At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO).

Nic Wistreich: Uberfication has become shorthand for many new concepts—from the sharing economy to any significantly disruptive digital business model. But what exactly did Uber do that was materially different to earlier disruptive digital businesses? In short:

• It created software…

• To replace existing industry-wide operational structures…

• That created huge cost and efficiency savings at the supply end (by removing human operators and taxi stands)…

• And created significant user-experience benefits at the delivery end (by providing an interface and fixed fee structure)…

• Which together has allowed the company to rapidly scale globally, threatening traditional taxi companies in every territory in which it operates.

Of course, the question remains, why is Uber not a coop? In principle, it would be the perfect model for a worker coop: a piece of software owned by drivers around the world that helped them do their work better with the costs and surplus or profits shared. In reality, it required the high-risk VC (Venture Capital) environment to finance and build such an innovative and disruptive piece of software. Public agencies, NGOs, social enterprises and coops do not have a strong track record building innovative technology. Even the great and successful collaboratively made pieces of technology—from within the open source community—are regularly criticised for not having a great user interface. Open source exceptions to this, such as WordPress, are run as private, profit-making companies.

The coop version of Uber will surely inevitably come, but at such a pace that when it does, Uber may have Facebook-levels of market saturation, and be midway through being hardwired into bus stops and taxi ranks the world over. Before looking at the cultural approaches that set successful digital businesses and services apart, it’s worth considering what exactly Uberfication could mean in the context of cooperatives, and why it’s of increasing social urgency that future Ubers are owned by the people who are governed by them —be that workers or consumers.

The digital boss

While computers have been used in management for decades, they have typically been one of two types: perhaps easiest categorised as either communication or alert. Communication-type machine management is where a manager creates a task on a system and assigns it, maybe on a space where people can leave comments. Perhaps there are a bunch of open tasks, such as on O-Desk or a Github bug list you can chose from, or perhaps you are assigned the task. Perhaps it tracks your time, calculates the cost, and takes a snapshot of your screen every ten seconds to make sure you’re not on Twitter – but in principle it’s just a machine streamlining the process of communicating (and recording) instructions. Alerts are similar but automated: for instance ‘the printer is out of paper’, or ‘the hydroelectric dam is about to collapse if you don’t open a sluice gate’. It’s communication, but the manager in this instance is a sensor of some sort, and it’s doing a job that a human probably can’t even do.

Interface machine management, as used by Uber, is a shade different because it acts as an interpreterbetween consumer and worker. The consumer creates a command, ‘I want a lift’, and the machine reinterprets that into instructions for workers, who compete to do the task. Finally, the consumer takes on the role of manager, writing the worker’s job assessment and inadvertently helping collectively decide how likely the driver is to stay in the job or not.

So humans are still vital. But the machine has become line manager, while the consumer has become empowered by the machine to have the final signoff, irrespective of their expertise. This fits within a ‘customer is always right’ sort of business, but less so in one full of drunk people arguing with taxi drivers about the quickest way home.

Putting aside such a disempowerment of the worker to the benefit of the consumer—we live under capitalism after all—the more concerning aspect is the massive empowerment of the machine in the process. Ultimately the software is answerable only to the management of Uber—not to the workers or even the consumers—i.e. the software is not answerable to any humans who are directly involved in each transaction.

It will always be part of the company’s legal obligations to their shareholders to keep maximising possible profit, regardless of the consequences to the humans involved. Although this is nothing new, traditionally that hard edge has been softened by the natural compassion of the people involved, capable of using judgement (“Your partner is in the hospital? Please take the rest of the evening off”). When the machine is our boss, and that machine is programmed solely to serve shareholder interests, there is less hope for compassion as that’s a programming cost with little economic benefit (so we’d get the review: “driver was quiet and moody, tried to tell me their life story, would NOT recommend”).

To conclude: The promised disintermediation of management structures – with web 2’s End of the Middleman potentially becoming Web 3’s End of the Middle Manager – will empower machines and software over the worker and consumer to unimaginable levels. Where those pieces of software are designed to serve solely a CEO’s corporate responsibility to maximise returns for shareholders, this empowerment offers considerable social, health and environmental risks, and at a speed of growth that will outpace lawmakers. However, if the software is answerable instead to the workers (and perhaps consumers) it manages and serves, then the considerable efficiencies, user-experience, and flexible working benefits that this shift could bring could be cause for a certain level of hope.

