens suggested to me that:

“…we need to build productive communities around our commons and to create generative entrepreneurial coalitions, so that we are commoners adding to the commons, but also cooperators making a living. It took capital 400 years to consolidate itself with all the institutions it needed. The problem of course, is: we don’t have that time, but perhaps, because of the acceleration of learning through mutual networks, we can achieve it in 40.”

I’m not sure we have even 40 years to establish a generative economy… If you were in charge, what changes would you make to help speed up the transition to a collaborative, generative, sustainable, economy?

NS: Thank goodness I’m not in charge. Michel and I are in discussion about the extent to which power must be organized and wielded to challenge the existing power relations. Perhaps a bit more than him, I think it’s important that cooperative economies find alliances with more combative movements for social justice—environmental justice, racial justice, worker justice. Labor unions in the US got their start a century ago in part by conjoining cooperative enterprise with collective bargaining; they’re starting to rediscover that combination in this moment of crisis. And those fighting for a “just transition” from climate genocide are turning to cooperative alternatives as well.

There’s also a growing swell in the progressive policy community to reinvigorate antitrust law for the online economy. Policymakers should start turning to shared ownership models as an alternative to merely obstructing or breaking up the emerging platform monopolies. We’ve already seen this, for instance, in Jeremy Corbyn’s recent call for platform cooperatives in his Digital Democracy Manifesto.

Policymakers who recognize the power of cooperative enterprise for bringing sustainable wealth to their communities have done several things to support it. They ensure that there are good, flexible cooperative incorporation laws. They provide development funds and financing. They provide incentives for companies to operate cooperatively and contract with co-ops that are commensurate with co-ops’ commitment to the common good. In this, Bauwens’ model of the “partner state”—a state that facilitates but does not direct the development of a cooperative economy—is an excellent starting point.

OSB: I’d like to open up a new subject about the increased value that platform co-ops can deliver, by avoiding the ‘leaky bucket’ syndrome in which value is extracted by external investors, management teams or other third parties… Do you know of any real-world examples which prove this to be the case?

NS: Many of us are still struggling to wrap our heads around where the competitive advantages of cooperative in the online economy lie. As in economies in general, this is usually a kind of question answered better in practice than in theory.

Theoretically, there are works like Henry Hansmann’s The Ownership of Enterprise, which argues that cooperative models can be most cost-saving in cases when shared ownership can reduce the cost of contracting. In practice, we see that play out with a company like Stocksy United. Stocksy has been successful in the highly competitive stock-photo industry because, through shared ownership, it has been able to obtain absolutely top-notch photographers and pay them the maximum possible returns. Because the photographer-owners and employee-owners have secured their own financing, there is no need to sell parts of the company as the price of contracting with investors.

It’s a lean, streamlined, ethical business model. Those are the feedback loops we need to look for. It’s not enough to say cooperation is better because it’s more ethical, even though it is; we need to find the opportunities where cooperation has these kinds of competitive advantages.

OSB: I thoroughly enjoyed your chapter “The meaning of Words” in your new book Ours to Hack and Own, I completely agree words are extremely important and that sloppy usage of words  often bends and warps definitions in dreadful ways.

To me, the terms “sustainable development”, “sharing economy” and “social enterprise” have all been bastardised by inappropriate usage, which has not only caused mass confusion but, worse than that, has also enabled the extractive economy to knowingly profit from this misinformation by subverting definitions to suit their own ends.

This corruption of once pure ideas and concepts undermines efforts at reform on a wholesale basis.

What particularly excites me about co-ops and the platform co-op movement is that a co-op is a very clearly defined entity and has been since 1844. It would seem extremely odd if anybody managed to corrupt such a long standing definition. Yet unfortunately we have already seen that start to happen, as people get excited by the ‘platform co-op movement’ and alternative definitions of what constitutes a platform co-op appear. My colleague Josef Davies-Coates wrote an important piece in June this year, to try and highlight this issue.

In the introduction to “Ours to hack and own…” you and Trebor write:

“A company that shares some ownership and governance is better than one that shares none, and we celebrate that. We encourage a variety of strategies and experiments.”

I agree with the celebratory sentiment, and that a variety of strategies and experiments will be required, but I maintain that mixing and grouping co-ops and non-co-ops is potentially disastrous. It simply paves the way for quasi-co-ops (with little or no genuine co-operative principles – think Juno) to piggy-back on the celebrated platform co-op meme which, to me at least, feels like the start of a slippery slope towards the bastardisation of the definition of platform-co-ops and other co-ops. Where do you stand on this?

NS: Platform cooperativism is a broader invitation to shared ownership, shared governance, and solidarity in online economies. But when we identify an organization as a platform co-op, I think it’s best to use something like the definition I’ve used for The Internet of Ownership directory: International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) principles, with ownership and governance shared over the platform. So not even a worker co-op that happens to have a website, or even one like Loomio that produces a platform is classed as a platform co-op. Adhering to the ICA principles is a matter of solidarity with the international movement; ensuring that ownership is shared online ensures that we’re focused in what we’re talking about.

OSB: Can we be sure that all the “co-op platforms” listed on your excellent website http://internetofownership.net/directory/ are actually co-ops?

NS: I have limited time for complete verification. I do attempt to ensure that everything listed as a co-op platform at least claims to follow the ICA principles. With more institutional support, we could do more due diligence. But to be honest, right now I would rather focus our attention building cooperative enterprises, not arguing over what counts under which definition.

OSB: What else do you think we can do to ensure the term “platform co-op” and “co-op” itself does not get distorted and compromised?

NS: This is a challenge that the whole cooperative movement faces. And I don’t like being a cop. But this comes back to that principle of education—continually insisting, at a variety of levels, that co-op members know that they are members, and what that means, and that they can exercise their rights. To me, the distinction between “co-op platforms” and “sharing platforms” on the Internet of Ownership is useful here; the platforms that sort of blur the lines of cooperative definitions are welcome, and they can be part of this movement, but we’re not going to call them co-ops. Fortunately we’re not in this alone. For more than a century, the ICA has been working to keep the meaning of cooperation clear and robust, and we’re collaborating with them to help ensure that this extends to platform co-ops.

OSB: In my latest article for OD I suggested that:

“For co-ops and platform co-ops to become ubiquitous, and the default model for startups worldwide, we need to strip out the bureaucracy and legal barriers and make founding co-ops as easy as catching a cab.

“…we need to combine the idea behind One Click Co-ops, with a range of versatile, off-the-peg, and easily understandable organisational options…founding and running a co-op needs to be as easy as:

1. Logging on to a web service or app and defining who your stakeholder groups and founding members will be

2. Defining if you will want to make profits, raise share capital or perform other financial transactions

3. Picking a model from suggested ‘cookie-cutter’ legal forms, depending on your location and objectives

4. Naming your organisation

5. Picking your required web apps from the Open App Ecosystem

6. Customising and setting up your apps (website, fundraising / payment, project / task / people management / decision making / rewards systems etc) to enable your new organisation”

What do you think about the idea that we could speed up the creation, and hence impact, of co-operatively owned organisations through the creation of an online process like the above?

