The current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “blockchain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting, file tracking, property title management, and the organization of worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger technologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”— until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridiculing handlebar moustaches and fixie bicycles.

So let me show my hand. I’m interested in the blockchain (or blockchain-based technologies) as one tool that, in a very pragmatic way, could assist with cooperative activities—helping us to share resources, to arbitrate, adjudicate, disambiguate, and make collective decisions. Some fledgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ridesharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of distributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures like water and energy. Many of these activities are difficult outside of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary. However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here.

ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult. This is why we have institutions, norms, laws, and markets. We might not like them, but these mechanisms allow us to cooperate with others even when we don’t know and trust them. They help us to make decisions and to divvy up tasks and to reach consensus. When we take these things away—when we break them down—it can be very difficult to cooperate. Indeed, this is one of the big problems with alternative forms of organization outside of the state and the market—those that are not structured by typical modes of governance such as rules, norms, or pricing. These kinds of structureless collaboration generally only work at very local kin-communal scales where everybody already knows and trusts everyone else. In Ireland, for example, there were several long-term bank strikes in the 1970s. The economy didn’t grind to a halt. Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their customers; the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were in a good position to make an assessment on their credit worthiness. Community trust replaced a trustless monetary system. This kind of local arrangement wouldn’t work in a larger or more atomized community. It probably wouldn’t work in today’s Ireland because community ties are weaker.

Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or, more specifically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically verified by an entire network of peers and by linking the production of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public repository. More recently this cryptographic database has also been used to manage laws, contracts, and property. While some of the more evolved applications involve verifying precious stones and supporting interbank loans, the proposal is that this database could also be used to support alternative worker platforms, allowing systems where people can organize, share, or sell their labor without the need of a central entity controlling activities and trimming a generous margin off the top.

The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative.

Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will.

The blockchain is what we call a “trustless” architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust, in other words—something that is quite different from fostering or building trust. As the founding Bitcoin document details, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. With a blockchain, it maybe doesn’t matter so much whether I believe in or trust my fellow peers just so long as I trust in the technical efficiency of the protocol. The claim being made is not that we can engineer greater levels of cooperation or trust in friends, institutions, or governments, but that we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption is naïve, it’s true, but it also betrays a worrying politics—or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. This is not just a problem with blockchain evangelism—it’s a core problem with the ideology of digital activism generally. The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

ASSUMPTION #2: THE TECHNICAL CAN INSTANTIATE NEW SOCIAL OR POLITICAL PROCESSES

Like a lot of peer-to-peer networks, blockchain applications conflate a technical architecture with a social or political mode of organization. We can see this kind of ideology at work when the CEO of Bitcoin Indonesia argues, “In its purest form, blockchain is democracy.” From this perspective, what makes Uber Uber and La’Zooz La’Zooz comes down to technical differences at the level of topology and protocol. If only we can design the right technical system, in other words, the right kind of society is not too far behind.

The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics.

There’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness pose any kind of threat to capitalism.

Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left—anarchism, mobility, and cooperation—even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups—applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.

While technical tools such as the blockchain might form part of a broader artillery for , we also need to have a little perspective. We need to find ways to embrace not only technical solutions, but also people who have experience in community organizing and methods that foster trust, negotiate hierarchies, and embrace difference. Because there is no magic app for platform cooperativism. And there never will be.

Rachel O’Dwyer | An essay originally anthologized in Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet | OR Books | August 2017| 6 minutes (1,600 words)

Originally published in Longreads.com

Photo by Ars Electronica

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Public trust in the investor-owned platform economy is collapsing. Business models based on selling workers and users to Wall Street are under growing scrutiny, and a small but growing number of cooperatively-owned platforms present a real, positive alternative. How might we seize this moment to show the promise of platform cooperativism?

We invite proposals for creative media interventions that communicate platform cooperativism. These might be 2 minute-long videos, comic books, memes, infographics, games, or more. They might seek to deepen the platform co-op community or draw new people into it.

To apply for funding, submit a proposal through this form by May 5. By May 15, two commissions will be selected for $1,000 in support each, of which they’ll receive $500 upon selection and $500 upon completion of the project as proposed (or amended with approval of the challenge coordinators), provided it is completed and deployed before July 1. Commissions, also, can expect support from the platform co-op community and its promotional resources.

This challenge is funded through royalties from the book Ours to Hack and to Own. It is jointly administered by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and the Internet of Ownership. The coordinators are Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.

artwork by James Seibold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can refuse.

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

To read the rest of the book, head on over to our store and buy the book. Like our work? Subscribe for future issues!

Photo by Ars Electronica

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

The first problem I encounter is pervasive in all the writing out there on the sharing/collaborative economy and p2p theory: the lack of a clear and operational definition of what a peer is and what a community is. The truth is that we may need a “taxonomy” of peers and communities, since we call peers and communities in a wide range of different realities.

How do we recognize someone as a peer? I can be tempted, as we do often colloquially,  to define my peer in terms of characteristics of the person (i.e. same hierarchical position, same knowledge, same skills, same values, etc.). But homogeneity is not what we find in peer relationships out there. Actually, we find more value in diversity. A peer is better understood not as someone that is like you, but as someone that you like. And if we think about organizations, as someone you would like to do things with.

This points out important consequences: a peer can only be defined as long as it has a peer; and what makes possible to call them peers is the existence of a certain kind of relationship. In this relationship, both feel comfortable with the idea of being peers, and this reciprocity can only be maintained as long as they both agree on which terms the idea of being peers is established. Therefore, the key aspect of the relationship is reciprocity in the agency of the parts.

