Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various digital platforms are rarely given much consideration. But this is beginning to change with the rise in what is known as the platform cooperative movement, a broad network of individuals and organizations pushing to bring the values of cooperative ownership, governance, and management, into the digital labor landscape.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, New York, and chair of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture.” He’s been an advocate of the platform cooperativism movement for many years and launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (Shareable is part of the Consortium), which was awarded a $1 million dollar grant from Google.org, this week. The grant “focuses specifically on creating a critical analysis of the digital economy, and designing open source tools that will support platform co-ops working in sectors such as child care, elder care, home services, and recycling​ in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and India,” according to a press release by The New School. “This grant is a big win for the cooperative movement and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” Scholz said in a statement. “This Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops. It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.” We talked to Scholz as he was working on the project about the potential of platform cooperatives in addressing many of the challenges in the digital world today.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: You are in the process of launching an ambitious project around strengthening and spreading the platform cooperative movement. The project consists of many different elements and is structured as a kind of development kit for platform co-ops. I’ll let you tell us all about it in just a second, but first, can you explain what a platform cooperative is, and what problem or challenge they are addressing?

Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media at The New School: Platform co-ops are really about the broad-based ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms. So, imagine that Uber is owned by its drivers, or something like TaskRabbit is owned and operated by the workers. Or, in Europe, that Deliveroo is operated by the couriers and owned by the couriers. What this model leads to is a fair pay and a higher quality of work,so there is a dignity that you will not get in the extractive sharing economy. Also, the research on worker cooperatives shows that they are actually more productive than traditional businesses.

There are all sorts of economic and tax advantages as well. So think about something like AirBnb. You might be staying at an AirBnb in Amsterdam, or Barcelona, and much of the money spent at that Airbnb is taken out of the community, and the revenue doesn’t go through taxes into your local community, but is transferred instead right to Silicon Valley. On top of that there are all of the illegal operations of platforms like Uber and Lyft. It’s been proven, with the recent study from MIT, that these businesses contribute to a congestion of cities.

So, what the platform cooperativism movement is pushing back against is what I would sum up as a broken social contract. There are unsustainably low wages, compromised data and privacy, edge populations that aren’t considered in the design — so it’s a sort of big ego design, a waterfall design of Silicon Valley that pushes software onto people instead of co-designing it. There’s a shift away from direct employment which means a loss of worker voice and rights and benefits and of course centralized data ownership. The intellectual North Star for the alternative of the platform co-op model is really democratic governance, broad-based platform ownership.

So, tell us a bit about the Development Kit project.

The first part of the project is just to explain what is actually the problem with a business model like Lyft and many of these other companies, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo — what’s actually the problem? So that’s part of it, because I think it’s very important to actually change people’s mindsets about that.

Once they are convinced and are interested in actually changing it, they can see this whole ecosystem that already exists. So we are building a map that will have a lot of information about all of these cooperative platform businesses, some 240, that already exist, and then we will invite people to participate themselves. We are working at the Harvard Business Law School on a platform co-op legal clinic that is starting to get at the legal issues that exist in starting platform co-ops specifically, not just co-ops but platform co-ops,and trying to get these legal issues out of the way.

My initial idea was to somehow perhaps automate this, so that you can click and create a platform co-op, almost like a click-through legal contract. But that seems to be quite unlikely to happen because there are just way too many different co-op laws in the United States. But you know, why is it that you can’t just do something similar to what corporations do in Delaware, for example? You know, the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. actually incorporate in the state of Delaware. It’s an example of how one model in one state can work for all corporations. A centralized model. Why wouldn’t that be possible for cooperatives as well — just to make it simple?

The second thing is that we are starting an international network of lawyers through the Harvard network so that you could basically have lawyers in many countries where platform co-ops emerge that could help them to get the legal issues out of the way.

Another thing is that we are trying to address issues of governance. We’re trying to co-create and co-design, in direct collaboration with the co-ops themselves, a model where co-op members can use the platform to have a voice in the co-op itself. We are working with a group in India, for example, where the women are really dispersed all over the state of Gujarat. And so they have a hard time actually being meaningful members of the co-op, and so we tried to change that.

The third thing is an open source labor platform. So, basically something that can be customized for various users. So anyone trying to build one only needs a small amount of money to be able to start a platform like that. And yeah, so these are just some of the many things we are working on co-designing as part of this project.

And so it sounds like the idea of co-designing, of co-creating this toolkit, in a collaborative and participatory way plays a central role in this project?