NS: I agree completely. I’ve argued for just this kind of model in my call for “pools” – one-click co-ops that don’t necessarily use the language of cooperatives, which can be kind of jargony, up front. What makes ideas and practices spread in the online economy is when they are super usable, super clear, and super intuitive. So I would love to see it be even simpler than what you describe—especially by abstracting over formal legal incorporation by, say, allowing people to form little co-ops within a parent legal co-op or foundation.

Our online platforms are some of our great educators nowadays. They teach us more than we know. Let’s get them teaching us democracy.

We need to create tools for people who want to do stuff, and for whom cooperative models are an intuitive and effective choice, not just people who want to create co-ops. In the process, we’ll be inculcating cooperative self-organizing among all whole take part. It reminds me of how once a classroom full of kids who were using Loomio online started playing “Roomio” in person. Our online platforms are some of our great educators nowadays. They teach us more than we know. Let’s get them teaching us democracy.

OSB: If platform co-ops and the generative economy take hold, it strikes me we could be living in a very different world in the future. Can you describe what you think this world might look like?

NS: I think the best thing we can do in the present is to set in motion what seem to be healthy, constructive processes so that we can flourish today and be well-poised to adapt to a future that we can’t predict. I don’t like the processes that are being set in motion in the online economy—ones where surveillance, deception, and extraction are the norm. A cooperative online economy would be one in which we’re used to, and expect, forms of exchange and collaboration that assume privacy, transparency, and shared benefit. That sounds very abstract, but the outcome is kind of what internet boosters have promised all along: Lives in which we have more connections, more choices, and more freedom to practice the creativity we’re all so capable of.

OSB: What do you think are the main stepping stones that need to happen for that vision to become a reality?

NS: We need to saturate the market and render the old models obsolete—through entrepreneurship, politics, resistance, and persistence. It has been remarkable, to me, to watch this platform co-op ecosystem form. One day, people start identifying challenges, and the next day others come forward with strategies for addressing them. We’re developing legal structures, financial instruments, collaboration software, and a shared culture. But in order to persist, and in order to prevail, we need to hold the basic faith that nobody can govern us better than ourselves.

Oliver Sylvester-Bradley is a member of the open.coop and tweets at @defactodesign.

This post originally appeared on opendemocracy.net

 Photo by laurabillings

The post Build democracy and it spreads like a virus appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Amidst misogyny, racism & political hostility, networks of economic alternatives in 2017. Happy new year!

Last week, we kicked around ideas for concrete projects that the Platform Cooperativism Consortium should realize this coming year. In the second part of this article, we’ll devote ourselves to just that: pragmatic objectives for the next twelve months. But for our project to have legs to stand on, we — the people involved in this movement— also need to think through the bigger picture and situate platform cooperativism historically. With that in mind, we went back and listened again to the contributions at the “Building the Cooperative Internet” event last year at The New School.

Yochai Benkler’s talk, in particular, stood out. In his Saturday-morning lecture, he presented platform cooperativism as an attempt to “build a coherent intellectual framework to offer an alternative to the failed ideology of the past forty years.” He is clear: “platform cooperatives will neither kill nor be killed by investor firms,” but there is sufficient room in the current market situation so that platform co-ops can strive. Benkler, a professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, situates platform cooperativism as a “core location for the development of new ideas in the pursuit of an open social economy.” For those less steeped in social economy studies, the term “social economy” refers to economic activities amongst the community. It is located between the economies of the private and public sectors.

Yochai Benkler begins with an account of two ideological periods in politico-economic history — that of managerial capitalism, beginning around World War II and ending during the inflation crisis of the early 1970s, and that of oligarchical capitalism, the period in which neoliberal thought and the Washington Consensus were central. The actuality of a Washington Consensus represents the claim that there is an optimal organizational form such as the investor-owned firm, which upstarts are then called upon to adopt to succeed “in the teeth of the market.” Benkler foregrounded that, ideologically, the actuality of the Washington Consensus depended on ideas such as the reduction of the economy to the self-motivated individual, the reality of predictable, calculable risk, and the importance of planned, controlled, and ultimately stable ventures. For Benkler, however, the victory of the Trump and Brexit campaigns is indicative of a general collapse of the neoliberal model and thus an opening which will be filled by a new economic understanding. He relates these political wins in part to the inequality caused by the extreme and unmatched extraction of wealth by the top 10% in the U.S. and the UK.

Benkler is skeptical about two particular visions of what might replace neoliberalism. First, there are the likes of Peter Thiel who argue for a new age of techno-libertarianism wherein technological development can run its course unimpeded by the state, with deregulation allowing markets to reward talent and accelerate us into a fully-automated Star Trek economy. Benkler did not name Thiel, but Peter Thiel does illustrate this point in his book Zero to One. Here, he argues that only through deregulation, monopolistic genius can be free to innovate us into a post-scarcity future. Second, there are proponents for what Benkler calls “nudge progressivism,” a return to the managerial capitalism of the mid-20th century, only updated and made more efficient by big data analysis.

For Benkler, these two imaginary successors fail to take into consideration the social embeddedness of systems, which is becoming central to all sorts of academic disciplines including sociology, economics, and management science. This “social embeddedness” indicates that we can no longer reduce the motivations of economic actors to rational self-interest, but must also acknowledge the existence of varying, socially-constructed drives and desires. There is a need to look beyond homo economicus to homo socialis, as Benkler puts it.

What Benkler proposes as an alternative future is a network pragmatism which seizes the space for experimentation. Rather than believing ourselves unfailing, he claims we must embrace our fallibilism, understanding that our success will come not from the perfect execution of a pre-planned attempt, but rather a rapid iteration which utilizes the knowledge generated by our applied inquiries to drive us forward and upward.

He stresses that local communities do know best about their needs if only given the chance for reflection through practical experience: trial and error and trial again. It is, he says, precisely this experience which is denied to these communities when they engage with investor capital, which immediately subjects any attempt to the logic of the “tyranny of the margin,” the need to compete in the market, to maximize profits. To produce flexible organizations which can continually adapt and innovate as circumstances change and our knowledge grows, Benkler suggests that we look to methodologies that have already proved successful. These could include institutional analysis and development framework developed by political economist Elinor Ostrom, as well as tech-sector models like commons-based peer production, free and open source software development, and even lean startup models. One challenge will be to determine how platform co-ops can exist as what Scholz calls “soft enclosures” that insulate populations from economically and politically hostile surroundings while also contributing to the commons. Platform co-ops like Fairmondo and Loconomics Cooperative are already sharing their code base and by-laws.