The word agency comes from Latin agere that means “to do, to act in such way that has an effect”.  Amy and John will be peers as long as they can define together what constitute their “peerness”, and this is the primary agency that regulates the rest of agencies once they recognize each other as peers. What makes them peers is that they are able to define what kind of reciprocity makes them peers, and consequently, what effect it has in what they can or cannot do because of this relationship. All human groups exist because they accept a list of dos and don’ts. But groups of peers can co-create them. Since doing is what constitute the very essence of a peer-to-peer relationship, that relationship will be freely established in terms that both parts will be capable to do more or different things thanks to it. A p2p organization empowers both parts through reciprocity. This way, the eventual common characteristics of the peers that form a p2p organization are not the reason that made them peers, but the consequence of being peers. But “peer” and “community” are buzz-words nowadays. For instance, there are plenty of communities in which participants are called peers but they are not. People join them and accept the “peer” label just because they get some value from being there, and no cost for being called “peers”.

This leads us to the core of the problem. In order to give stability to relationships, people need trust; a reasonable confidence in what we can expect from others to behave.  We know from the sociological tradition that there are two kind of ties to build trust. The first kind are ties established through mechanisms of socialization and emotional engagement, while the second are ties established through the assumption that others will act according to rational and self-interest calculations. The first characterizes traditional communities, the second is the one that has shaped our modern societies. The first shapes communities that are protecting and comforting but also stiffly and rigid; the second shapes communities that are liberating and innovative but also alienating. Communities and societies present, at the end, a combination of the two types of ties, but our current economic system is based mainly in the second type, and they are dramatically corroding the first type. Some authors hypothesize that the tension between the two is provoking the emergence of collaboration. Others, just the simple collapse of our current societies, and we should not take collaboration for granted unless we work on it.

Peerness’ reciprocity is the obvious way to prevent relationships from being stiffing or alienating. This way, you may find egalitarian intentional communities with thick ties (which members share a roof and livelihood) or the community of torrent users with thin ties (which members hardly know each other), that they do not feel trapped or alienated by their communities.

So, then, what is a community? Traditionally, community is understood as a group of people that share something in common, but also, as the very conditions for sharing that in common in the first place. If peers share an agreement of what they want to do together, (and at the end, members of communities come and go!), then we better understand community as the set of institutions that builds the confidence/trust for doing things together.

We are ready to see a taxonomy of paradigmatic communities in the economic world:

Taxonomy of Communities

We see four kind of different communities for which we do not have a name, but their paradigmatic examples are clear: a family business, a corporation, a kibbutz, and a consumers’ cooperative. They are “not peers with thick ties”, “not peers with thin ties”, “peers with thick ties”, and “peers with thin ties”. You may think, “and what about my peer colleagues in my department”? Well, you tell me. How are your relationships? Like members of a family? Like members of a corporation? Like members of a kibbutz? Or like members of a consumer coop?

Until now, each kind of community faced different limitations. For the sake of simplicity (I will refine this in my next post), let’s say that those communities based on “thick ties” had a limit of scale, being the Dunbar number their limit to growth without loosing their thick ties. Although they have the strong commitment of its members, they never had the critical mass to face big investments for major operations in order to compete with bigger organizations. On the other hand, communities based on “thin ties” have flourished and gained an outstanding influence, at the cost of the alienation of its members. Despite all their efforts for developing strong cultures (sic) and aligned missions and visions, and so on, Gallup found that “71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive”.

Traditional Limits

But technological development has changed and is still dramatically changing the economy through:

– A reduction of the optimal scales of production

– A reduction of transaction costs

What it is interesting is that the reduction of the optimal scales of production and transaction costs are affecting the four kind of communities very differently. The traditional “commitment-scale” trade off is vanishing, and this is the true cornerstone of what we call the collaborative economy:

New opportunities

So yes, we can look back to the book’s insights and agree with:

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins, being the wineskins the new business models for rent-seeking.

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users, so they can capture all the value.

But then others deserve to be analyzed further:

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

Well, yes and no. They disguise as much as they can thin ties’ trust with the appearance of thick ties’ trust. But they deliver a trust environment; otherwise they would not exist.

And others become problematic, because they clearly do not apply to all Coop-Platforms…

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

 …because they depend on the particular architecture of each coop-platform:

 6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

And at the end, most of the Coop- Platforms discussed in the book are not designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. This way, value will still be captured in a centralized way despite:

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

For instance, it is true that Coop-Platforms as Fairmondo, (which by the way, is a company that I LOVE), have set mechanisms for returning value to society, which leaves its community out of the equation:

The usual justification is that some Coop-Platforms articulate community and society through special boards, because:

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

And… we really must stop here. What is the role of the community in an multi-stakeholder interdependence scheme? I am afraid we cannot discuss multi-stakeholder interdependence if we do not look first at the “governance” of each kind of community that we described before. Otherwise, how could we rightly understand interdependence with other stakeholders?

This will be the object of discussion of my next post.

Photo by antonychammond

The post On Platform Coops: what the heck is a peer? And a community? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Words are the tools of my trade as a writer, so I like to have a handle on what they mean. We rely on them so much. They connect us to each other; they remind us what we’re capable of. And I hope that the Internet can help us make our definitions of democracy more ambitious, rather than redefining it out of existence.

