Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens: I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right?

The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things. But what is the problem? The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital. So, there is an accumulation of the commons on the one side, we are effectively producing a commons, but we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction. We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere. The solution that I propose is related to the work of Dmytri Kleiner – Dmytri proposed some years ago to create a peer production license. I’ll give you my interpretation of it; you can only use our commons if you reciprocate to some degree. So, instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons. Imagine that you have a community of producers, and around that you have an entrepreneurial coalition of cooperative, ethical, social, solidarity enterprise.

The idea is that you would have an immaterial commons of codes and knowledge, but then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops. The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production. That’s the basic idea. I think that a number of things are happening around that, like solidarity co-ops, and other new forms of cooperative-ism.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups. They have been very influenced by this neoliberal atmosphere that has been dominant in their generation. They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take. Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money. They forbid you to continue to work in the same sector after your company has failed, and you have a gag order, so you don’t even have free speech to talk about your negative experience. This is a very common experience. Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system.

There is a real lack of knowledge within the young generation that there are other forms of enterprise possible. I think that the other way is also true. A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge. They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge. They’re also not aware that there’s a new way of becoming more competitive through increased cooperation of open knowledge commons. This is the human side of it, and we need to work on the knowledge and mutual experience of these two sectors. Both are growing at the same time; after the crisis of 2008, we’ve had an explosion of the sharing economy and the peer production economy on the one side, but also a revitalization of the cooperative sector.

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Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

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Consequently, it was a surprise to her to receive an infringement notice for using one of her own photographs. Getty Images, a corporate stock photo cite, hosts a collection of public domain images on its site, apparently without indicating they are public domain.

Getty’s enforcement arm, Licensing Compliance Services, apparently didn’t put a parameter in they monitoring algorithm to disregard public domain images.  So they ended up threatening public access activist for using her own work.

Highsmith is not the only person disenchanted with Getty.

Extracted from: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-business/founder-of-istockphoto-reveals-real-reason-he-left-why-hes-started-new-stock-photo-company/

In 2006, Bruce sold iStockphoto to Getty Images for around £30 million, and later left the company, but has now decided to start a new stock image venture. We caught up with him to find out why.

AA: Why did you sell iStockphoto to Getty Images?

BL: “There were several reasons. I had partners I couldn’t get along with. They were focused on revenue and profits. I was focused on the community. I couldn’t afford to buy them out. I felt like I had accomplished everything I had set out to do.

“I love to build things, trying to maximise revenue and margins is not as exciting to me. The community at iStock was surprisingly strong. Even today, with nobody at the helm of iStockphoto, there are still people hanging on the ship as it is sinking into the depths of apathy.”

Extracted from: http://www.fastcompany.com/3007439/tech-forecast/istockphoto-creator-bruce-livingstone-takes-second-stab-stock-photos

“It’s hard for me to criticize their corporation,” Livingstone says. “They’re responsible to their shareholders. They have to keep making profits and keep having growth. I totally get it. I don’t fault them for that.” But within his photographer network, it seemed like what started as a friendly business had grown up to become a monster. “One of the most depressing ones for me,” Livingstone says, “[were] people who I had helped change their lives—real estate agents or veterans or policemen who had quit their jobs and had focused on making stock photography and were earning a living—suddenly saying, I’m going to have to go back to my old job.”

Extracted from: http://collectivehub.com/2016/05/how-to-be-successful-for-the-second-time/

Their start-up story was the stuff of fairytales. But in 2012, three years after selling iStockphoto to Getty Images for US$50 million, Bruce Livingstone and Brianna Wettlaufer decided to start all over again. The pair, along with a small team of iStockphoto veterans, founded Stocksy – a rapidly growing photographer’s co-operative where the photographers own equity in the company, with a finely curated collection of stock photos and a distinctive aesthetic driven by a relentless ambition to make stock photography better than it has been before. Where this industry often pays photographers around 20 percent of profits from each license, Stocksy passes on 50 per cent on all photos, as well as paying dividends.

Extracted from: https://www.stocksy.com/service/about/

Stocksy is home to a highly curated collection of royalty-free stock photography that is beautiful, distinctive, and highly usable.

We’re also a cooperative! (Think more artist respect and support, less patchouli.) We believe in creative integrity, fair profit sharing, and co-ownership, with every voice being heard.

OUR CO-OP APPROACH

We are a photographer-owned cooperative founded on the principles of equality, respect, and fair distribution of profits. Our contributing photographers receive 50% of a Standard License Purchase and 75% of an Extended License Purchase – and every single Stocksy contributor receives a share of the company.

Extracted from: http://www.vicnews.com/news/258039681.html

The model has competition elsewhere, but its co-op structure means each of Stocksy’s 600 contributing photographers directly benefits from year-end profits.

“After a year of operating, we’re getting close to that magic number of $200,000 in royalty payments per month,” Livingstone says. “We hit profitability after eight months, started spending again and now we’re in profitability again. It’s evidence that we’re there. After a year, for any business, it’s kind of unheard of, especially for an online start-up.”