For Benkler, network pragmatism is fundamentally about the embrace of the diversity of organizational forms. This pursuit of an “organizational bricolage” resonates with our understanding that platform cooperatives are but one practical near-term alternative. They are part of this bricolage of the solidarity economy, the pro-commons movement, and various other successful organizational forms including B-corps, non-profits engaged in economic production, philanthropic LLCs, and, central to our community, platform co-ops.

In sum, we should first of all be a sounding board for the needs of the platform co-op community. We are no lone star heroes but instead, strive for solidarity and collaboration with other projects and organizational forms. We aim for economic experimentation, building playful, intellectual and practical incubators.

Before we get to our goals for 2017, we are pleased to report that the PCC managed to hire Samuel Tannert who is helping us to cope with day-to-day communications and our ongoing research. We started a draft of a Wikipedia in-depth article about platform cooperativism, for example. It should be live in a week or two. With Samuel, we are also working on streamlining the onboarding process for all who’d like to join and contribute to the PCC. See profiles of some of our researchers on the Consortium website at http://platformcoop.newschool.edu/index.php/about/. If you are one of them but have not added your profile yet, please contact Samuel.

Out of the working document that we generated together in 2016, we extracted a set of activities for the PCC, but it should be obvious that we need to focus on a small number of projects. With that in mind, for 2017, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is focusing on the following projects.

1) A mooc about the cooperative platform economy. We are immediately moving to fundraise and create a free, massively open online course on the subject of the cooperative platform economy. This course will be for motivated individuals and groups worldwide who would like to start a platform co-op or reflect more on its the implications of an open social economy. It will also serve as a resource for those in the academy, providing teachable segments which instructors can use in their classes. If the task at hand is, as Benkler argues, the seizure of this unique historical moment to reframe the way politico-economic processes are understood, the availability of this courseware will be a vital tool in the dissemination of this new understanding which we are building together.

2) Templates. We plan to work on legal templates to help the community to launch platform co-ops, at least in the U.S.

3) Design. A design team already started a design overhaul of the platform.coop website. It will be rolled out in February. Send us your input or requests for features, please.

4) Fundraising. We are about to launch a donation channel and are looking for first donations to support I) the operation of the PCC, II) the massively open online course about the cooperative platform economy, and III) our work on legal templates that make it easier to start up platform co-ops.

5) The Platform Cooperativism Consortium will continue to interview different platform co-ops about their ethical commitments, lessons learned, ownership models, and systems of self-governance and publish articles, which make the community aware of projects within the ecosystem. The goal of these stories is to bring people within the ecosystem closer together. Our network will be as potent as the relationships of the people within it. You can keep abreast of this effort by following the stories we post here, on http://platform.coop/stories. A list of articles appears at the end of this article. We are open to review your platform co-op story. Submit it to us!

6) We will also our project of mapping the growing landscape of platform cooperatives and related democratically-run projects by promoting the excellent work by the team at Internet of Ownership who have produced a comprehensive directory of platform cooperatives, many articles, and are keeping a running calendar of events related to platform cooperativism.

7) In the fall of 2017, we will convene the next event at the New School. Write us your wish list for the event.

8) We are planning on launching a European sister organization of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium.

9) Platform cooperativism events are coming up in many cities including London, Brussels, Melbourne, and Berlin.

What are your priorities?

Stories on platform.coop

• Some People Are So Poor, All They Have is Money
  By Ela Kagel and Thomas Doennebrink
• Commune ? ? ? : a Taxi Co-op Owned by Passengers and Drivers. A Proposal from Berlin.
  By Arthur Röing Baer
• Reflections on Platform Cooperativism
  By Jonas Algers
• Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” Link Mega-List
• How to Connect the Platform Ecosystem? A Report from Mexico City.
  By Sebastian Romero
• Own the Next Generation of Streaming Music
  By Peter Harris
• The User Experience in Platform Cooperativism
  By Enric Senabre and Ricard Espelt
• Twitter kaufen, Demokratie erweitern (in Deutsch)
  By Ute Scheub und Thomas Dönnebrink
• Sci-Fi Imagines the Cooperative Platform Economy as a Victor
  By Trebor Scholz
• In Brussels, Online Food Couriers Launch Their Own Platform Co-op
  By Matthieu Lietaert
• How to Set Up a Platform Co-op for Refugees in Europe
  By RefugeesWork

Lead Image: Christopher Chavez

The post This year you’ll seize the means of production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Civic Hall’s Micah L. Sifry interviews Trebor Scholz on the upcoming Platform Cooperativism conference and looks back at the development of the Platform Coop movement over the last two years. Originally published at CivicHall.org.

MS: Two years ago, the term “platform cooperativism” had yet to be invented (if my search of Google is accurate). Your piece in Medium really set off a wave of interest that is still growing. Before you fill us in on recent developments, can you shed some light on what led you to write that piece?

TS: Thank you so much, Micah, for this invitation to talk with you. Two years ago, I proposed to bring the cooperative business model to bear on the digital economy because the Web had hit rock bottom. And the situation today isn’t any better, frankly: data tracking is pervasive, siren servers hold our data in perpetuity, privacy has become a privilege of the rich, and the online platforms that we depend on most, are owned by a number of people so small that you could fit them into a Google bus.

One thing is clear: today’s network of networks has hardly any resemblance of what the creators of the Internet or Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when designing the Internet and consequently the World Wide Web. It is no longer the “vendor neutral and altruistic contribution to society,” that Berners-Lee had imagined. So, when I look at today’s centralized Internet, this isn’t only about cloud computing and surveillance.

This is also fostered the rise of a climate change of digital work. Let me explain. Over the past 40 years, there has been a steady shift away from direct employment so that today, more than one third of the American workforce no longer has predictable paychecks, employer-provided social benefits, insurance, or representation. Most rights that came with employment have stalled or have been lost. For younger generations, this seems much less traumatic because they have never enjoyed the benefits that large, stodgy, and hierarchical institutions bestowed on their parents.

In the face of the daily barrage of the media, it is easy to forget that the “sharing economy” only generates a minute part of the GDP. However, its influence has been pervasive. The labor templates that were developed by companies like Uber are now the blueprints for all kinds of sectors of the economy. Now you can even “uberize” an ice cream parlor or fire thousands of your employees to then hire them back as freelancers. The journalist Steven Hill office gave the compelling example of the pharmaceutical company Merck, which did just like that.

All of this is relevant as a response to your question because many of these debates had a home at The New School where I convened the digital labor conferences since 2009. These conferences turned The New School into a hotspot for digital labor studies and were important in formulating a cogent critique. But they didn’t stop there. They were very invested in developing imaginaries, to insist that there are many different possible futures of work. It is in this sense that the digital labor conferences were a seed out of which platform cooperativism emerged.