In late 2014 I was reporting a story about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, a website where users can find entirely online piecework – jobs that might take between seconds and hours, like transcribing a receipt, providing feedback on an ad, or taking a sociological survey. I went to Trebor Scholz’s Digital Labor conference in New York, which included real-life Mechanical Turkers. One was a wife whose husband lost his job, for instance; another was a former cable technician. I heard them describing what working on the platform is like. Employers can review them, but they can’t review employers. Their work can be rejected with no remuneration or recourse. There are no constraints to prevent below-minimum-wage pay. One of them complained in the media and her account was frozen.

Over the course of those days, a kind of question kept coming up among the Turkers, a thought experiment. They wondered aloud: What if we owned the platform? How would we set the rules?

They’d sit with that for a minute or two, batting ideas back and forth about how to make the platform better for themselves – and for Amazon. Reasonable ideas. Clever ones. But then the ideas would fade back into reality again: back to the complaints.

Since then the agonies over the dictionary-altering Internet have only intensified. People have blockaded Google Buses to protest wealth inequality in San Francisco, and Uber drivers have gone on strike around the world. Increasingly this online economy is becoming the economy – the way more and more of us find jobs, relationships, and a roof over our heads. Internet companies aspire to network and monetize everything from our cars to our refrigerators; the companies call this the “Internet of things.” But the Turkers’ questions have kept coming back to me.

Were they on to something? What if the platforms and networks really were ours? What if we had an Internet of ownership?

Real sharing, real democracy

Another word that the Internet has gotten to is sharing. Sharing used to mean something we do with the people we know and trust. In the so-called sharing economy, it means more convenient transactions that take place on distant servers somewhere. Convenience is great, but all along there has been a real sharing economy at work, the cooperative economy.

One can trace the modern cooperative movement to the Rochdale Principles of 1844, in England, though it had precursors among ancient tribes, monasteries, and guilds around the world. The rudiments of this stuff could be basic common sense: shared ownership and governance 16 among people who depend on an enterprise, shared profits, and coordination among enterprises rather than competition.

We might not know it, but co-ops are all around us. In Colorado, where I live, 70 percent of the state’s territory gets its power from cooperative electric companies that date to the 1930s and earlier, owned and governed by the people they serve. The credit union where I’m a member is one of the top mortgage lenders in the region. Up in the mountains west of me, some years back, a group of neighbours started their own co-op Internet service provider. There’s also Land O’Lakes, Organic Valley, and REI.

Co-ops come in all shapes and sizes. They fail less than other businesses, and they often pay better wages (except to top executives). Democracy, it turns out, works – though it can be less lucrative for those just trying to get rich. People in charge are harder to swindle.

I lived in a co-op house once; it followed a certain dirty, organic, folk-music-every-night stereotype. The same couldn’t be said, though, for what I saw at Kenya’s business school for managers of cooperatives. There, co-ops hold about half the GDP, and those students looked like business students anywhere – except that, along with all the marketing and case studies, they were also learning how to run a company where the people who work for you are your bosses. In the area around Barcelona, among the thousands of members of the Catalan Integral Cooperative, I got a glimpse of what twenty-first-century cooperatives might look like. Rather than securing old-fashioned jobs, these independent workers help each other become less dependent on salaries, and more able to rely on the housing, food, childcare, and computer code they hold in common. They trade with their own digital currency. In cases like this, the traditional lines between workers, producers, consumers, and depositors may become harder to draw.

Part of the cooperative legacy has played out in tech culture already. The Internet relies on free, open-source tools built through feats of peer-to-peer self-governance, like Wikipedia and Linux. Visit many tech offices, from a startup’s garage to the Googleplex, and there are self-organizing teams creating projects from the bottom up. Yet somehow this democracy doesn’t seem to make it to the boardroom; things are still pretty twentieth-century corporate in there, with whoever happens to own the most shares calling the shots. There’s a firewall. We can practice democracy everywhere, it seems, except where it really matters.

There are some pretty sci-fi questions before us these days: Will apps and robots replace our jobs? Will any aspect of our digital lives escape the notice of surveillance? Can there be a digital utopia without the dystopias of sweatshops and blood minerals? In each case the cooperative tradition poses necessary questions, which in the onrush of change we may neglect to ask: Who owns the tools we live by, and how are they governed?

Platform Commons

Cooperative enterprises of the past and present have relied on two kinds of strategies to gain a foothold in economies and cultures premised on competition. One is the competitive advantage to be found in cooperation – the ability to succeed where conventional markets fail, for instance, and the power latent in solidarity. The second is when the rules of the system are changed to support more cooperative practices – especially through governments that see the value of cooperative enterprise enough to encourage and fund it. For platform cooperativism to flourish, I suspect we need both of these.

We can begin by identifying the competitive advantages of cooperation. Cooperative practices, for instance, are poised to thicken the notoriously loose ties that online connectedness normally offers. And as big tech companies continue having difficulty treating workers and users as – well, people – co-ops can offer positive, ethical alternatives that workers and users can turn to. Hybrid models – combining aspects of a conventional company with aspects of cooperative ownership and governance – seem promising in the short term. Yet the rules of the system remain very much tilted against cooperativism.

This needs to change. Governments should recognize that cooperative platforms will mean more wealth staying in their communities and serving their constituents. Rather than trying (and failing) to say “no” to the likes of Uber, platform co-ops are something public institutions can say “yes” to. We need laws that make it easier to form and finance co-ops, as well as public investment in business development – stuff that extractive businesses get all the time.