“The co-op model helps set up a new paradigm, but it doesn’t help the other 95,000 photographers out there struggling,” Livingstone says. “But we wanted to create something sustainable first and then worry about big numbers after that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by darkday.

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The latest entry in a special project in which business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace.

The culture surrounding the Internet has a way of changing the meanings of common words. “Democratizing” now means that more people can book air travel or buy stocks online, rather than the older connotations of jury trials or ballot boxes. “Disruption” is suddenly an unabashedly good thing—referring not to the cataclysmic layoffs and displacement that occur when one industry undermines another, but only to the happy story of a David beating a Goliath. Then there is “sharing.” We used to share common resources with the people in our communities. Now sharing is the word we use for paying a tech start-up to connect us with people who, in turn, we can pay for using their house, car, or Legos.

The so-called sharing economy was barely born before many people began to recognize its slogans about trust and relationships as a rent-seeking ruse. But this ruse is still transforming how we work. Labor-sharing platforms like Uber and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have used the fact that they are on the Internet to bypass both customs and laws about what constitutes fair employment. They’re poised to set workers’ rights back a century or more. But, thanks to that very same Internet, there has never been a better time to build an economy in which participants can share real ownership and real control.

Imagine how Mechanical Turk, a digital clearinghouse for short-term gigs, would be different if the thousands of people working on it were also co-owners of the platform. They could use decision-making apps like DemocracyOS or Loomio to determine the policies that employers would have to follow. They could manage their shares online. When the platform does well, they could decide how much to pay themselves in dividends and how much to invest in R&D. They would have every reason to be enthusiastic advocates of the platform with potential clients. Its success would be their success. How, too, would Facebook be different if its users owned it and could decide what is done with their data? What about Uber?

All of this is possible. The Denver-based worker cooperative Green Taxi, for instance, has its own app for hailing a cab—the convenience of Uber, except drivers aren’t at the mercy of rules set by a faraway company that takes a hefty cut. A little more sci-fi is La’Zooz, an Israel-based ride-sharing system that uses the technology underlying Bitcoin to make co-owners of drivers and riders alike. As the on-demand “gig economy’’ leaves us with jobs that are lower-paying and more precarious than their predecessors, cooperatives are a way of putting participants first. With the help of the Bay Area’s Sustainable Economies Law Center, a company called Loconomics is creating a worker-owned alternative to TaskRabbit.

For just about every old-fashioned corporate platform we rely on, there’s a more cooperative way of doing things. The Amazon-like marketplace Fairmondo, based in Germany, is owned by its users rather than by a near-monopoly waging war on book publishers. Federated social media networks like Diaspora and Friendica show that we can have all the functionality of Facebook and Twitter without losing control over the personal information we share.

There are offline reasons why the big online platforms are not generally like this; it’s not for lack of technology. The most popular financing model among tech companies is to sell ownership and control to moneyed investors, whose primary interest is in a big, fast profit. Venture capitalists like companies that can grow quickly without having to worry about a lot of workers demanding to be treated humanely. Uber’s investors can’t wait to replace its drivers with self-driving cars.

Walk into the offices of a leading tech company, and one might think that the egalitarian utopia has arrived. Developers scooter around on open floor-plans, choosing how to spend their time in ever-evolving project groups. They talk about “do-ocracy” and “holacracy.” Internet culture has taught us a lot about working collaboratively. But—except for some stock options here and there—this utopia doesn’t extend to ownership or control. In the end, the company’s purpose is to maximize profits for investors who may or may not have any relationship to what it actually does in the world. The Internet’s equalizing front-end obscures a depressingly familiar back-end business model.

We have a choice. We can veer toward Uber and Mechanical Turk, where work is insecure, impersonal, and on someone else’s terms. Or we can create online workplaces that a democratic society deserves. This means that the people who work to cultivate them—whether they’re users at home or programmers in an office—can help make decisions and reap the benefits. This means financing projects through resources that we manage together as a commons, rather than relying on inequality-producing markets. This might also mean deflating a dot-com bubble or two.

A more cooperative Internet can only happen if we re-align our culture and incentives—as well as changing the meanings of the words we use. Governments, for example, can give priority to contractors that practice real democracy in their own governance. The tech press can refuse to celebrate disruptions that don’t give workers more control over their lives. And sharing-economy boosters can insist that sharing must extend to ownership.

This is a practical challenge more than an ideological one. The goal is not to enforce a rigid orthodoxy. Rather, it’s to have a world in which a can-do young entrepreneur—the kind who wants nothing more than to create something new and excellent—will conclude that the best way to proceed is to practice democracy.

For the Future of Work, a special project from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace, and what anxieties and possibilities they might produce.

Nathan Schneider writes about technology and the economy for publications including Vice, the New Republic, and the Nation. He is co-organizer of “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy,” a convergence at the New School on November 13-14.

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Originally published in the Pacific Standard

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“[…This] is gonna kinda hurt: In the startup world, you work hard and you move fast in order to make other people rich.”

