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PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM

By Trebor Scholz

ROSALUXEMBURGSTIFTUNGNEW YORK OFFICE

Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy

Table of Contents

Building a Digital Economy We Own. By the Editors........................................................................1

Platform Cooperativism Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy............................................................................2

By Trebor Scholz

The Sharing Economy Stops........................................................................................................4

Every Uber has an unter................................................................................................4 New Dependencies and New Command....................................................................5 GeneratingProfitsfortheFew.....................................................................................6

Illegality as a Method.....................................................................................................7

Amazon is Joining the Sharing Economy....................................................................................8

TheRiseofPlatformCooperativism.........................................................................................10

TowardaTypologyofPlatformCo-ops....................................................................................14

Cooperatively Owned Online Labor Brokerages and Market Places....................15 City-OwnedPlatformCooperatives...........................................................................15 Produser-ownedPlatforms........................................................................................16 Union-BackedLaborPlatforms..................................................................................17 Co-operativesfromWithin..........................................................................................17 ThePlatformasProtocol.............................................................................................17 10PrinciplesforPlatformCooperativism.................................................................18

The Cooperative Eco System.....................................................................................................21

ForAllPeople..............................................................................................................................26

PublishedbytheRosaLuxemburgStiftung,NewYorkOffice,January2016

Editors: StefanieEhmsenandAlbertScharenbergAddress: 275MadisonAvenue,Suite2114,NewYork,NY10016Email:[email protected];Phone:+1(917)409-1040

WithsupportfromtheGermanForeignOffice TheRosa Luxemburg Foundation is an internationally operating, progressivenon-profit institutionforciviceducation.Incooperationwithmanyorganizationsaroundtheglobe,itworksondemocraticandsocialparticipation,empowermentofdisadvantagedgroups,alternativesforeconomicandsocialdevelopment,andpeacefulconflictresolution.

TheNewYorkOfficeservestwomajortasks:toworkaroundissuesconcerningtheUnitedNationsandtoengage indialoguewithNorthAmericanprogressives inuniversities,unions,socialmovements,and politics.

www.rosalux-nyc.org

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Building a Digital Economy We Own

The“sharingeconomy”wasn’tsupposedtobethisway.Aidedbythetinycomputersmostofuscarrywithusallday,everyday,wewouldbefreefromtheburdensofownershipandmakingmoneyinourspare time by renting out our unused possessions. The vison was—or at least appeared to be—an idealisticone.Evenbeforetheyenterkindergarten,everychildlearnsthevalueofsharing,andherewerethebeneficentforcesofSiliconValleybringingusinnovativenewtoolstostrengthenourcom-munities,disruptoutdatedwaysofdoingbusiness,andmaybeevenreduceourcarbonfootprints.

Therealityturnedouttobea littledifferent.Sure,Uberandits ilkofferremarkableconvenienceandanearlymagicaluserexperience,buttheirinnovationliesjustasmuchinevadingregulationsasindevelopingnewtechnology.Behindtheappsliesanarmyofcontractworkerswithoutthepro-tectionsofferedtoordinaryemployees,muchlessthebackingofaunion.Thisneweconomyisnotreallyaboutsharingatall.Rather,asTreborScholzarguesinthisstudy,itisanon-demandserviceeconomy that is spreading market relations deeper into our lives.

With thesenewmiddlemensuckingprofitsoutofpreviouslyun-monetized interactions, creatingnewformsofhyper-exploitation,andspreadingprecaritythroughouttheworkforce,whatcanwedo?Scholzinsiststhatweneednotjustresistancebutapositivealternative.Hecallsthisalternative“platform cooperativism,”which encompasses newownershipmodels for the Internet. Platformcooperativisminsiststhatwe’llonlybeabletoaddressthemyriadillsofthesharingeconomy—thatistosayplatformcapitalism—bychangingownership,establishingdemocraticgovernance,andre-invigoratingsolidarity. Inthispaper,Scholzbreatheslifeintothisideabydescribingbothactuallyexisting andpossible examplesofplatform co-ops, outliningbasicprinciples for fairly operatinglaborplatformsontheInternet,andsuggestingnextsteps.