A cooperative rethink

As has been demonstrated by the Amazon workers sprinting around warehouses trying not to lose their jobs by meeting their numerical targets, machine-led human management feels like the harbinger of a dystopian sci-fi nightmare, somewhere between Terminator and Modern Times. A natural response might be : “such systems must be resisted, and the only answer must be to avoid them, boycott them or legislate against them”, a bit like some politicians’ understandable – if deluded – desire to outlaw any form of encryption.

But what if taxi software had been written with priorities other than maximising profits, growth and shareholder satisfaction—and instead a set of social values:

• Personal. Prioritising driver mental and physical health in a job that traditionally sees high levels of heart attacks because so much time is spent sitting down, while providing a secure level of income with flexible working hours.

• Social. By training drivers in basic first aid and intervention, to empower them to help, or get help, for vulnerable people on the street, and potentially act as first-movers to anyone in distress or needing a quick exit.

• Environmental. To reduce the number of cars on the road by a certain percent through car-pooling and lift sharing (experiments show reduced congestion by some 50%).

This fits into the model of win-win-win (W3?) enterprise where the personal, collective and planetary benefits each more than offset any social, individual or environmental costs. It also fits comfortably with the social values embedded within much of the cooperative world.

Cooperatives offer a further benefit unique to this culture shift of empowered machines. If software is to become the worker’s direct line-manager, then by letting the worker in turn be the machine’s line-manager a positive feedback loop can be created where bugs, injustices and problems within the software can be ironed out—in a humane, worker- and person-centric way.

But how does something like this get created without the VC support that backs startups and pushes them through rigorous development to be launch ready, then through rapid growth and into IPO? While there are countless open source projects proposing enviro-social benefits (from the Fairphone to Precious Plastic, many struggle to raise the capital and scale sufficiently to offer a convincing alternative to mainstream approaches.

So if there is one question to answer, it is not whether uberfication of the majority of industries is increasing (it seems to be), or whether worker- and user-owned coops can offer a more socially responsible and humane counter to this model (of course they do)… it’s how to finance and build software that can rival shareholder-owned, VC and IPO-driven alternatives.

Engineering better online cooperation

It would be over-ambitious in this article to offer a single proposal to solving that challenge. Indeed, the act of answering that question may need to take the form of some engaged form of doing, i.e. only in trying to build such coops may the pitfalls and perils be understood and resolved.

There’s a considerable and demonstrable demand for better digital tools to support traditional coops…

There’s a secondary issue: as well as creating a new environment and techno-legal structures to facilitate digital-cooperative-Ubers, YouTubes or Facebooks, there’s a considerable and demonstrable demand for better digital tools to support traditional coops with everything from fundraising, transparency, communication, management and decision making. While this is a much different set of needs, the spectrum of digital tools around coops needs to encompass that which can support the 100,000 member ‘legacy’ coop, the small vegetable shop that wants to integrate their checkout system with their membership system, and the new Uber that wants every account holder to be a shareholder.

Rather than trying to solve all these problems at once, a sensible approach might be to create the environment for multiple people and coops to start trying to solve different parts of these problems at the same time—collaborating and sharing code, costs, information or ideas where it is useful, and trusting that the outcomes will start to materialise when sufficient numbers of smart people are resourced and networked together to try and tackle some of these problems. In other words, for there to be an incubator, with a core set of requirements, a guiding vision and core projects and APIs, but sufficient room for a range of outcomes and approaches to emerge in parallel.

This approach may help cover some of the main cultural and structural questions:

• The agile and lean startup, typically driven by headstrong individuals with a small team, vs the democratic, board-accountable and sometimes bulky large coop or public body. Greater scale typically means a slower process and more inefficiency and greater democracy can increase those tendencies (or seem to).

• Full democratic open source, where anyone can submit code or fork, as in Linux, vs the (benevolent) dictatorship management model of Apple, where user-journey and experience is put ahead of any other considerations; the two extremes of software development practice as we currently know it

• Following from this, the choice between a platform that is focused, elegant and easy to use, vs one that can serve all the different needs many different coops might have.

• And, perhaps most key, whether to build on the work of those who have gone before or to start from scratch? In other words, CiviCRM has the advantage that it works across Drupal, Joomla and WordPress – it’s free, open source and has a large active community of developers and users and countless extensions for different needs from Direct Debit to HR Management. But it’s large, demanding, sometimes problematic, and if built from scratch today would have a much different and lighter architecture.