It was really hard for me to get my head around the fact that federal policymakers wouldn’t intervene when it became public knowledge that novice workers on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (and other similar platforms) are making between two and three dollars an hour. I followed some of these developments with disbelief. Once I talked with a former member of the National Labor Relations Board and this person responded with controlled anger and incredulity saying “how can that be, that would be completely illegal.” Precisely. But then you immediately enter the underbrush of legislation where only employees are protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act while independent contractors are not considered. Should these workers be employees? This entire knotty discussion remains unresolved.

In the case of Amazon.com, attempts by workers to sway Jeff Bezos to create more fair working conditions fell on deaf ears. I distinctly remember Kristie Milland, who had been an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker since its inception, the moment as part of the closing session at one of these digital labor conferences when “Why don’t we just build our own platform?”

But of course that was not the only trigger for my piece; these ideas did not emerge in a vacuum. Also in 2014, in San Francisco, Janelle Orsi, the executive director and cofounder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, had called on technology companies in the sharing economy to share ownership and profits with their users. While worker ownership is an old American tradition– just remember the recent move by Chobani, the yogurt producer, to hand over part of the company to its workers— it has been virtually unheard of in Silicon Valley.

Also in 2014, in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), the activist and researcher Mayo Fuster Morell, convened an event calling for dialogue between the cooperative tradition and the pro-commons movement.

These were some of the pieces that all fell into place when I wrote “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy.” My proposal was to rip out the algorithmic heart of the Uber model to then embed cooperative values in the code and then run the platform as a democratically governed co-op.

Therapists and life coaches tell people that they slowly have to learn to say no. But platform cooperativism was about embracing an alternative.

Importantly, this theory was just a few inches behind the practice. By then, platform co-ops like Fairmondo had already existed for two or three years. I had come across this cooperatively operated and owned online marketplace at a festival in Berlin in 2013 where a group of students walked around with handmade-signs calling for a fair online marketplace. Later, I came across even older platform co-ops including Cotabo, which is a network of taxi cooperatives that now unites some 5000 cabbies all over Italy. With their app, TaxiClick, clients can order a car knowing not only that the price is right but also that the drivers are treated fairly. In Queens, New York, an app connects a childcare cooperative with clients through the Coopify app and platforms like Loconomics are offering online labor brokerages.

Despite the attention that the piece had received, it was important to develop this more substantively. I remember one French theorist telling me that the proposal was fantastic but to be taken seriously in France, it had to be much longer. It was not in order to please the French but I did write a much longer piece that was subsequently published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in NYC and Berlin, the Catalan research network Dimmons, and Legacoop in Italy. More translations will follow by a publisher in France, the C–Center at Chinese University in Hong Kong, China, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil.

All of that work is also anchored in my book Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. (Polity, 2016), and in the collection Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (OR, 2016) that I co-edited with the reporter, University of Colorado scholar-in-residence, and activist Nathan Schneider.

Also in 2015, Nathan and I had organized the platform cooperativism conference which became very consequential. Its large scale, really helped to popularize the idea.

At that time, Nathan had already reported prodigiously on cooperatives. He had also written an article “Owning is the New Sharing” in which he proposed the conversion of large corporate platforms like Uber into co-ops. And ever since, Nathan has written numerous articles about the cooperative platform economy, most recently suggesting that we should all band together to buy Twitter and turn it into a platform co-op.

At this point I really must also acknowledge the support from Civic Hall, and from you personally, Micah. After you read “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy”, you convened an event at Civic Hall where various labor advocates, artists, and union leaders were asked to respond to my piece. This led to many collaborations.

MS: The first conference on Platform Cooperativism at The New School last year was attended by more than a thousand people. Did you expect such a big turnout? Why do you think you struck a nerve?

TS: You’re right, it was really astounding – what was supposed to be yet another academic event attracted over 1000 people to attend. The resonance of the event didn’t end when we locked the last room the night of November 12, 2015. In fact, many doors opened after that. There were events about platform cooperativism in cities like London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Valencia, Brussels, Vancouver, Oakland, and Berlin, to name just a few. The platform co-op community in Berlin, led by Thomas Doennebrink, now counts some 120 members. Also notable are the Coop DiscoTech events initiated by MIT’s Sasha Costanza-Chock and the fervent coverage of all of these developments by Shareable, FastCo.Exist, and The Nation. Neal Gorenflo’s article “How Platform Co-ops Can Beat the Deathstar” was also an important contribution.

Of course I can never be sure why something strikes a nerve but I have eight hypotheses:

1)  I think people were just really thirsty for a coordinated effort that pushes back against the extractive sharing economy. Remember, that this was the year when the critique of the sharing economy had finally become more visible. After all these years, for example, the Washington Post finally caught on to the critique of data labor that I and others had mounted since 2008.

2015 was also the year when the critique of the so-called sharing economy became more vocal. After the initial rush of excitement riding along the waves of the language of autonomy, choice, and flexibility, co-opting the values of the pro–commons movement and the social capital of cooperatives for market-oriented goals, came the more sober realization of what we had gotten ourselves into – in terms of labor conditions, privacy, top-down algorithmic command, and, what Frank Pasquale called the “nullification of the law.” The fact that this critical angle was suddenly more acceptable, was one reason for the popularity of the event.

2) In addition, especially younger people, who were trying to enter the job market realized that there simply wasn’t a good place for them in capitalism anymore. The mantra that education will avoid immiseration is not always true. Just consider that 40% of Uber drivers have a college degree and that Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are more likely to be college-educated than the average American worker.

3) Part of it was also simple fascination with technology. But as soon as I iterate these words, I have to immediately say that platform cooperativism is not about some kind of misguided techno solutionism. But I do suggest that it is meaningful to embrace these technologies, of course reverse-engineer them for cooperativism, to then use them and update the cooperative and the union movement. Collaborate with Floss developers and build a big tent to bring all of these different groups together.

The big part about the excitement about technology is directed towards blockchain. Blockchain technology is the underlying protocol for Bitcoin. Many people think that it will make the ocean boil. And perhaps they are right, from an ecological sustainability perspective the oceans may indeed warm up, considering the devastating amounts of electricity that this technology is currently consuming. But perhaps this problem can be solved. And on the other hand, there are genuine opportunities linked to this public ledger. This reaches from applications in record-keeping, banking, and land registries, to so-called Distributed Autonomous Organizations. There’s also the idea that this protocol could connect consumers directly with freelancers without any intermediary.  An example of this is peer-to-peer business model  is Arcade City, a ride sharing service.

There’s much excitement about the prospect that one no longer has to trust human beings while algorithms seem undoubtedly dependable. I can’t help but notice the parallel to the way Amazon Mechanical Turk interprets its own platform as being exempted from any kind of responsibility related to what happens there in terms of wage theft, for example. They simply step back and say that they have nothing to do with those conflicts because they are only providing the platform.What if there is a protocol that takes out a certain amount of profit from daily transactions but is otherwise detached from agency, disconnected from an organization that could be regulated or questioned? It scares me. While I would not want to see the blockchain rain on all sectors of life, I do see genuine promise when it comes to using this technology, for instance, to bring about democratic governance in distributed organizations.