That’s right. This needs to be opened up to the whole community — like to really activate the community around it and really do this with the community and not just for the community.That’s the idea. I’d like to really activate groups and really work with people, alongside people, and do it with them. I think that’s the way to go. And yeah, the project starts in July and will run for two years. After which, of course, we hope to get more funding and also try to engage other foundations to build on this. We are laying the technical foundations now, and there will be all of this infrastructure that will exist, that will be built, and the hope is that now others can come in and say, “Can you do this in Georgia, can you do this in Ohio?” You name it.

Can you describe some of the projects, some of the communities that you are working with or hoping to work with?

There are babysitters in Illinois, for example, that were organized by the union, and now we are coming in and adding an onboarding tool for them and maybe helping with a labor platform. And then there are these women in Ahmedabad, India, that I mentioned earlier, who we are working with to bring beauty services to people’s houses — like a platform service for doing hair and makeup, you know. So they are training twenty-seven women right now and in the fall it will be seventy-five, and then it will grow from there. And they are already all organized in a co-op and they will basically bring this sort of service to urban, young professionals.

There are many other projects. We talked to these 2,000 Uber drivers in Cape Town who wanted to drop out and start a platform co-op, we talked with trash pickers in the informal economy in Cairo, Egypt. There is no trash collection there and so through the Coptic Church these people get organized and want to start a platform where people can order trash pick-ups from them, and they would get paid for them. All these very, very diverse applications.

What is your ultimate dream for this project?

Well the project itself is much bigger than what we have right now. So, the goal is really to go into what we call “pull markets” — so markets where you don’t need so much marketing. For example, social care. There you see basically what we are doing, what we’re addressing, and then also what is not funded, you know? The dream is basically like a full-cycle implementation of this model in various territories. So we have projects that we could do in Brazil, and Colombia with refugees, in Germany, and you know all over the place. It’s very exciting.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header illustration by Susie Cagle

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“University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.”

Trebor Scholz interviews Julie Broad and Indigo Olivier. Originally published at Platform.coop.

Trebor Scholz: Julie, you just graduated from The New School. What was your experience?

Julie Broad: I transferred to The New School from McGill, a large research university. The New School is, of course, really different: small classes with engaged, dedicated professors who show care for the students.

Before I graduated in May, I started to get involved with the campaign to unionize our student academic workers, a fight that has been ongoing since 2014. I was working as a research assistant at the time for a really wonderful art history professor at Parsons. I started getting to know our graduate students — some of whom had been my instructors — and the kinds of issues they were facing as workers. I had often thought of The New School as really supportive and intimate compared to McGill’s kind of bureaucratic machinations, but then you start chatting to people about pay disparities, being overworked — and that image falls apart.

The movement for student worker unionization is challenging the way we think about the university. Research and teaching assistants are reasserting themselves — and, in some cases like ours, finally being recognized by the National Labor Relations Board — as workers with the right to have a say in the terms and conditions of their work. But you can only get so far when you don’t own the organization you work in. A cooperatively owned college could go a step further in the public conversation about economic equity. In collaboration with unions, a cooperative college could reshuffle how learning takes place in a way that makes it more affordable and fair to everyone involved.

Indigo Olivier: When I applied to The New School, my father was unemployed, my mother was supporting a family of four on a public school teacher’s salary, and I had a twin brother going to school at the same time as me. The New School did not give me nearly enough financial aid and campus jobs didn’t pay enough to support the cost of living in New York.

I was self-supported throughout my time as a student and set a strict schedule for myself to graduate in three years instead of four to minimize the amount of loans that I had to take out (about $32,000). Rushing through my college experience didn’t allow me to explore all the things that I wanted to explore and working a lot didn’t leave me any time to take up an internship or volunteer my time to social movements if they were off campus.

Going to the financial aid office, I very much got the feeling of being treated like a customer, not a student that’s part of a larger academic community. A co-op college could turn this understanding of what it means to be a student on its head.

TS: In 2012, I proposed a cooperatively operated college that would offer substantive education at drastically lower tuition fees, taught not at the university but in cafes, public libraries, museums, and parks. Do you think that a college operated based on co-op principles could work? What would your ideal college look like?

JB: Sure, I think that if we consider some of the problems with the educational system, cooperatives could be a radical alternative. There’s plenty to change. The magnitude of the student debt crisis alone is overwhelming. Students regularly tell themselves and each other that they just can’t conceptualize what it means to owe $37,000 (national average) by the time they’re twenty-one. Strike Debt and other movements working within the system are creative ways to alleviate a lot of people from crushing debt, but they don’t challenge the system. Students are stressed about their job prospects; educators are stressed about their job security, a lack of meaningful co-governance, and increasing administrative work. Who is this system working for?