TreborScholzhaslivedandworkedinco-opsforoveradecade.TheauthorofThe Internet as Play-ground and Factory(2013)andUberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Econ-omy (2016, forthcoming), Scholz is an associate professor at TheNew School,where he teachescoursesonInternetandsociety.TogetherwithNathanSchneider,hehasbeenfocusedoncreatingacampaigntochallengethesystemofvalueextractionthatfuelsthe“sharingeconomy.”InNovem-ber2015,TheNewSchoolhosted“PlatformCooperativism:TheInternet,Ownership,Democracy,”whichbroughttogethermorethanonethousandpeopletoplanttheseedsforanewkindofonlineeconomy.Theresultsofthisconferencearereflectedinthisstudy.

Platformcooperativismispossible,anditisnecessary,butitisbynomeansinevitable.Thecurrentownersofonlineplatformsarewillingtoofferusseeminglyeverythingexceptownership.Itistimeforustoinsteadcreateanonlineeconomybasedindemocracyandsolidarity.

Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert ScharenbergCo-Directors of New York Office, January 2016

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Platform CooperativismChallenging the Corporate Sharing Economy

By Trebor Scholz

Among all the problems with 21st-centurywork — theballooningofthelowwageservicesector, economic inequality, the crumbling ofworkerrights — themainproblemreallyisthatthere are so few realistic alternatives. Whathasbeenmissing from thedebate about thefutureofworkisanapproachthatofferspeo-ple something that they can wholeheartedly embrace. This is what this essay is about. First,Iwillreflectontheopportunities,pitfalls,and consequences of the sharing economy. IamusingthecaseofAmazon.com,whichhasfirmlyenteredthe“sharingeconomy.”Second,Iwilldescribetheriseofplatformcooperativismandofferexamplesofreallyexistingaswellasimaginaryplatformco-ops.WhatIcallplatform cooperativism is about democratic ownership models for the Internet. Third, I’ll outline tenprinciples for labor platforms that are bring-ing fairness toworkon laborplatforms. Iwillconcludewithreflectionsaboutpossiblenextstepsforthismovementinthemaking.

The Consequences of the Sharing Economy. They called it the gig economy, thepeer economy,the sharing economy. It took a while to ac-knowledge that the sharing economy was really an on-demand service economy that set out to monetize services that were previously private. It is true that there are undeniable opportuni-ties for students, educatedworkers betweenjobs,andeveryonewhoownsasecondhome.Now,it’seasierforcollegegraduatestolandagigassembling furnitureor renovatingsome-one’s house. Consumers, raised with a keenappreciation of low prices and uber-conve-

nienceaboveallelse,welcometheseupstarts.But should we understand the sharing econ-omyasaroadsignpointingtoabetter,moreflexiblefutureofwork?Whathasthiseconomyreally brought us? WelcometothePotemkinVillagesofthe“shar-ingeconomy”whereyoucanfinallysellthefruitfrom the trees in your garden to yourneigh-bors,shareacarride,rentatreehouseinRed-woodForest,orvisitaKinkbnb.Your friendlyconvenienceis,formanyworkers,alow-wage,precarious trap. But you, on the other hand,canlistentoyourveryownSpotifyaccountinanUbertaxi.NolongerdoyouhavetosufferfromwhateconomistGeorgeAkerlofpenneda“marketforlemons;”1thesenewplatformsareintroducingnewchecksandbalances.Youarepromotedtomiddlemanagement,entitledtofireyourdriver.Companiesevenfoundawaytosuckfinancialvalueoutofyourinteractionswith everyday objects, recruiting them as in-formantsforsurveillancecapitalism. Oh-so-cool laborcompanies likeHandy,Post-mates,andUbercelebratetheirAndyWarholmoment,their15billiondollarsoffame.Theyrevel inthefactthattheylaunchedtheirplat-formmonopoliesintheabsenceofaphysicalinfrastructureof theirown. Just likeAOLandAT&Tdidn’tbuild the Internet,andMittRom-neydidnotbuildhisbusinessallbyhimself,2

1 George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: QualityUncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quar-terly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500,doi:10.2307/1879431.

2 “Review & Outlook: ‘You Didn’t Build That’,” The Wall Street Journal,July19,2012,www.wsj.com.