Don’t miss this outrageously inspiring video, where Bruce Sterling proceeds to break the hearts of a few thousands wannabe venture capital baiters at last year’s NEXT Berlin conference for “digital forethinkers and tech experts”.

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At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — the annual opportunity for the President to engage directly, and humorously, with reporters who cover him — it was expected that most of the jibes would be aimed at Barack Obama. Sure, he gets the chance to defend himself, but it’s pretty much a roast: A leading comedian is invited every year to make jokes, while the commander in chief tries to laugh instead of squirm.

Maybe that’s why I was so jolted when this year’s headliner, comedian Joel McHale of TV’s “The Soup,” took such a hard swipe at Google. “America still has amazing technological innovations. Google Glass has hit the markets. Now, just by walking down the street, we’ll know exactly who to punch in the face.”

It got a pretty good laugh — perhaps because both the press and the politicians in the room were relieved to have been spared for at least one joke. But the violence of the imagery, and the intensity of the rage that it expressed, gave me serious pause: Are we in the midst of a new kind of tech industry backlash? And is it for something these companies are actually doing, or have they simply lost control of the technology story?

This is more than the traditional sort of commentary and critique of a new form of culture that we’ve seen waged against everything from television advertising or fashion iconography in the past.

When the artists called Like4Real rebel against the ubiquity of the Facebook “Like” by holding a funeral for the thumbs-up symbol, it comments effectively, if acerbically, on the changing nature of social relationships in a commercial space. Meanwhile, artists from KillYourPhone.com are encouraging people to make special pouches for cell phones and PDAs, which prevent them from receiving signals. Again — agree with them or not about the need for an occasional digital detox — it’s clever, provocative and memorable satire.

But the notion, even expressed jokingly, of punching people in the face for wearing Google Glass — as if the device somehow signals a traitor to the cause of humanity — pushes things over the top. Yes, we can all imagine how people wearing an augmented reality device might be annoying: They can surf the Web while pretending to converse with us or, worse, record us when we don’t know it. No sooner had the very first prototypes been spotted last year than TechCrunch reported a new, purely apprehensive moniker for its wearers: Glassholes. But it’s as if the public is now being primed to go after early adopters — almost to a point where one might be reluctant to put on the device.

Are technology companies such as Google shouldering the blame for too much? It seems as if they are bearing responsibility not only for people’s fears about the future of technology but the excesses of corporate capitalism.

Consider the hullabaloo now centered on the buses that convey Google employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. This winter, protesters waylaid one of the Google shuttles, going so far as to hurl a brick through one of its windows in protest of what they see as the tech giant’s gentrifying influence on the city. When San Francisco introduced the new Muni 83X bus line, locals were quick to point out that its sparsely utilized buses run suspiciously close to Twitter headquarters. More protests, and more vitriol ensued.

Of course, in reality, Google’s buses spare the highway a whole lot of traffic, and the atmosphere from countless tons of carbon emissions from what would otherwise be an extra few thousand cars on the highways every day. And suspicions about local government adding commuter lines to accommodate Twitter appear to be unfounded.

The deeper angst in San Francisco appears to be over the way each new tech initial public offering creates another few thousand millionaires who want to buy apartments, jacking up the real estate prices for everyone else. But even this local economics issue seems unlikely to be motivating such widespread disdain for tech business. Besides, there are a number of corporations with much worse records of displacing locals or hurting business than the new tech giants.

No, I think the reason these young corporations are getting so much pushback is that they were once seen as the upstarts — as the companies on the people’s side of things. Digital technology was supposed to disrupt business as usual, create new opportunities for both self-expression and small business, and — perhaps most of all — change the very nature of the corporation and its relationship to real people and places. They’re being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations.

Now that these little garage businesses are some of the biggest companies in the world, it’s a whole lot harder for them to exhibit the qualities that once made them the darlings of the culture and counterculture alike. Yes, digital companies are being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations. But this is largely because we all understand that they are building the infrastructure in which our economics, culture and perhaps even a whole lot of human consciousness will take place.

That’s why they have to pay more attention to communicating their intentions than might otherwise seem justified. Steve Jobs was famous for keeping great secrets, but Apple is largely a consumer electronics firm. We like being surprised about the features on our next phone.

A company such as Google can’t be as secretive when it purchases a military robotics firm. Without clear messaging about the reasons for such acquisitions, the public mind reels, particularly in the wake of National Security Agency disclosures, jobs lost to automation and movies from “Her” to “Transcendence.”

Instead of balking at our widespread suspicions, the leaders of Silicon Valley must begin communicating honestly and effectively about what they hope and dream for. If people are scared of Google’s Glass, of Facebook’s purchase of a virtual reality company or of Twitter’s use of big data, then it’s up to those companies to explain loud and clear how these developments will serve us all.

For once, protecting strategy secrets has to take a back seat to clear communications. If these companies really are building the world we’re all going to be living in, they have to let us in on their plans. Otherwise, we’re going to feel like we’ve been left off the bus.

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