4) It’s quite clear that we are living through a renaissance of cooperatives, farmers markets, cooperative 3-D maker spaces, co-working spaces, coops like SMart that act like unions, and also freelancer guilds such as Enspiral.

5) I think there’s also a certain fatigue when it comes to the language of innovation. Is it really all that innovative to build a technology that generates short-term wealth for a small group who will then take that money and fly off to Mars? Or, should we think about innovation in terms of the common good? It’s really not that complicated. Next time you come across a so-called “disruptive technology,” simply put it to the test. Ask how it contributes to the bottom line of the common people. If it doesn’t hold up, we shouldn’t call those technologies innovative.

6)Another factor was also that some of the alternatives that had presented themselves as the intellectual nerve center of the 21st-century had run out of steam a bit when participants realized that they can’t live off enthusiasm alone. While platform cooperativism is completely aligned with the commitment to the commons, there is also a necessity for some kind of enclosure, an enclosure that feeds solidarity, an enclosure that allows practitioners to make a living, especially outside of the context of the European welfare state. People appreciate the pragmatism of the platform co-op proposal and the fact that they don’t have to forget about their values at their day job. It’s an alternative that they realize in their lifetime. They could build the new society in the shell of the old, as the IWW would have it. It’s absolutely clear that platform co-ops are projects of transition to a better society. They are squarely situated within capitalism; they cannot be an answer to all its ills.

7) Post–Snowden, there’s much more awareness not only of the fact that we are the product when the service is “free,” but also that we are manipulated in the way we evolve. And there is the realization that the large number of people in cooperatives, for example, could bring about a different system when it comes to, for instance, data ownership. Projects like Midata.coop are a good example of that.

8) Earlier on I described how I see the belief in benevolent platform owners diminished. There are small or even medium-sized platforms that might use slightly better working conditions as a competitive advantage but on any significant scale, this is not the case. Workers are realizing that they have to take things into their own hands. And in some ways this is also true with regards to federal politics in the United States at least. If you look at the sharpening xenophobia, the post-Brexit insecurities, the Trump phenomenon, and the ensuing political polarization in this country, you can’t be surprised that there’s a turn away from federal politics. Many cooperativists I spoke with invest their energies in local politics and try to influence their municipalities. It is at this level that they are still committed to the political process. And this is also where platform cooperativism fits in because of its commitment to local communities. This turn of people to their municipalities also echoes the ideas of Murray Bookchin.

These are some of the reasons why I think that the response to the platform cooperativism proposal has been so strong.

MS: This last year has been quite a whirlwind of talks for you. What would you say has been the biggest impact of platform cooperativism so far? I assume you’d probably say how it’s being embraced by cities in Spain, but perhaps you have other ideas?

TS: This past summer I spent five weeks explaining the cooperative platform economy at academic conferences, in the boardrooms of cooperatives, and in front of city councils. I also addressed the Innovation Committee of the Italian Parliament in Rome.

But in terms of lasting impact, the city of Barcelona decided to include platform cooperativism in policy directives on innovation and technology for the city. I’m also serving on their Advisory Board for Technological Sovereignty.

Second, the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, included platform cooperativism as one of his eight principles for his Digital Democracy Manifesto. While he is the leader of the opposition, I think that it is not unheard of that ideas from the opposition are absorbed into government policy on the British Islands. Corbyn suggested to finance platform cooperatives through the National Bank.

Just a few weeks ago I was speaking, alongside Nathan Schneider, at the International Summit of Cooperatives in Québec city, where we also addressed more traditional, large cooperatives.

MS: This fall, you are starting the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, which Civic Hall is a founding member of, along with the Center for Civic Media at MIT, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Solidarity Economy Network, and Fairmondo. What is the main purpose of the consortium?

TS: In the context of the second platform co-op event this November, “Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” we will launch this consortium.

It grows out of genuine needs. At our event last year at, a women walked up to me and asked what platform cooperativism can do for the dental industry. These days, we get emails from groups that want to start platform co-ops.

Just recently I got a message from a babysitting cooperative in Argentina that wanted to know what the next steps would be for them to set up a platform co-op. I also got questions from dog walkers in Los Angeles and a group of six men from India who are about to start a tech cooperative.

You can see that the consortium is a response to specific needs of this community.

1) There is genuine need for an open source labor platform for co-ops, for example. I first proposed that in 2014. This would allow co-ops like the ones that approached me to get started quickly. Currently, the barrier of entry is fairly high. We have to change that. And “off-the-shelf” solutions to that problem would be useful. This software could simply be a kernel of a software which could then be customized for local needs by the local developments.

2) There are also legal issues. They might come up in the context of the use of
blockchain technology or they simply emerge when people try to start a cooperative. The process is purposefully made quite difficult in many countries. In Germany, for example, all members of a cooperative have to physically be present in the office of the city administrator if you want to change the charter of the co-op. So, the consortium will give advice on how to overcome such hurdles.

3) Our consortium can help to connect the various actors in the ecosystem so that they can more fruitfully work together without replicating efforts.

4) They are is a vast need for advocacy for this kind of work and we can work with policymakers to prepare policy briefs and recommendations to support this ecosystem.

5) We have overcome what Jodi Dean called “commanded individualism” — the focus on individual careers, individual housing, and individual success in favor of cooperation. So this is something we can work on the personal level and I think this is where it all starts. Nobody’s life is just their life. But it’s definitely challenging because institutionally, there is little or no reward for lived solidarity or genuine cooperation.

6) And surely, also obvious from the list of active contributors, this consortium is about research. Without serious research into the history of cooperatives, unions, and the digital economy, this work cannot thrive. It is fairly clear, for example, that the home health care sector is good place to start a platform cooperative. At the same time, there are other areas which heavily rely on a global scale of operation and significant R&D budgets, and they might be less suitable for this model. The question is which sectors are working for this model and which are not.

7) And last but not least, there’s the obvious question of seeking funding to start platform cooperatives. The best way to do this, is to bring all the people that have discussions about different funding models together to coordinate and find ways of introducing inventive funding schemes that can in some way rival the traditional venture capital model.

MS: This year’s conference on Platform Cooperativism (which we are hosting the unconference section of)  is going to be different from last year. Why are you doing a smaller event?

TS: This year’s event, Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet, is indeed drastically smaller. I thought about that for a long time. One person told me recently, “hey, you could’ve had the next SXSW there,” sounding a bit disappointed. But then I was told that even SXSW organizers are rethinking the massive scale of their event.

Look, a spectacular show may be necessary if you want to make an idea more broadly accessible. In the past, I was often motivated to convene events to draw mainstream attention to completely underprivileged topics. Let’s say invisible digital workers, to give just one example.