These four questions represent a version of the age old tension between the conservative and radical, the orthodox and innovative. It may be helpful to keep that tension (aka Woody vs Buzz Lightyear) as an operating condition rather than choosing one side, but to ensure that tension fuels serious, positive and responsible innovation, rather than keeping it forever trapped at committee stage or plunging into rapid innovation without considering the wider socio-enviro-personal impacts. Either way, it’s likely the solutions will be found in the doing.

Photo by timlewisnm

The post Can Cooperatives Build Better Online Tools to Disrupt the Disrupters? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The moment we stop optimizing the digital economy for the growth of capital, and optimize it for the circulation of value between people, everything will start to get better really fast.”

Another eye-opening interview with our friend Douglas Rushkoff. This one was conducted by Jesse Hicks and originally published at The Kernell.

For more than two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has provided incisive commentary on our increasingly connected, digitized, and corporatized world. From Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace to Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back to his newest, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, he’s chronicled both the promise and the peril of of a global society being remade by the Internet and high-tech corporations.

In his new work he argues that, appearances to the contrary, today’s online colossi—think Facebook, Google, Apple, and the like—haven’t truly revolutionized our economy. Instead, they’ve reproduced the Industrial Age corporation at a global scale, with all the benefits of digital innovation. At heart, though, they’re still designed to extract value and to pursue growth above all else. That mission, he argues, is becoming increasingly untenable, and for perhaps the first time there’s an alternative: companies that leverage technology to spread abundance rather than hoard wealth to themselves. But making that happen first requires rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what corporations do—and why they exist.

Via email just prior to his book launch at SXSW, we discussed why our global economy is stuck in an Industrial Age mindset, why Wall Street considers Twitter a failure, and why Silicon Valley needs to start building companies that aren’t just meant to be sold for a healthy return on investment.

What made you write a book about the failings of the digital economy?

I got the idea the day that Twitter went public, when I saw my friend, one of the co-founders, on the cover of the Wall Street Journal with the number of billions he made that day. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sorry for him. Yes, he was rich, and he had disrupted the communications industry—but he was surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry on the block: finance.

Worse, Twitter would have to somehow deliver impossible returns to its new investors. They were demanding growth. So even today, Twitter—which earns half a billion dollars a quarter—is considered an abject failure by Wall Street.

Worst of all, this obligation to grow has turned otherwise promising companies into extractive monopolies. In order to grow, they use scorched-earth practices that take value from people and places and turn it into capital for their shareholders. This growth mandate is cause for the increasing disparity of wealth, and it has been energized and accelerated by digital technology. Digital technology was supposed to distribute this wealth to more people, not impoverish the many for the wealth of a few.

The main target of your critique is what you call “the growth trap.” Since at least the birth of the corporation, you argue, our economic thinking has been dominated by an unrelenting drive for growth: Companies have to continue to extract more and more value in order to be seen as successful. You suggest that we’ve reached a point where this is no longer tenable—and that digital technology in particular can enable a new way of thinking. Can you explain the growth trap and how it undergirds our current thinking?

Well, it takes a whole book to explain this properly, because the requirement for companies to grow really traces all the way back to the institution of interest-bearing currency, which requires that the economy grow in order for that interest to be paid back.

Today, the equivalent of those bankers are shareholders. They expect not just interest, but tremendous returns on their initial investments. They witnessed the success of Facebook and Google and want those sorts of returns, too. So they put money into a company like Twitter, and then expect to earn back 100 or 1,000 times on their original investment. The fact that Twitter makes 500 million dollars a quarter is considered an abject failure by the investors. And so Twitter must look for some way to “pivot”—that is, change from a super successful company that lets people send 140-character messages, into something else.

Regular companies are in the same position. Pepsi, McDonald’s, Exxon all have shareholders who demand that the share price go up—that the company grow. And the bigger these companies get, the harder it is for them to grow. They are already worth billions of dollars. In fact, corporate profits over total value have been declining for over 75 years.

The CEOs of these companies read my articles about getting out of the growth trap, and they call me begging for the way out. They all know they can’t keep growing at the rate demanded by their shareholders. They can fake it a while, but in the end, these scorched-earth policies just kill the markets and consumers on which they’re depending. Well, in the real end, they end up extracting all the value out of people and places until there’s nothing left.