This also means thinking differently about the incumbents. The Facebooks, Googles, and Ubers aren’t just regular companies anymore. Their business models are based on how dependent so many of us are on them; their ubiquity, in turn, is what makes them useful. They’re becoming public utilities. The less we have a choice about whether to use them, the more we need democracy to step in. What if a new generation of antitrust laws, instead of breaking up the emerging online utilities, created a pathway to more democratic ownership?

Rather than donating Facebook shares to his own LLC, Mark Zuckerberg could put them into a trust owned and controlled by Facebook users themselves. Then they, too, could have a seat in the boardroom when decisions are made about what to do with all that valuable personal data they pour into the platform – and they’d have a stake in ensuring the platform succeeds. How would you vote?

These aren’t just questions about what kind of Internet we want, or even what kind of world we want; they’re about how we see ourselves. Do we trust ourselves enough to expect democracy from the institutions on which we rely? Are we bold enough to imagine, as the Mechanical Turkers were, what the Internet would look like if we were in charge?

Thirty years ago, when the Internet wasn’t much more than a lab experiment, the social critic Theodore Roszak saw a lot of this coming. “Making the democratic most of the Information Age,” he wrote in The Cult of Information, “is a matter not only of technology but also of the social organization of that technology.”

We forget that. New gizmos come and go so quickly that we hardly notice when the meanings of our words change, and when what we 19 expect of ourselves changes with them. Ordinary people have already made the Internet their own with their hacks, their memes, their protests, and their dreams. The cost of forfeiting control over these things is too high, and too mysterious. We need to expect better, to demand more. It’s time that we own and govern what is ours already.

This is an extract from Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer internet, edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider and published by OR Books

Originally published on opendemocracy.net

The post We need our platforms to be real democracies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ok; this was the short answer to the question I posed in the tittle. But if you want to know a little more about the book content, keep reading. I am going to share with you some key ideas developed in the book. All the companion quotes are from the book, so you have a glimpse of what you will find.

However, I have some objections and for me some things are missing. In my next post I will engage critically with the book. In the meantime, you may want to read a critical perspective that Las Indias Electrónicas just posted about the Coop Platform movement.

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins

• “It’s the same old industrialism, being practiced with powerful new digital tools” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace. Neither of these business models is very new” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “The decisive question is not who owns any kind of means of production but who owns the dominant means of production. These used to be the factory, the machinery. They are now becoming the big algorithms, the constantly adjusted and ever-developing virtual machinery.” (Christoph Spehr)

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users

• “The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “Capitalist platforms based on the sale of audience commodity and capturing marketplace rents demand a sacrifice of privacy and autonomy” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

• “turns out that we act differently when we rate people to when we rate products […] The distorted rating distributions serve the interests of the platform owners, making the platform appear to be a higher-trust environment than it really is […] (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis)

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

• First, disruption. Things are very much up in the air. Uber is growing dominant in personal-transportation services in the United States, but Uber could still be the Friendster, or at most the LinkedIn, of the on-demand economy if the cooperative movement moves fast into a broad range of services. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Second, we are in the cultural moment of cooperation. Wikipedia, free and open-source software (FOSS), citizen journalism, and other forms of commons-based peer production have made normal people encounter cooperation and its products as a matter of everyday practice. The decades-long insistence of expert economics that we should think of ourselves as self-interested rational actors acting with guile is bumping up against a daily reality that refutes it (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Third, commons-based peer production has provided a template and experience with the possibility of large-scale enterprises managing and governing themselves through online cooperative platforms. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Finally, networks have destabilized the model of the firm. Transaction costs associated with both market exchanges and social sharing have declined; interactions once preserved for firms that combined capital with contractual commitments for labor, materials, and distribution can now be done in a more distributed form (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Platform co-ops can benefit from the bursting of the content bubble (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• App store opportunities are drying up (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible).

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

• “The dominant players continue to brand themselves as a community, while users experience the systems more like customers. There is an opportunity for platform co-op designers to revive the project of establishing genuine community” (Cameron Tonkinwise—Convenient Solidarity: Designing for Platform Cooperativism)
• “In many ways, the platform co-op model is well suited to counteract some of the ownership and sustainability problems intrinsic to venture-backed enterprises that we encountered firsthand. But near-future tech platforms will be built upon rapidly evolving infrastructures and will require sudden adaptations to new capabilities” (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• Platform cooperatives—as a directed affront to the platform of monopolies characterizing digital industrialism—offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “open cooperatives internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of immaterial and material commons; and are socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally” (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops)

6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

• The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics. (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls)

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

• Going back to an early Internet architecture of cooperative, decentralized servers, as projects like Diaspora, GNU Social, and others are attempting to do, will not work. This is precisely the sort of architecture that antidisintermediation was designed to defeat. Decentralized systems need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. Central to the counterantidisintermediationist design is the end-to-end principle; platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platforms users (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

• Platforms are us: Platforms aren’t just software applications and the companies that administer them. What gives a platform value, in most cases, is the community of users that employ the platform, along with the networks, data, and ideas they create (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)
• As part of our project, we are developing our own conceptual framework that identifies six dimensions to assess and measure value: 1. Community building 2. Social use-value of the resource created 3. Reputation 4. Achievement of the stated mission 5. Monetary value 6. Ecological value and derivative processes (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

• This kind of shift in focus means leaving behind some of the cherished emphasis that the last cooperative wave put on autonomy and independence; instead, cooperative developers have been enthusiastically exploring ways to partner with city governments, labor unions, forward-thinking philanthropy, and impact investors to create mechanisms to finance and support the work of building a more democratic economy. Cooperative purity can easily become an obstacle to achieving meaningful scale and inclusive impact. For instance, insisting that members self-finance their own enterprise risks creating a closed circle of relative economic privilege rather than a movement to truly democratize capital. Similarly, insisting on autonomy from government intervention and support means that the policies behind traditional economic development will continue to grind away, subsidizing corporations and leaving cooperatives to fend for themselves (John Duda—Beyond Luxury Cooperativism).