TREBOR SCHOLZPLATFORM COOPERATIVISM

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mand,supply,andprofitbyaddingathickicingofbusinessontoapps–baseduserinteractions.Theyareextendingthederegulatedfreemar-ketintopreviouslyprivateareasofourlives.

The “sharing economy” is portrayed as a har-binger for the post-work society— the pathto ecologically sustainable capitalism where Googlewillconquerdeathitself,andyoudon’thave to worry about a thing. With the slogan “What’sMineisYours,”theTrojanhorseofthesharing economy rids us of Jurassic forms oflaborwhileunleashinga colossal union-bust-ing machine; passing over especially agingworkers.TheGermanauthorByung-ChulHanframes the current moment as Fatigue So-ciety.7Weare living,hewrites, inanachieve-ment-oriented society that is allegedly free,determinedbythecallof“yeswecan.”Initially,thiscreatesafeelingoffreedombutsoonitisaccompaniedbyanxiety,self-exploitation,anddepression. Importantly, we cannot have this discussionwithout first acknowledging that the “sharingeconomy” isnotsomesortof isolatedshrink-wrappedcubein“cyberspace,”it’sjustanotherreflectiononcapitalismandthemassiveatlasofdigitallaborpractices.Consequently,wecan-nothaveaconversationaboutlaborplatformswithoutfirstacknowledging that theydependon exploited human lives all along their glob-al supply chains, starting with the hardwarewithout which this entire “weightless” economy wouldsinktothebottomoftheocean.

All the beloved Apple devices cannot be consid-ered without first reminding ourselves of thelabor conditions at what Andrew Ross called the “Foxconn’ssuicidemills”inShenzhen,China.Ortake the rare earth minerals in the Democratic Republicof theCongo; it is essential to followthesupplychainsthatfacilitateallthoseseem-inglycleanandglamorousdigitallifestyles.

7 Byung-ChulHan,Mudigkeitsgesellschaft.Berlin:Matthes&SeitzBerlin,2010.

thefirms in theon-demandeconomydidnotbuildtheirempireseither.Theyarerunningoffyourcar,yourapartment, yourlabor,your emo-tions,andimportantly, your time. They are lo-gisticscompanies that requireparticipants topay up to the middleman. We are turned into assets;thisisthefinancializationoftheevery-day3.0. In What’s Yours is Mine,theCanadianresearch-erTomSleesumsitup:

Many well-intentioned people suffer from a mis-placed faith in the intrinsic abilities of the Internet to promote egalitarian community and trust, and so have unwittingly aided and abetted this accu-mulation of private fortune, and the construction of new and exploitative forms of employment.3

At the Platform Cooperativism conference4 John Duda of the Democracy Collaborativestatedthat:

The ownership of the institutions that we depend on to live, to eat, to work is increasingly concen-trated. Without democratizing our economy we will just not have the kind of society that we want to have, or that we claim to have, we are just not going to be a democracy. The Internet is certainly not helping! It is fueled by short-term thinking, cor-porate profits; it is directed by venture capital andit’s contributing to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Wherever the tech econo-my is rampant, housing becomes totally unafford-able. We need to reverse that trend.5

Occupations that cannot be offshored — thepet walker or home cleaner — are becomingsubsumed under what Sasha Lobo6 and Martin Kenneycallplatform capitalism. Baby boomers are losing sectors of the economy like trans-portation, food, and various other sectors,tomillennialswhofiercelyrushtocontrolde-

3 TomSlee,What’s Yours Is Mine.NewYorkCity:ORBooks,2015.

4 platformcoop.net.5 vimeo.com/149401422.6 Sascha Lobo, “Sascha Lobo: Sharing Economywie bei

UberistPlattform-Kapitalismus,”SpiegelOnline,March9,2014,www.spiegel.de.


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Thereisamassofbodieswithoutaname,hid-denbehindthescreen,exposedtoworkplacesurveillance, crowd fleecing, wage theft, andproprietarysoftware.Asthefreesoftwareac-tivistMickyMetts cautioned: “When buildingplatforms,youcannotbuildfreedomonsome-one else’s slavery.”8

Whenrespondingtoapoliticalcritiqueoftheon-demand economy, some scholars posethat, well, the terrible results of unfetteredcapitalism are well understood; that wholeMarxist spiel does not need to be asserted yet another time. But perhaps, asMcKenzieWark claimed: “This is not capitalism, this issomething worse.” He suggested that “themodeofproductionweappeartobeenteringisonethatisnotquitecapitalismasclassical-ly described.”9

8 livestream.com/internetsociety/platformcoop/vid-eos/105663835.