And with our event in 2015, we succeeded to an extent in popularizing the idea of platform cooperativism. Large events – and I convened some that were larger than the one last year – are opportunities to map the landscape of practices in a given field. But such mapping effort is already under way. The prodigious Nathan Schneider has set up the Internet of Ownership, which is in fact a directory of the cooperative platform ecosystem. Anybody who wants to learn about the latest, emerging platform co-ops, can go there and find them meticulously archived.

But in this case, large events are not always what you need if you want to build for lasting impact. We are sending a signal. This isn’t a Broadway play that you attend with popcorn in hand. This is about you picking up your instruments, putting on your own production, promoting the cooperative platform economy and building it, together.

The post Trebor Scholz on the Rise of Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Platform cooperativism, as he puts it, is “a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance.” I talked to him about this young movement, its rise, and the steps ahead.

About half-a-year after the first platform co-op event in New York, what are the outcomes?

The New School event was not the first platform cooperativism event in New York City, but from the very beginning, I noticed an unusual degree of interest. Workers, unions, labor advocates, cooperatives, legal scholars, designers, and civic technologists were all over it — especially young people who could not see a clear perspective in the current system, were enthusiastic about a realistic but slightly different pathway to more control over their life opportunities; it’s a more holistic vision of their future that starts with the question: How do we want to live?

Facing the every day realities of digital feudalism — or, framed differently, a platform capitalism that is built on socialized risks and privatized profits — more and more people warm up to visions of a world where wages are de-linked from labor, a global commons that is sustained by a populace supported by universal basic Income. The resonance of Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future attests to the desire for this change. The peer-to-peer movement, with stellar examples of commons-peer production like FLOSS and Wikipedia, is making absolutely pivotal contributions to this end, but there are not enough workable proposals for a transition.

For the near future, this movement has not practically, directly addressed the need of the more than one-third of the contingent part of the American workforce to make a living. These are the independent contractors, day laborers, and freelancers. Between 2010 and 2013, more than 10 million people earned income through online platforms. Without state support, social benefits, or labor rights, they are left behind. And this is obviously not only a problem in the United States, but also in countries like Kenya and Nigeria where Airbnb and Uber are starting to take over the short-term rental and transportation markets despite the rich traditions of cooperativism in those countries.

Some sectors seem to be particularly suited for experiments with cooperatively owned online platforms. Home health care, for example, is an area where this model of social organization around technology could succeed on a larger scale. In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux offers a description of one such successful model in the Netherlands. All over Europe, and especially in Germany, cooperatively owned online platforms could help refugees sustain themselves. Importantly, these need to be designed with the help of refugees from day one. In Brussels, I met with refugees from Syria and Iraq, which showed me the clear promise of this idea.

There is a need for research into the needs of existing cooperatives. While the platform co-op proposal may be well-suited for a cooperatively owned bookstore, a stock photography site, or a cleaning cooperative, it may not work for other types of co-ops.

How did citizens take over the idea?

Events about platform cooperativism are currently taking place in many cities — from Berlin to Barcelona, Valencia, London, Oakland, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Melbourne, and Bologna. The City Council of Barcelona just agreed to support platform cooperatives as part of their innovation plan for local development. And in Berlin — convened by Ouishare connector Thomas Doennebrink and the founder of the creative resource center Supermarkt, Ela Kagel — a platform co-op group started to meet on a regular basis.

To keep the momentum going and to further build, grow, and sustain these initiatives, I am convening “Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” November 11-13, 2016 again at the New School in New York City. Shareable and Civic Hall are already confirmed as partners in this event.

What about those who cannot make it to New York City this Fall?

We will hopefully be able to live stream the event.

What are the next steps?

Considering the threats for cooperative practices posed by TTIP and the recently published guidelines of the European Commission on the “sharing economy,” one of the hopes for this event in November is to bring together policymakers from various “rebel cities” (thank you, David Harvey) like Berlin, Paris, or Barcelona to talk about and globally coordinate thoughtful regulatory responses to the “sharing economy” and to promote social innovation and experiments with digital cooperatives, in particular. The goal is to link platform co-ops to the pro-commons movement and the solidarity economy more broadly.

While Nathan Schneider and I conceived of the event last November as a coming out party of the cooperative, decentralized Internet, the gathering this Fall will focus more on rolling up our sleeves to make it happen. The questions on the table concern not only the ways in which platform cooperatives can contribute to the commons, but they are also about the legal aspects — of blockchain technology, for instance — design, funding, social organization, governance — of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations like Arcade City, for example — ecological sustainability, data transparency, a deep understanding of the social impact that is created beyond revenues measured in dollars and cents, and the role of unions, academia, credit unions, and municipalities. We should start incubators and accelerators to advance this work, especially with existing cooperatives that are best suited for this model of organization of labor. To host these initiatives, we should consider making creative and unconventional use of public libraries and museums.

Nathan Schneider created the Internet of Ownership, which is a very useful directory that will significantly help to follow and give visibility to emerging projects. Nathan has also advocated this model extensively.

In addition, we also need to more clearly articulate platform cooperativism as a cross-generational feminist critique of the future of work, as Mayo Fuster Morell rightfully suggested. A discussion about a cooperative future of work must also take social reproduction into account.

Are you planning to publish something about all this?

In 2014, I wrote “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy” and last Fall, I published a longer introductory piece, which has now been published in English, German, and Spanish. Italian, French, Chinese, and Portuguese translations will follow. Then, in the Fall, my book,  Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, will be available from Polity.

And together with Nathan Schneider, I edited a volume titled Ours to Hack and to Own, for which we asked dozens of designers, workers, and other participants in the event last Fall to answer the question of what they’d tell someone who wants to start a platform co-op. This, too, will be available in the Fall.

You talked last year about the setup of a foundation?

Not exactly; we are in the process of setting up a Platform Cooperativism Consortium that will help to connect the practitioners in this eco system with each other and with organizations that can support their effort to change minds and bring real value and a fairer Internet to real people.

For updated information in coming weeks stay tuned @platformcoop

Matthieu Lietaert is an investigative journalist, director of the film The Brussels Business about corporate lobbying in the EU, and author of the book Homo Cooperans 2.0 about the “coop-laborative economy.”

Cross-posted from Shareable

The post Bringing the Platform Co-op “Rebel Cities” Together: An Interview with Trebor Scholz appeared first on P2P Foundation.

High-tech tools of exploitation are being repurposed to build a fairer economy. The digital platforms that have become the connective tissue of our lives – the likes of Airbnb and Google – have proven to tend towards monopolies, monetisation of surveillance and disregard for labour standards.

But what stops us from using the Internet’s power for collective action to usurp them? Last week, an evening hosted by Outlandish outlined the prospects of platform co-operativism. Featuring Felix Weth, Sarah Gold, and Nathan Schneider, it covered ways of truly making the concept happen.