10. Well designed Coop Platforms can provide dignified and sustainable livelihoods for those who work on them

• Based on this research, we’ve begun to identify some principles or rules that should guide designers in order to achieve more positive outcomes for workers: 1. Earnings maximization, 2. Stability and predictability, 3. Transparency, 4. Portability of products and reputations, 5. Upskilling, 6. Social connectedness, 7. Bias elimination, 8. Feedback mechanisms (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms)
• Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and protection into our other organizing work (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)

11. Governments cannot remain spectators of the tremendous effects of centralized platforms

• “Cities and governments have not yet fully grasped that power lies, today, at the level of data” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• “The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• Many of the business models of the “sharing economy” are based on the strategic nullification of the law. Companies knowingly violate city regulations and labor laws. This allows them to undermine the competition and then point to a large customer base to demand legislative changes that benefit their dubious modus operandi. (Trebor Scholz—How Platform Cooperativism Can Unleash the Network)

12. Civil Society and Governments have to co-create an eco-system for Coop Plataforms to flourish

• “The big companies that rule the Internet aren’t coming to dominate just because of a good idea and a charismatic founder; they grow out of supportive ecosystems, including investors, lawyers, sympathetic governments, and tech schools. Perhaps most important is their culture—the festivals, the meetups, the memes, the manifestos—that share norms for what kinds of practices are expected and celebrated. To change these norms, we need to cultivate an ecosystem for platform cooperativism” (Editors -Showcase 2: Ecosystem)
• The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits. ( Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)

13. Some administrations are beginning to realize the potential of cooperative platforms, or at least allowing new opportunities for them to emerge.

• A very interesting example of a city that is putting forward alternative policies and forward-looking regulations is Barcelona. (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• The Securities and Exchange Commission has enacted new rules on crowdfunding, through the JOBS Act, that are opening up the ways that everyday people can invest in the companies that best align with their values. These new rules allow non-accredited investors to invest, and they also allow for investments to occur without the intervention of brokers. It has become easier, in this way, for us to be responsive to the people we hope to serve and partner with (Karen Gregory—Can Code Schools Go Cooperative?)

14 . Coop Platforms need initially both a core limited multi-skilled team and a wide community to succeed.

• I have found that innovation occurs most readily in small teams with shared goals but different skill sets. Big groups, on the other hand, are good for education and organizing work, and for refining existing platforms. But to innovate, I like to work in core teams of three to six people, as this allows for deep relationships, shared memory, and relatively fast decision making, since each person can speak for ten to twenty minutes per hour in meetings (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).
• If you can’t raise $300,000 a year for a core team of five, don’t build a demo site that barely works or buggy software that won’t last—organize great events and build community! (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).

15. In Coop Platforms terms, ownership is what matters.

• With less than 10 percent of Americans currently owning their own businesses and workplaces, today’s “new, new organizing” begins to address the skewed imbalances between capital and labor and the power this distortion produces and exercises (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Starting in the spring of 2014, 1worker1vote.org set out to demonstrate that widespread workplace equity and democratic participation can return America to its original system of individual and local community ownership (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Very few campaigns lead to what Hochschild calls “deep acting”—our genuine emotions at work. Most campaigns fall back on “surface acting,” the kind of behavior associated with fake smiles. These campaigns strain volunteers, scare supporters, and fail at their goals. And if a project does get funded, any future collective action depends on whoever owns and controls the value created. Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

16. Coop Platforms can offer a wide range of ownership/membership alternatives

• These DCOs are connected intellectually to a variety of related decentralized ownership models. They range from the FairShare Model of Karl Sjogren, which proposes a structure of different classes of ownership shares for different contributors—for founders, people with a continuous working role, for users, and for investors—to the Swarm approach to “crypto-equity” crowdfunding developed by Joel Dietz. If the rules for equitable value distribution are well defined, generally accepted, and become “normal” in the same way that employment for salary at a shareholder corporation was in the twentieth century, perhaps the providers can then focus more of their efforts on creating value (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership).

17. Coop Platforms will be developed more quickly if depart from what already exists, and traditional cooperativism and unionism experiment with it.