9 McKenzieWark, “DigitalLaborandtheAnthropocene,”DIS Magazine, accessed November 24, 2015, dismaga-zine.com.

This isn’tmerely a continuationof pre-digitalcapitalismasweknowit,therearenotabledis-continuities—new levels of exploitation andconcentrationofwealthforwhichIpennedtheterm crowdfleecing. Crowdfleecing is a newformofexploitation,putinplacebyfourorfiveupstarts,todrawonaglobalpoolofmillionsofworkers in real time. The current situation needs to be discussed at thefoldofintensifiedformsofexploitationon-line and also older economies of unpaid andinvisiblework—thinkof Silva Frederici, SelmaJames,andMariarosaDallaCosta’s“WagesforHousework” campaignand, in the1980s, cul-turaltheoristDonnaHarrawaydiscussingwaysin which emerging communication technolo-giesallowedfor“homework”tobedisseminat-ed throughout society.

The Sharing Economy Stops

Twentyorthirtyyearsfromnow,whenwearepossiblyfacingtheendofprofessionsandevermorepeople’sjobswillbe“uberized,”wemaywell wake up and wonder why we did not pro-test these shifts more forcefully. Despite allthe scrumptious, home-cooked convenienceofthe“sharingeconomy,”wemayendupshar-ingthescraps,nottheeconomy.Wemayfeelremorsefulaboutnotseekingoutalternativesearlier on. Unsurprisingly, we cannot changewhatwedonotunderstand. So, I amasking,whatdoesthe“sharingeconomy”standfor?

Every Uber has an Unter

The sharing economy indicates a massive,globalpushinfavorof“digitalbridgebuilders”

who insert themselves between those who offerservicesandotherswhoare lookingforthem,therebyembeddingextractiveprocess-es into social interactions. The on-demandeconomy indicates that digital labor is not a nichephenomenon.UpWork(formerlyODeskand Elance) claims to have some 10 millionworkers. Crowdwork 8 million. CrowdFlower5million. In2015, 160,000driversareon theroadforUberifyoutrusttheirnumbers.10Lyftreports50,000drivers.TaskRabbitstatesthatithas30,000workers.11

InGermany,unionslikever.diconcentratetheireffortsondefending the rightsof employeeswhileintheUnitedStates,Iseelittlechancefora return of the 40-hour-work-week for thosein the contingent sector. The question then

10 Rebecca Smith and Sarah Leberstein, Rights on De-mand: Ensuring Workplace Standards and Worker Security

In the On-Demand Economy,September2015,NationalEmploymentLawProject..

11 Ibid.


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becomes,howwecanmake itbetter foronethirdoftheworkforcethat isnottraditionallyemployed. Today’s extractive platform-based businessmodelsmakesomeoftheearlierInternetmon-ey schemes look like Socialist experiments. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Stones at the Google Bus, points out that “Instead ofcreating truly distributive businesses we are justputting industrialeconomicsonsteroids,creatingmoreextremedivisionsofwealthandmore extreme forms of exploitation. We aremaking all these new technologies like Bitcoin or blockchain but we are not really asking what we are programming these things for.”12 The benefitsofplatformcapitalismforconsumers,owners, and stockholders are apparent butthe value added for vulnerable workers andthelong-termvalueforconsumersareunclearat best.

New Dependencies and New Com-mand

It is about the shift from the employee,withhis or herW-2 tax document,13 working a 40hourworkweektoamorecontingentworker,thefreelancerorindependentcontractor,alsosometimes referred to as 109914 or gig work-er.15 In theprocess,workersare loosingmini-mumwage,overtime,andprotectionsthroughemploymentanti-discriminationlaws.Employ-ersalsodon’thavetocontributetoMedicare,unemployment insurance, workers comp, orsocial security payments of their workers.

12 vimeo.com/149979122.13 AW2istheformthatanemployermustsendtoanem-

ployeeandthe InternalRevenueServiceat theendofthe year.