We chatted with Nathan and asked him about the prospects of platform co-operativism in a world of monopolistic brands built on centralised capital.

You write extensively about platform co-operativism in your work. How would you define it in a few words?

NS: The simplest explanation, I think, is a question: Can we bring co-operative ownership and governance to the online platforms that we increasingly live by? Are we ready to expect, demand, and practice real democracy on the Internet?

You have been influential in developing the term and concept of platform co-operatives. Why did you feel like it was the right moment to do this?

NS: My colleague Trebor Scholz first coined the term in December 2014. That same month, I published a report with Shareable about entrepreneurs around the world who were already trying to build platforms based on shared ownership and governance. There was already something in the air. By that point, many people who had been excited about the prospects of the so-called “sharing economy” were starting to realize that there wasn’t much actual sharing going on, and that in many cases workers were expected to work without the basic protections—stability, benefits, a living wage—that their predecessors had won through centuries of struggle. The striking Uber drivers; the protests against Google buses in San Francisco; the Snowden revelations—these are all signs, I think, that we need a new social contract for the online economy. And rather than just saying “no,” to the emerging platform society, we need something to say “yes” to.

Internet marketplaces often tend towards monopolies. Is the future of platform co-operatives in opening up new sectors for operation, or in displacing established players from existing sectors?

NS: I’m starting to think that we need a new generation of law and custom for dealing with these rising online monopolies. The old trust-busting logic doesn’t really make sense; Facebook and Google, for instance, are so useful to us because they’re so ubiquitous. Rather than breaking them up, or regulating them so intensely that they can’t innovate, perhaps the most responsible option is to create pathways toward more democratic ownership. Governments, and companies themselves, might help to finance fair buyouts that grant users the ownership stake they need to ensure, for instance, that their personal data is being used responsibly. In some cases, it may be possible for co-operative startups to displace incumbents. But where that is not possible, we should consider strategies for transition.

Companies like Uber and Airbnb are in the news a lot, often because of disputes. What do you think the near future is like for these the dominant platforms?

NS: I don’t like to make predictions; the past and present are hard enough to understand already. But it does appear that cities around the world are testing out different strategies for retaining some meaningful control over the impacts of these companies on their economies. I hope this can be an opportunity for innovation, not just reaction. And, I think that co-operative business models should be part of this innovation. Some communities are already experimenting with co-operative taxi networks as an alternative to Uber – including in Colorado, where I live – and local alternatives to Airbnb. One way or another, it would be very troubling to see global logistics handed over monopolies owned and controlled by unaccountable founders and investors. These alternatives are incredibly important.

Historically, co-operatives have done well in areas such as retail and capital-intensive small-scale business. What do you think are the promising sectors for a take-over by platform co-operatives?

NS: Compared to the industries of a generation or a century ago, online platforms need less startup capital. The trouble is, they’re often riskier. Sharing platforms that depend on connecting people, rather than operating factories or maintaining large workforces, seem like they could be well-suited to shared ownership among the people they connect. I’m particularly interested in identifying ways in which co-operative models can be more competitive than the investor-owned incumbents. Labour platforms like Uber and social platforms like Facebook, for instance, depend on maintaining centralized, one-size-fits-all tools, and they often rely on pretty creepy forms of surveillance for revenue.

Co-operatives might be able to find better revenue models through the trust their members have in them; regional co-ops could also work together by sharing open-source software—introducing global efficiencies while keeping profits local. Co-operatives have long specialized in meeting challenges that capital markets don’t serve, and I’m eager to see how this can transform the landscape of the Internet, rather than merely replacing the existing one.

In response to the concept of platform co-operatives, some say it will be impossible to develop platforms that are comparable to the current commercial ones, without having extensive profit-oriented investment. What do you think are the constraints specific to co-operatives organisations when building platforms?

NS: First, again, I think we should be aspiring to platforms that are better than the existing ones, not merely comparable replacements. To do this, we’ll need better forms of financing. Co-ops represent an opportunity for a “crowdfunding 2.0,” based not just on donations and advance sales, but on genuine shared ownership.

Historically, when co-ops have achieved some success in a region, they set up their own co-operative financial institutions with the know-how and business models to serve them. Already, a few promising experiments in platform co-op financing are underway.

What do you think the role of the state or local government should be in supporting platform co-operatives?

NS: Governments already make extractive business far easier than it should be, and they should recognize the need to make co-operative business at least as easy. It’s in their interest because co-ops, unlike investor-owned corporations, keep jobs and profits (and thus tax revenues) local. Firstly, officials can work with co-op developers to design laws that make the process of incorporating co-ops easy and flexible. Secondly, they can ensure that co-ops are part of their overall economic development strategy and have fair access to contracts for public infrastructure. Thirdly, they can create incentives, or even requirements, for platforms providing public services in their area to practice appropriately democratic ownership and governance.

We’ve already seen some encouraging interest from public officials who are looking for a better option than simply trying (and failing) to say “no” to Airbnb and Uber. Platform co-operativism is something to say “yes” to.

How would you describe recent changes in the public perception around the so-called “sharing economy”?

NS: Who even uses that term anymore? Silicon Valley seems to have moved on to calling the “sharing” platforms the “on-demand economy,” which more accurately describes their consumerist, service-oriented tendencies. I hope that, as more and more of the Internet practices shared ownership and governance, we can say “sharing economy” and actually mean it.

You are co-founder of Internet of Ownership, a project that aims to map the ecosystem of platform co-ops. How widespread would you say the phenomena is in the US? Are there any interesting examples that you would like to highlight?

NS: Already, many of the most promising examples are outside my country. Stocksy United, a stock-photo website owned by photographers, is based in Canada. Fairmondo, an online marketplace owned by its vendors, started in Germany and is now spreading to the UK. Great things are also happening in the US, especially thanks to the work of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland and the Tech Co-op Network.

I suspect that the US might lag behind a bit, since our tech scene is so awash in venture capital. And this wouldn’t be a bad thing; I hope that platform co-operativism can usher in a more truly global tech economy.

What differences are there between the US and Europe in the opportunities and challenges for platform co-operatives?

NS: Probably more of my thinking about the prospects of this model came from inspiration I found in Europe than what I’ve come across in the United States. In the U.S. there’s a wide gulf between entrepreneurs and activists for economic justice; they don’t speak the same language, and that makes for a rigid divide between the builders and the resisters. In Europe, I’ve found it much easier to meet people who have both a rigorous analysis of economic injustice and the know-how for creating practical alternatives. That’s a fearsome combination. And if we can work together across borders, I bet the American propensity for throwing out old rulebooks will come in handy as well.

Is the future of platform co-operatives in the post-industrial developed countries, or in building offerings in developing countries?