• It’s important for folks in the platform-cooperative community to understand that there are existing worker-led organizations that are set up to deal with multi-employer, disaggregated work situations—and that we can build from their model, rather than starting from scratch. (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)
• What both of these paths signify is the potential for value when organized labor and worker cooperatives team up in the “gig economy.” (Christoph Spehr—SpongeBob, Why Don’t You Work Harder?)
• Here is an often-overlooked challenge: try to join and add to existing cooperative platforms, rather than building your own from scratch.(Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…)
• As a movement, cooperativism will only succeed by moving fast and decisively, learning from the near past, and sharing our experiments and knowledge quickly and repeatedly in a network of cooperatives. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)

18. Platform Coops must put “humanizing” emotions into equation (and crowfunding efforts are examples of this).

• Elizabeth Hoffman’s 2016 study of worker co-ops found that embracing emotion ultimately benefits democratic participation. As individuals get comfortable expressing themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners—their workplace and co-workers feel like “home” and “family.” Such transformative, humanizing experiences contrast with how we relate to one another through marketing. These are also how investment grows into stewardship. (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).
• Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations. For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-raisers—regular activities in which guests can co-create with the gifts they bring, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again. Marketing strategies extract generosity by developing an audience, message, and call-to-action, leveraging one-way relationships. A barn-raiser is an organizing strategy for a cooperative alternative that involves people, invitation, and engagement (think p-i-e): 1) Connect with people. Audiences are passive, but people put emotion at the core of cooperation. Learn who might join the effort, and what they’re trying to get done. 2) Make an invitation. Messages are static, but invitations cultivate voluntary and open membership. Define what you want to celebrate, together—in person or online. 3) Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but engagement supports democratic ownership and control. Seek participation more than financial contributions (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

19. Traditional Coops may be in a privileged position for building Coop Platforms, but they have to understand the power of commons first.

• In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be dominated by large corporations

20. The best Platform Coops could be envisioned as infrastructures for Open Value Networks built over “natural abundance”

• “In a natural extension of such capacities, open value networks, or OVNs, are attempts to enable bounded networks of participants to carry out crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of knowledge, and co-budgeting among their identifiable participants. OVNs such as Enspiral and Sensorica have been described as an “operating system for a new kind of organization” and a “pilot project for the new economy.” (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity […] Open cooperatives, in comparison, recognize natural abundance and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources artificially scarce. […] Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute […] Open co-ops, therefore, practice open-value accounting or contributory accounting […] Third, open cooperatives can secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses. […] Fourth, open cooperatives are able to make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and services […] Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives reduce waste [… ]Sixth, open cooperatives can mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops).

21. Governance of Platform Coops, Open Value Networks and commons requires a distinctive set of management practices

• 1) Find the right people, 2) Explore different strategies for self-management, 3) Consider conversion, 4) Define the parameters of your cooperative environment, 5) Join a cooperative network (or two), 6) Invest in other cooperatives, 7) Choose free tools to run the business. (Micky Metts—Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Tech Co-op)
• Our Good Work Code is a set of eight simple principles that can serve as a framework: 1) Safety, 2) Stability & Flexibility, 3) Transparency, 4) Shared Prosperity, 5) A Livable Wage, 6) Inclusion & Input, 7) Support & Connection, 8)Growth & Development (Palak Shah—A Code for Good Work).
• We considered the following six interrelated factors as determinants and drivers of commons governance: 1) Mission 2) Management of contributions. Greater flexibility of participants seems to be conducive to higher degrees of contribution. 3) Decision-making with regard to community interaction. Consensus-based decision making is frequent in commons-based peer production but the methods differ. 4) Formal policies applied to community interaction. 5) Design of the platform. 6) Platform provision (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

22. Blockchain technologies could actually be an opportunity for Coop Platforms, but should not be used for promoting cooperation without trust.

• Although Bitcoin itself has been designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is significant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of a digital object (for example, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body. This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote, or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and not a forgery? (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons)
• In the United States, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed using blockchain technology to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses coordinated as commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• This field of experimentation may yield another breakthrough tool for forging digital commons: smart contracts. […] These transactions could, of course, be used to invent new types of markets, but they also could be used to create new types of commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls).

23. Those that want to build a Coop Platform should get rid of mainstream mindsets

• Cooperatives tended to focus too much on how the value would be shared rather than on a compelling offer to create the value in the first place (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership)
• We embed values into our technologies, and today such values are reflections of Silicon Valley’s ethos and funding models (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms).
• Platforms don’t need to be treated as commodities: It’s easy to develop a platform fetish as a result of their seemingly magical potential to create billionaires. Yet all along, it is the users themselves, and the rents they pay to platform companies, that enable the billion-dollar valuations (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)

24.There are plenty of experiences to learn from that are documented in the book. Far too many to pick excerpts. Get the book and read it.

Photo by arbyreed

The post Why you should read “Ours to Hack and to Own”: the book in 24 powerful insights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The book is edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, the organisers of the Platform Co-operativism events in New York, who have really put this movement on the map. With contributions from scores of contributors and case studies of working platform co-ops, as well as guidance for any would-be platform founders and designers, Ours to Hack and Own provides the most comprehensive summary of the burgeoning platform co-op movement to date.

At its simplest, the platform co-op concept is pretty straightforward; if ‘we the people’ own and democratically control the platforms we use we all get a better deal; without external investors syphoning off funds every quarter any value created can be recycled within the platform; workers get paid more (and, most importantly, a real liveable wage), customers get better value and together we set the rules. The profit motive, of conventional ‘platform monopolies’ like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo is replaced in favour of ‘benefitting the community the platform serves’.

It’s a simple concept, with the most noble and laudable objectives which, ultimately, provides a model for a completely new economy. That may sound grandiose but, unlike other movements, or startups claiming they will disrupt the norm, the platform co-op model genuinely has the potential to kick-start a new way of organising life as we know it, because it is rooted in collective ownership.

This ownership revolution, is just one aspect of what makes the platform co-op model so enticing and grounds it within a pre-existing legal model, established in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. Bringing the co-op movement up to date for the internet era and equipping ourselves with the right tools to organise effectively, collaboratively and democratically is what Ours to Hack and Own, is all about.