14 A1099formisareportofvarioustypesofincomethata worker may receive throughout the year other than the salary an employer would pay. Contingent workers havetosendthese1099formstotheInternalRevenueService.

15 Aseveryfirst-yearMBAstudentwillknow,employmentisn’t just a single conceptbut it describesabundleofrights and it is those core labor rights that are at risk.

“Whereas traditional employment was like marriage,”legalscholar FrankPasquale writes,“with both parties committed to some lon-ger-term mutual project, the digitized work-forceseeksaseriesofhookups.”16 Energetically projected myths about employment suggestthat working as an employee means that you havetogiveupallflexibilityandthatworkingas an independent contractor somehow inher-entlymeansthatyourworkisflexible.Butthis“innate flexibility” of low-income freelancersshould be put to question because workersdon’texistinavacuum;theyhavetoadapttotheschedulesoftheirvirtualbosses,too. Using the languageofentrepreneurship,flex-ibility, autonomy, and choice, the burden ofthebiggestrisksoflife:unemployment,illness,andold agehavebeen liftedonto the shoul-dersoftheworkers.Platformownersrefertoworkers as Rabbits, Turkers, and Providers!I wonder if Leah Busque, CEO of TaskRabbit,wouldfeelinsultedifyouwouldcallherarab-bit. She’s a head. The trouble is that she owns hermindandtheplatform. Who will be willing to offer employee–likerights for all freelancers, temps, and con-tract workers? Senator Mark Warner of Vir-ginia17 and notably Princeton economist Alan Krueger,amongothers,havesuggestedathirdcategoryofworkerthatisneitheranindepen-dentcontractornoranemployee:theindepen-dent worker.18 This category ofworkerwouldreceivemanyoftheprotectionsthatcamewithemployment. Adifferentresponsetothe lossofbargainingpoweronthesideofworkersintheon-demand

16 Frank Pasquale, “Banana Republic.com” Jotwell: Cyber-law,February11,2011,cyber.jotwell.com.

17 “U.S. Senator Mark Warner on Why We Need a New Class ofWorker (Q&A), Re/code,” accessed November29,2015,recode.net.

18 SethD.HarrisandAlanB.Krueger,“AProposalforMod-ernizingLaborLawsforTwenty-First-CenturyWork:The‘IndependentWorker,’”The Hamilton Project,December2015,www.hamiltonproject.org.


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economycomesfromthecomputerprogram-mer andwriter Steve Randy Waldman who sug-gested that the classification of independentcontractors should be made contingent on the requirements forworkers to “multi-home,” toworkusingseveralplatforms,therebyavoidingthe trappings of single, dominant platformslikeUber.Waldmanunderstands “multi-hom-ing” as bargaining power when it comes to mit-igatingthepowerofmonopolies.19

The sharing economy is Reaganism by other means.Takingastepback,Iarguethatthereisaconnectionbetweentheeffectsofthe“shar-ing economy” and the deliberate shockwaves ofausteritythatfollowedthefinancialcrashin2008.Techbillionaires jumpedright in, ridingon the back of those desperately looking forwork, thereby not only increasing inequalitybut also restructuring the economy in a way thatmakesthisnewwayofworking,deprivedof allworker rights, livable, survivable, or, astheywouldputit:“sustainable.”

The“sharingeconomy”grewoutofthelineageofReaganandThatcherwho,inthe1980sdidnotonlyshutdownthestrikesofminersandflight traffic controllers, they damaged thebelief intheabilityofunionstowatchoutforworkers;theyweakenedthebeliefinthepos-sibilityofsolidarity,andcreatedaframeworkinwhichtherestructuringofwork,thecutsinwelfarechecks,andthedecouplingofproduc-tivityfromincomebecamemoreplausible.

Demands for qualifications are getting everhigherandanxiety,thefearofunemploymentandpovertyhavebecomecentrallifethemesformany youngpeople today. All of this ledto aworldwhere formillennials, the end ofthe world seems more plausible than the end ofcapitalismandtheircareerpaths looklikeautonomous vehicles heading towards Arma-geddon.