An ideal university would be a lot of things, but firstly, I think it’d be a commitment to supporting students financially, so they’re working on research and projects instead of juggling four jobs. I remember a petition, I think spearheaded by students working with Get Artists Paid, going around at the beginning of the summer, asking folks to pressure the board of trustees to stop holding the transcripts of students (primarily students of color) who had unpaid balances. Like Indigo said, there are national and international movements for racial and economic justice that we need to support; addressing the extreme economic disparity happening within the walls of our university is where we should start.

IO: For one thing, in my ideal college, there would be no Board of Trustees. University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.

My ideal college would make servicing the wider community its ultimate concern. This means prioritizing research that confronts mass incarceration, climate change, the war in the Middle East, and the erosion of the middle class in a very practical way.

The university president would be elected for a limited number of years. For this position, students and faculty should be able to vote for a social justice leader, labor organizer, or artist; their vision for the university would, therefore, go beyond mere branding and new facilities.

TS: Indigo and Julie, thank you for sharing your experiences so openly. You are not alone. A few years ago, CUNY Professor Cathy Davidson, summed it up: “There is not a person -­‐ students, teachers, administrators -­‐ who believes that the current education system is working.” You’re right: How could students and all people working in universities: from janitors and cashiers to cooks, staff, adjuncts and all faculty be better served?

It’s not like people did not try before. Just think of the student occupations a few years ago, and the many do-it-yourself universities that emerged on the heels of the student protests of 1968. Remember the Free University Movement in Berkeley, Berlin, and many other cities or Mount Holyoke College launched as an experiment of a small consortium of colleges in Massachusetts. Today, there are countless non-accredited learning groups that capitalize on the possibilities that 21st-century networked technologies. There are many examples: Peer to Peer University, Florida Universitaria in Spain, University of the People, Edu Factory, Occupy University, The School for Poetic Computing (founded by a former Parsons professor), and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. While these learning collectives are very different in their approaches, most of them do not offer accreditation, and it really is that accreditation that matters to many prospective students.

In the midst of this watershed moment in higher education, what is necessary for positive institutional change is for administrators to provide incentives for innovation and experimentation of programming efforts. A cooperative college would have to be more than an engine of speculative idealism. While cooperatives have always been about bottom-up self-help and autonomy, it’d be important to consider if and how a cooperative college could function within a university that is not a co-op.

JB: I think the broader issue, which a co-op model might be able to address, is economic uncertainty. Who knows how our degrees will hold up when we graduate. A model that allows for more democratic, participatory structuring could free up students and educators to have not only more economic equity, but also take a larger part in controlling what we want to do with the university. A cooperative college could put more control into the hands of people whose futures are largely contingent upon their successes in academia. Such democratic control is the promise of any co-op: respect in and democratic control of the workplace. As the academic worker movement has brought renewed focus to the university as a site of worker exploitation, there’s a lot of room for dialogue about what democratic control could look like.

Giving students a literal stake in the university as owners could, I think, completely change the dynamics of on-campus organizing, whether labor or otherwise. Historically, there are many examples where the labor movement and cooperativism have gone hand-in-hand. Of course, Trebor, you know that these kind of alliances are already being made in the world of platform co-ops, with workers co-ops like Green Taxi in Denver being hugely supported by Communication Workers of America.

IO: We first have to recognize that schools are communities because I think most administration have all but forgotten this fact. The New School is there rhetorically, but in practice it’s an entirely different story. Since the recession, tuition at Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts has gone up 47.6% while the endowment went up by 85.1% from 2010-2015 alone (New School Almanac, pg.140).

The current model of higher education is in crisis but we cannot separate this from the larger crisis of capitalism that has brought about the environmental crisis, the refugee crisis, a crisis of democracy, etc. The role of a cooperative college should be to provide the resources to make sense of these different intersecting crises and then act on them cooperatively with labor, environmental organizers, prison abolitionists, and urban communities outside of the university.

There is absolutely a better way to operate a university, and I don’t think there is any lack of imagination there: CUNY has been working on transforming the student senate to a participatory budgeting model, the Edu-factory collective reimagined the university as the 21st century “factory” where connecting the university to the city could create a new understanding of “the commons” (see: Towards a Global Autonomous University), and groups like the Debt Collective have created new networks that bridge student debtors with mortgage, auto, medical, and credit card debtors.

What is needed to sustain these organizations and projects is a vision that sees the transformation of the economy at large as its ultimate goal. To “fix” the “broken model” of our universities we need to “fix the economy” and vice versa. That means we need to take a global perspective when thinking about co-ops that doesn’t just include our students, faculty, and immediate communities, but also the communities across the world that are, for instance, on the receiving side of the research that our university has been conducting for the Department of Defense since 2002.