The book starts with intros from Trebor and Nathan who define the main tenets of platform coperativism as ‘communal owernship and democratic governance’. Susie Cagle reminds us of the seven cooperative principles and Jessica Gordon Nembhard outlines eight facts about cooperative enterprise:

1. Cooperative enterprises address market failure and need – by providing access to services which the present market fails to deliver.
2. Cooperatives overcome historical barriers to development – by aggregating people, resources and capital.
3. Cooperatives are already a significant part of the existing economy – contributing $154 billion to the US economy alone.
4. Cooperative businesses have lower failure rates that other businesses – with 90% still operating after five years (vs 3-5% of conventional businesses).
5. Cooperatives are more likely to promote community growth – since they’re ‘needs oriented’ and founded within communities.
6. Cooperative businesses stabilise communities – because they are anchored, and recycle value within, their communities.
7. Cooperatives and their members are good citizens – because they support people, communities and use sustainable business practices.
8. Cooperative startup costs can be low – because members can contribute time and capital offsetting the need for outside financing.

Part two takes us on a whistle-stop tour of ‘platform capitalism’ with insight from a range of authors:

Douglas Rushkoff proposes

“Platform cooperatives – as a direct affront to the platform monopolies characterizing digital industrialism – offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good. Instead of extracting value and delivering it up to distant shareholders, we harvest, circulate, and recycle the value again and again. And those are precisely the habits we must retrieve as we move ahead from an extractive and growth-based economy to one as regenerative and sustainable as we’re going to need to survive the great challenges of our time.”

Juliet B. Schor reminds us that, even within existing ‘alternative economy’ communities, such as time banks and food swaps, exclusive behaviour and discrimination can ferment and the platform co-op community would be wise to tackle the aspects that undermine egalitarian goals from the outset.

Mackenzie Wark explores the idea that a ‘third order of commodification’, which he calls ‘vectorialism’, undermines society through the use of brands, patents, copyrights, trademarks and infrastructures which limit or control flows of information.

Stephen Hill discusses the “uber-ization’ of work and the ‘race to the bottom in the freelance society’, arguing that

“cooperative platforms and greater economic democracy can offer consumers an alternative to runaway capitalism.”

Christopher Spehr co-opts SpongeBob Squarepants to help explain the issues for platform workers. He argues for a ‘bill of rights for the age of algorithmic capitalism’ including new labour rights, entrepreneurial rights (today’s equivalent of antitrust laws), and a ‘new legal framework for a new regime of accumulation’ that gives the economy ‘a social purpose and a base in democratic values’.

Kati Sipp highlights the need for ‘portable reputation’ within the platform co-op economy so that users do not need to start from scratch and build up trust in every new community they join (like we propose in PLANET). Kati suggests that the platform co-op community can borrow insight from existing offline worker-led unions which have already found ways to deal with multi-employer, dissaggregated work situations.

Dmytri Kleiner explains how capitalist platforms ‘based on the sale of audience commodity and capturing marketplace rents demand a sacrifice of privacy and autonomy’. He goes on to detail how “disintermediation” was central to the early visions of the internet, which was going to eliminate middle-men by allowing us to deal with each other directly but how, in reality, today’s web is more mediated than ever before by large corporates and Internet Service Providers who successfully invoked policies of “antidisintermediation”. This takes a little bit of brain power to get your head around but what he proposes is truly salient; that the platform co-op movement must develop a policy for (you’ve got to love this new word) “counterantidisintermediation” meaning that, for the vision to succeed, platform co-ops must not rely on private servers and admins but instead leverage the computational capacity and network access of the users’ own computers, ‘so that each new user adds more resources to the platform than they consume’.

The last chapter of section two is from David Bollier who discusses how access to ‘digital commons’ in which groups have the tools for “free and responsible association for common purposes” produces hugely valuable networks, the likes of which make Facebook and Youtube look “rudimentary”. He asserts that “the value potential of the commons has been deliberately stifled as part of the business model” of existing, privately owned, platforms and it’s hard not to agree. He goes on to explain how ‘smart contracts’ and ‘open value networks’ will “surpass the value-creating capacities of conventional open platform”. A thoroughly enticing vision.

What’s particularly enjoyable about all these chapters, as well as the rest of the book is that they’re short, often no longer than 3 or 4 pages, which replaces the usually mind-numbing nature of such complex issues with the charm of individual enthusiasm.

Part three of the book rattles through some case studies of existing, successful, platform co-ops. From the poster-child of the platform movement, Stocksy United, to Fairmondo and Coopify all the best examples of this new movement in action get a mention. Gratipay, FairCoop, Member’s Media, TimesFree, Snowdrift.coop, Resonate, Loconomics, NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative, Robin Hood Collective and Seed.coop are all detailed.

The rest of part three covers how we can build an ‘internet of our own’ with specific guidance for would-be platform founders and designers. There is a wealth of well researched and valuable information in this section and numerous suggestions and ideas which the proponents suggest should be encoded in viable platform co-ops.

Janelle Orsi suggests that platform designers should enable mechanisms to prevent the platform from being sold, to put a cap on pay-outs and compensation and adopt a staff trusteeship model of governance. Speaking from experience, Caroline Woolard suggests potential platform co-op founders should consider alternative approaches before launching into the unknown, by asking: Can you make a platform for an existing co-op? Who will build the cooperative platform? How much time and money do you have? And, what if you ran events instead of building software? Her observation that the knowledge built into real life communities won’t deliver 404 errors a year down the line reads like solid, experience-based advice.