Growth depends on expansion. Not just that, but on accelerating expansion. You have to grow faster and faster. And it’s just not possible for companies of this size to do that. They must instead learn to pay shareholders with dividends. Run themselves like family businesses, for the long term.

You noted that at the beginning of the Net, there were serious and deeply felt expectations that it might not become, as you’ve characterized it, a strip mall. Today we have “social media” that basically recruits people to become marketers to their friends, and a “sharing economy” driven by the idea that if you’re not monetizing every bit of your time, you’re wasting it. Does it feel different this time—that this time there might be a role for the Net to play in genuinely reimagining our economic world?

Well, the thing that feels different to me is that pretty much everyone sees that it’s not sustainable. How can everyone get paid to advertise? What’s left to advertise? Marketing has never ever accounted for more than 3 or 4 percent of GDP. And now it’s supposed to be our main industry? That, and finance? They’re both abstractions. When we see a company as successful as Twitter failing, we come to understand that the model itself is broken.

As for “sharing,” Uber drivers taught us that this is a crock. The unemployed gig drivers of Uber are now as smart about labor politics as the cabbies from London. Uber’s monopoly and policies have been rendered so transparent.

And yes, while I’m not a techno-solutionist, I do believe that networking technologies could enable much more distributed prosperity. The digital economy, so far, is just corporate industrialism on steroids: extract value from people and places. Digital companies are like software programmed to take currency out of circulation, and deliver it up to shareholders. They could just as easily—more easily, in fact—be optimized to promote the circulation of currency. Most simply stated, less like Amazon, more like eBay. It’s as simple as letting Uber drivers have shares in the company, proportionate to the amount of work they’ve done. And that would be pretty easy to calculate and authenticate with something like a blockchain. Networking technologies are biased toward more distributed solutions. That’s what they were originally built for.

But the real problem here is that our technology development is driven solely by the needs of capital.

The book’s title comes from an incident in which protesters in Oakland, frustrated by the way Silicon Valley companies are remaking the social fabric of San Francisco, threw rocks at the private buses that ferry Google employees to work. What did that event clarify for you, and why do you think those rocks were aimed in the wrong direction?

I don’t know that rocks needed to be thrown in any direction. Not just yet. The original protests did not involve rocks, and were entirely well-founded. Still are. Google and other Silicon Valley companies are behaving like foreign corporations. Workers move into SF, impacting rents, driving local businesses out of the neighborhood. Then they use public bus stops to take private buses to workplaces outside the city.

“The whole ‘startup’ process is really just the old wine of venture capital in a new digital bottle. These companies are built to be sold.”

And this crisis of poor wealth distribution is both real and symbolic of a bigger disappointment we all have with the poorly distributed gains of the digital economic boom. I try not to blame individuals for this—as if there are some mean people making this happen. They’re not mean so much as clueless. They have built very disruptive—positively disruptive— businesses, but haven’t disrupted the economic operating system on which they are operating. They are not truly digital companies so much as industrial companies running on digital steroids.

You point to the popularity of books such as The Second Machine Age as evidence that despite being in an entirely new economic environment, we’re still saddled with thinking from the Industrial Age. Why is that the case, and what’s the new kind of thinking that we ought to be embracing?

It’s only natural for our first response to be reactionary. Most books on how to thrive in a new economy are really about how to maintain a traditional industrial corporation. The whole “startup” process is really just the old wine of venture capital in a new digital bottle. These companies are built to be sold. And their revenue, when they even have it, is based on the company’s ability to extract value—not their ability to create it.

Where do we look for hope that we can shake off dead ideas and adapt to the new environment we’re in the process of creating?

We look for hope right there in the despair. Every person who can’t get a job at a big corporation is another person who gets to figure out how to create and exchange value in the real world. Every person who can’t get a loan is another person willing to consider how alternative currencies, favor banks, and the commons work. Every town whose economy has been trashed by a corporation is another community about to learn that the only things you need for a thriving economy are people with skills and people with needs.

The moment we stop optimizing the digital economy for the growth of capital, and optimize it for the circulation of value between people, everything will start to get better really fast.

Illustration via Max Fleishman

– See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/15982/douglas-rushkoff-throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus-interview/?curator=MediaREDEF#sthash.fn9gVnLQ.dpuf

Photo by designbyfront

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