TS: I learned from my work with the economical and political movement around platform co-ops how important it is to collaborate with other social movements.

It is peculiar that while democracy has been propagated in many countries throughout the 20th century, it has largely skipped the workplace. Workplace democracy is hard to come by, also in universities. It’s worth exploring the question if the one-worker, one-vote model of co-ops would make sense for institutions of higher education. As you so convincingly point out, the current educational system in the United States does not work. It’s worth exploring if the cooperative model could work for higher learning. For one, co-ops could contribute their core intellectual commitments, anchored in the ICA’s seven co-op principles: 1. Voluntary and Open Membership 2. Democratic Member Control 3. Member Economic Participation 4. Autonomy and Independence 5. Education, Training and Information 6. Cooperation among Co-operatives 7. Concern for Community. What would it mean to apply these principles to a cooperative division of The New School? One place to start could be adult education, returning to the legacy of the 1940s when The New School was a center of continuing education in New York City.

IO: We can agree on certain principles, and I do believe democratic participation is fundamental to both sustaining a co-op university and preparing students for civic engagement after college. Additionally, there have been some interesting ideas proposed that need to be experimented with further: open source unionism, reinvesting endowments, participatory budgeting, and academic councils.

The Women’s Strike this past March was a great example of movements coming into the classroom and the classroom moving out onto the streets. We saw activists, artists, community organizers, and students interacting in ways that probably wouldn’t have occurred if we didn’t all feel this moment of panic with Trump’s election. What we need to do is follow through with “movement moments” and turn them into resilient networks.

TS: It takes practical utopians to imagine a cooperatively operated ‘Ivy League community college.’ What, for example, would be the key tenets of a manifesto of such a cooperatively operated college? It could, for example, be completely learner-administered with all expenses only focusing directly on learning. All members of the university could participate in its day-to-day operation, which would help to keep the costs down. Instructors would function as “learning sommeliers,” or learning coaches. Following Ranciere, professors would not only be in the classroom to impose what they know but rather, to bring out the knowledge that’s already there. Beyond that, the college could heavily rely on open educational resources and all research would be published freely accessible online.

Students could be socialized into non-extractive platforms; they could learn to use social.coop or instead of Twitter and Diaspora instead of Facebook.

Instead of the semester-structure, we could use flexible units that would last, depending on need, any time time from three days to two years. Each group of learners could have an intergenerational mix: pre-­college learners, middle- and high-schoolers, traditionally university-aged students, and retired professionals. There should also be a mix of online and in-person learning to create a continuous, learner-­centered experience that is not restricted to the classroom.

Such co-op college could also be a place to experiment with new models of accreditation such as Mozilla’s Open Badges.

IO: We do need to experiment with models of accreditation. However, without some push from labor in the workplace, I think it’s very likely that alternative forms of accreditation would be discriminated against. This goes back to the need for some larger cultural shift in how we think about learning versus schooling and which one holds more weight in the job market.

I think there is a danger of getting trapped in the “small is beautiful” mentality when we talk about cooperatives. A manifesto would have to take a national and international perspective to be truly transformative. It would have to simultaneously address the labor grievances of academic workers and the future conditions of students who will graduate and be “competing” for jobs with a global workforce that’s predicated on “free trade.”

The student movement of the 1960s understood this pretty well and tried to lay out an analysis of society at large, with “student power” as a means to a larger end. The goal of a co-op university should be replacing competition with cooperation as the ultimate virtue, and then eventually linking up with a larger socialist movement. With student debt fast approaching $1.5 trillion, universities will only help push students further down this path.

JB: This November, a working group of educators, students, and activists is convening in Manchester to parse out what a co-op university would actually look like. Creating a working theoretical model is important, sure, but they’re really after creating something which in practice can challenge the reigning, corporate model of higher ed, at least in the UK. Co-ops can grow and develop within capitalism — that’s the point. We can’t wait for a socialist revolution to get to a decent educational system. A cooperative university — or, to start even smaller, a co-op college within a university — which is academically rigorous, accredited, and democratically owned and governed, needs to prove itself. Let’s grab the market share, as it were, of equitable higher ed so that when socialist reform really starts making waves, we’re already there showing that alternatives are possible.

Julie Broad is a recent graduate from The New School, a writer, and an organizer with United Auto Workers, working on the campaign to unionize academic student workers on campus. | @thatbr0ad

Indigo Olivier is a recent graduate from The New School’s Global Studies program and a freelance journalist. | @IndigoOlivier

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School. | @trebors

Image by Miquel Llonch via Stocksy United

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All photos by Kenneth Ho

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

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A Relevant Past for a Digital Age?

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

Algorithmic Hegemony & the Droning of Labor –

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