Melissa Hoover outlines the different forms that co-ops can take: Consumer co-ops, Producer co-ops, Worker co-ops and multi-stakeholder co-ops, which are all explained in detail. David Caroll provides some extremely valuable observations of which platform co-ops are well placed to take advantage. For example, the bursting ‘content bubble’, the over-crowding of app stores, the advent of chat bots and chat interfaces for apps, the need for co-owned AI and an alternatives to private clouds, the need for replicable legal frameworks and new ‘privacy-positivity’ as a competitive advantage over platforms backed by venture capital. Marina Gorbis encourages platform designers to incorporate some simple principles to achieve positive outcomes for platform workers including ‘earnings maximisation’, stability and predictability, transparency, portability of reputation, upskilling, social connectedness, bias elimination and successful feedback mechanisms. Danny Spitzberg covers how crowdfunding can become stewardship when a community is emotionally engaged with a project through the process of on-going ‘barn-raisers’. Taken together, the wealth of advice crammed into these pages is truly invaluable.

Part four, the final section covers ‘Conditions of possibility’ with another twelve case studies on interesting projects and some more condensed wisdom from a host of further authors. There’s even more guidance for those wishing to: escape the trappings of neoliberalism, understand the role of finance and capital, to employ ‘a code for good work’, to setup tech co-ops, to develop union co-ops and for those who wish to co-create a ‘theory of value’ for platform co-operatives, or to develop public policies for ‘digital sovereignty’ or to understand the legal and governance structures available.

Ours to Hack and Own is an extremely timely publication covering every aspect of the legal, social, technical and economic aspects of the platform co-op movement. Although it’s focus is on ‘platform cooperativism’ it is key reading for anyone with an interest in creating a more collaborative, equitable and sustainable world. Whether you’re coming from an environmental, social or economic perspective platform cooperativism is the process through which all progressive movements can unite.

I leave the final word to Yochai Benkler, who wrote: “At no time in the two centuries since cooperativism first appeared … has it been more feasible. That it is feasible, however, does not make it inevitable. As a movement, cooperativism will only succeed by moving fast and decisively, learning from the near past, and sharing our experiments and knowledge quickly and repeatedly in a network of cooperatives.” Lets get involved. You can buy Ours to Hack and Own from OR Books.

Oliver Sylvester-Bradley
@defactodesign

If you are interested in the topics above come and meet the people who are co-creating the platform co-op economy at Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops, a two day conference at Goldsmiths, University of London on the 16 – 17 February 2017.

Cross-posted from The Open Coop

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In their latest interview, the Upstream team traveled to Brooklyn, NYC, to interview Trebor, who is an Associate Professor of Culture & Media at the New School for Liberal Arts & co-editor of 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. Trebor has a very wide breadth of knowledge in the field of digital labor, and is able to articulate a very strong critique of the modern day digital landscape. He walks us through how the internet has hit rock bottom, exemplified as it is these days by extreme power concentration, high levels of worker exploitation, and a lack of privacy.

“All of the apps that most of us are using on a daily basis are really owned by so few people that you can squeeze them all into a Google bus,” Trebor explains. “We need a stance that doesn’t just open the doors to these monopolies and let’s them rule freely, but that actually thinks about how to also invest in alternatives that can then lead to a more diverse digital landscape. In a climate that is politically and economically hostile to workers, I think that platform cooperatives can insulate–to an extent–from this onslaught…that we are experiencing now.”

Trebor is able to draw a very compelling picture of how things could be different. What would Uber look like if it had cooperative values? What if residents owned Airbnb? This is the idea behind the concept of Platform Cooperativism, which Trebor tells us has really taken off since he first began exploring it a couple of years ago.

“The resonance comes because you have so much uncertainty. And also as you can see from surveys of millennials, that they identify as anti-capitalists to a much larger degree than people would have thought,–in the UK as much as in the US. So they don’t really see a place for themselves in capitalism anymore. It almost sometimes feels like they are sitting in a self-driving car, heading to armageddon.

Something we’re beginning to see in this economy is that younger generations are very skeptical of these big institutions and their hierarchies. They really don’t want to have a boss – they want to think outside the boss, if you will. This has to do with the difference with their parents who had very tangible benefits and perks by these–by all means flawed–institutions. Younger generations don’t experience that. They don’t see those benefits from those institutions, all they see is hierarchies and horribleness.”

The conversation covers many topics within the sphere of digital labor and the economics of the web. How do digital economies operate invisibly, so that we live in a sort of black box society? How is our data being used against us? How are the economic policies of the new Trump administration going to further impact labor and the nature of work? Darkness and uncertainty loom ahead. Trebor’s insights are a flash of light that illuminate and begin to guide us through these tumultuous times.

Upstream Podcast

Upstream is a podcast that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. They specialize in documentaries focusing on cutting-edge themes within the economic and political world. Trebor Scholz will be featured in their upcoming episode on the economics of the digital world, which will be released sometime in 2017. You can find out more at upstreampodcast.org and through the links below.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes & Google Play

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The post Platform Cooperativism: Trebor Scholz Interview 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.

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

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

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

I devoured it in two sittings.

Selected Quotes

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

Melissa Hoover

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

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

Rachel O’Dwyer

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

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

Astra Taylor

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

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

A new space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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