NS: Both, I hope. A big question for me is to figure out how to expand this work into hardware co-operativism, call-center co-operativism, and more. We need to account for how global our technology is already. Rather than disguising that globalism, as the dominant tech industry does so well, an imperative for platform co-operativism is to build solidarity. Co-operatives aren’t co-operatives unless they cooperate with each other.

Rewiring the Sharing Economy was a panel discussion from Outlandish, to whom we thank for their assistance in this article.

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Can the co-op movement take advantage of crisis, too? Often, it has. The Great Depression, for instance, was a time when the U.S. government actively pursued cooperative development, establishing rural electric companies and farmer co-ops, in order to provide services where the capital markets had failed. After Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, workers occupied their factories and kept them running (which Naomi Klein reported on before her landmark book on disaster capitalism). And we don’t have to wait for disasters of that scale; capital fails at all sorts of things all the time—especially Internet startups, of which about 90 percent fail. This, I think, presents an opportunity for platform cooperativism.

There are two basic strategies for cooperative development, which seem to me to be also the two basic strategies for platform cooperativism:

1. Startups: Companies that are born as cooperatives, with cooperative principles deep in their DNA, growing and evolving through democratic processes
2. Conversions: Companies that begin in non-cooperative forms, and that transition to cooperative ownership, governance, and culture by desire or necessity

We tend to put a lot of our attention on startups. Some conversions happen because the company’s owners think it’s a noble idea, and others because it fits well with the company’s business model. For platforms that have already had some success, conversion means that a broad stakeholder community doesn’t have to share the high risk of the startup stage; once the platform takes off a bit, it can switch to a more appropriate stakeholder structure. And this approach can be aided by keeping an eye out for crisis.

I’ve sometimes advocated that we should try cooperativizing the huge platforms like Facebook and Uber and Google, which have become public utilities and have no business being investor-owned. But doing so without simply confiscating a lot of capitalist property would be hugely expensive, possibly impossible. Much more plausible would be to attempt a conversion of a platform that capitalism has failed—that is rapidly losing value, or that hasn’t yet taken off. In some cases, co-op conversion might be precisely what a supposedly failing platform needs in order to solidify its user community, attract patient investment, and thrive.

In the past, declining tech companies—like Netscape-turned-Mozilla—have opted for an afterlife as foundation-directed, open-source projects; can we instead resurrect them as co-ops?

In order to do so, we need infrastructure—anti-private equity for platform cooperativism. Organizations like the National Center for Employee Ownership already specialize in converting existing businesses to more democratic ownership structures, and turning capitalist failures into democratic successes. This process involves financing, technical assistance, consulting, and culture. We need organizations with the special skills needed to do this work in tech, that have the tools to create successful turnarounds and the know-how to look for opportunity in the tech industry’s plentiful emergency rooms.

What’s already out there that we can draw from, and what needs to be created? Where do we begin?

Photo by darkday.

The post Disaster Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But there are other perspectives, too. A co-op lawyer in Colorado, for instance, has helped develop several online platform cooperatives, but he also considers a farmland co-op he works with a platform co-op as well?—?a platform made up of that incredibly offline substance of dirt.

I visited Enspiral expecting to find a group of people bound together by managing shared things?—?for instance, working space and money and businesses. And I saw some of that. It’s there. But what really struck me was the way in which Enspiral’s power lies less with the stuff it manages than the connections it enables. Members and Contributors spoke about their friendships, the mutual encouragement, and the way the community responds to requests for help. In this way, Enspiral seems to me, precisely, a platform?—?one that has evolved very well to meet the needs of an often alienated, isolated platform society.

And, in this, Enspiral hints to me how a platform can be much more than a thing. Especially when a platform is a cooperative, like Enspiral, it evolves according to the needs and imaginations of its members. It’s a living being. Some of it is on the internet—notably the bespoke tools it has set loose in the world like Loomio and CoBudget—but so much of it isn’t. I’m still sorting through the lessons of visiting Wellington, but maybe that’s a start: When we build platforms in which their members are truly in charge, they’re no longer just things. They come alive.

Since being in Wellington, I keep comparing what I saw of Enspiral with my experience with the Catalan Integral Cooperative, which I reported on for Vice. Both are organizations that pave the way toward a much more humane future of work (and life), and both serve as models that others should imitate. But there are also some revealing differences.

One is in regard to the nature of the economic commons. The CIC holds an annual budget of about half a million euros, and budgetary decisions for that are made through periodic general assembly meetings. These funds are used to furnish the common goods and services (housing, holistic health care, office space, accounting, software) for the network. The CIC also has its own crowdfunding platform and an interest-free investment bank, but the bulk of the resources go through this common fund.

Enspiral’s approach is different. The bulk of economic activity remains under the umbrella of individuals and affiliated businesses (“ventures”); for instance, whereas the CIC itself maintains an office building in downtown Barcelona, Enspiral’s main space in Wellington is actually owned by a particular venture, which in turn rents out space to other ventures and community members. Enspiral’s main economic commons is essentially a crowdfunding system, run through CoBudget. CoBudget isn’t designed for the kind of collective, consensus-based budgeting of the CIC; instead, users have their own individual allocations of funds, based on what they or their ventures contribute, which they in turn can allocate to projects they like. The relatively modest shared expenses, meanwhile, are agreed on through consensus-y decisions on Loomio, one-person-one-vote; so are a ton of other decisions that affect the culture and governance of the community. But on CoBudget, those who make higher economic contributions have more decision-making power.

The upshot: CIC emphasizes collective budgeting and infrastructure, whereas Enspiral fosters a more entrepreneurial approach focused on maintaining the agency of individuals and ventures. Both groups seek to empower both the individual and the community, but they have wound up with diverging emphases. Each approach has its benefits, but they’re quite distinct strategies of commoning.

Another difference is culture. One thing that is remarkable about the CIC is the way in which it bridges the rural-urban divide, as well as encompassing a mix of subcultures: punks, hippies, urbanites, spiritualists, etc. They don’t always like each other, but they still trade with each other using the shared mutual-credit system. Enspiral seems to have a somewhat narrower field, mainly composed of urban professionals. This fosters much tighter bonds among participants, and it has resulted in a really compelling, intimate shared culture, with far less infighting than I saw with the CIC. But when I heard Enspiralites geeking out about “process”—a thing I love to do as well—I kept thinking of my mentor George Lakey’s writings on cross-class organizing; Lakey argues that middle-class people are raised (in order to broker between the owning class and the working class) with a particular attention to systems and processes, but that this passion can get in the way of building genuine ties with communities that aren’t so inclined.

All this is to say: Not only are we seeing the rise of particular living beings among the platform cooperatives emerging among us, but we’re seeing distinct niches, and diverse outcomes, and a variety of choices along the way. There is no one right answer for what we do with our self-determination, thank goodness. Beautiful creatures like Enspiral and the CIC help us understand our choices better.

Also published, with discussion, at Enspiral Tales on Medium.

Photo by Nick Kenrick.

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