19 Steve Waldman, “1099 as Antitrust,” interfluidity, ac-cessedNovember29,2015,www.interfluidity.com.

It’s EliaKazan’sOn theWaterfrontonSpeed;digital day laborers are getting up every morn-ingonly to joinanauctionfor theirowngigs.According to the economist Juliet Schor, thesharing economy increasingly provides access tolow-levelworkfortheeducatedmiddleclasswhocannowdrive taxisandassemble furni-ture in people’s houses while simultaneously displacing low-incomeworkersfromtheseoc-cupations.20

One in three laborers in the American work-force is now an independent contractor, daylaborer,temp,orfreelancer.Thejuryisstilloutwhether or not they would rather return to a worldwitharegularpaycheck,a40-hourwork-week,andsomesocialprotections.

Generating Profits for the Few

The software that is propelling the sharingeconomyiswrappedupinaddictiveinterfacedesign.Onthescreen, theant-sized iconofataxi approaching your location is as seductive yet dangerous as the Sirens who lured Odys-seus;it’sdesignforscale.Onthebusinessside,entrepreneurs and software engineers havecreated new markets. But is this innovation or is there a factory behind the playground?Shouldinnovationbejustaboutprofitsforthefewwhileleavinginitswakeaworkforcethatispredominantlywithoutsufficientsocialprotec-tions?Isinnovationgearedforvalueextractionandgrowthorisitaboutthecirculationofthisvalue between people? Efficiency,inthesameway,isnotavirtuewhenitis,mostofall,builtontheextractionofvalue forshareholdersandowners.Itisinthissenseof taking away value from people that laborcompanies like Amazon, CrowdSpring, andTaskrabbitareneithereffectivenorinnovative.Platformcapitalism,sofar,hasbeenhighlyin-



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effective inaddressingtheneedsofthecom-monwealth. What initially looked like innova-tion,eventuallycrankedupthevolumeonin-comeinequality. With the creation of new occupations in the1099 economy, businesses like Intuit startedtoblossombecausetheirsoftwarehelpsfree-lancers to report their taxes.

Illegality as a Method

IntheUnitedStates,illegalityisamethodofthe“sharingeconomy,”notabug,andtheFederalgovernment,atleastfornow,isnotintervening,leaving thefield (andonlyhope)with themu-nicipalizationofregulation.Thesharingecono-myhasalsobeencriticizedforits“nullificationof federal law,”21 a lackofdignity forworkers,andtheeliminationofworkerrightsanddem-ocratic values like accountability and consent. Firmsinthesharingeconomyfailedtopaytax-es,violatedfederallaws.Theirmodusoperandifollowsapattern.First,companieslikeUbervio-latevariouslaws—anti-discriminationlaws,forinstance—to then point to a growing and keen consumerbase,demandinglegalchanges.Airb-nbspentover$8millionto lobby inSanFran-cisco when residents voted on regulating their operations. Uber spends more money on lobby-iststhanevenWalmart.Significantly,bothUberand Airbnb are using their apps as political plat-formsthatcanbeusedtoactivatetheirclientstoopposeanyregulatoryeffortsagainstthem.

When you learn that Uber drivers in Los Ange-lesaremakingbelowminimumwage;whenyouknow that workers on CrowdFlower and Me-chanical Turk earn no more than two to three dollars an hour; when you understand thatmuch(ifnotmost)ofAirbnb’srevenueinNewYorkCitycomesfromhostswhorentoutentire

21 Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Uber andtheLawlessnessof ‘SharingEconomy’Corporates,”The Guardian,July28,2015.

apartments for less than thirty days22; whenyou are told that startups are sailing around thedefinitionofemploymentby restructuringwork in such a way that the people who are working for themare categorizedas indepen-dent contractors instead of employees; whenyou understand that the status of the inde-pendent contractor voids the protections af-fordedtoworkersbytheFairLaborStandardsAct, when Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb continue torun their businesses in cities that shut down theiroperations;thenyouwillunderstandwhythe government and/ormunicipalities have toact against this “nullification of federal law.”23 In 2015, a Princeton study showed that Uberdriversin20citiesarenettingabout$17.50anhour,which,accordingtodrivers,comesouttoanywherebetween$10and$13anhouraftersubtractingthecostofgasoline,insurance,autopayments,andautomaintenance.24 Los Angeles approveda$15-an-hourminimumwage,which,onceineffect,mightputUberinviolationofthislaw. Now,anyonewithbasicawarenessoftheFairLaborStandardsActof1938wouldsaythatsuchpaymentsmustbeillegallylow;theydon’tmeetminimum-wagestandards. Considering the significant attrition ratesamong Mechanical Turk workers and Uber driv-ers(halfofallUberdriversdonotstaylongerthanoneyear),25itisclearthatthesebusiness,intheircurrentform,arenotsustainable.

IntheU.S.,notdoingrightbyworkers,comesataverylowlegalriskforbusinessowners.TheU.S.Department of Labor, being strategically

22 Tom Slee. What’s Yours Is Mine.NewYorkCity:ORBooks,2015.

23 Pasquale, Frank, and Siva Vaidhyanathan. “Uber andtheLawlessnessof ‘SharingEconomy’Corporates.”The Guardian,July28,2015.

24 HarrisandKrueger,“AProposalforModernizingLaborLaws forTwenty-First-CenturyWork:The ‘IndependentWorker.’”

25 In2015,morethanhalfofallUberdriversdonotstaylonger with the company than twelve months. To learn more,readStevenHill’sRaw Deal. How the “Uber Econo-my” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Work-ers.


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understaffedas it is, is basically incapableofpursuingcompanieswhoareviolatingFederalLabor law. And even in the unlikely case that theyaregettingcaught,allcorporationshaveto do is to pay workers what they owe them. There’s somehope. Inone recentdecision, aFederal judge found that anUber driverwasan employee and not an independent contrac-tor,forexample.26AndalsoLyftandevenYelpworkers are filing lawsuits to become recog-nized as employees.27 In the fall of 2015, thecityofSeattleopenedthedoorfortheunion-izationofUberdrivers.28And around the same time,anunlikely coalitionof startupsandor-ganized labor published a document29outlining

26 Mike Isaac and Natasha Singer, “California Says UberDriver Is Employee, Not a Contractor,” The New York Times,June17,2015.

27 “Judge Not At All Impressed By Class Action Lawsuit Claiming Yelp Reviewers Are Really Employees,” ac-cessedNovember24,2015,www.techdirt.com.

28 “CoalitionofStart-UpsandLaborCallforRethinkingofWorkerPolicies,”The New York Times Blog,November9,2015.

29 “TaxiRegulations,E-HailAppTargetedByMontgomeryCountyCouncil,”WAMU 88.5,June8,2015,wamu.org.

necessary social protections forworkers thatareneededforthedigitaleconomytothrive.28 IftheFederalGovernmentwillhavethepolit-ical will to introduce new worker protections remains to be seen. Onthe localandstate level, someregulatoryeffortsareunderway.InMontgomeryCounty,for instance, theMarylandGeneralAssemblydecidedtoregulateUberandLyftbyimposinga$.25chargeforeachtripwiththosecompa-nies. The revenue will then be used to offermore accessible taxicab services for eligiblesenior citizens and low-income residents.29

MayorDeBlasio isworkingtocurbthesizeoftheUberfleetinthestreetsofNewYorkCity.

Amazon is Joining the Sharing Economy

Amazon.com,stillbarelyabovethelegaldrink-ingage, isoneof theoldestcompanies inthisdigitaleconomy.Andnow,itisjoiningthe“shar-ing economy.” Amazon’s book section started in1994buttoday,Amazon,notunlikeUber,hasbecome a template for countless other busi-nesses.Thecruelgenieisoutofthebottle,thebusiness logic of crowdsourcing systems likeAmazon Mechanical Turk is now being adapted bycompanieslikeCrowdFlower,99Designs,andhundreds of others. Amazon inserted itself inthesharingeconomywithenterpriseslikeFlex,a crowd sourced delivery service that uses reg-ularpeople,notlegacycouriers,todeliverpack-ages.30 It also launched HomeServices, which

places the company squarely in the middlewhen you order an electrician or plumber. And thenthereisalsoHandMade-at-Amazon,whichis directly taking on Etsy.30

Since 2005, Amazon operates an online laborbrokerage called Amazon Mechanical Turk,whereworkerscanlogontopickfromlonglist-ings of tasks. Similar to traditional piecemealworkinthegarmentindustry,MechanicalTurkallows for a project to be broken down intothousands of bits, which is then assigned toso-calledcrowdworkers.Oftenwell-educated,novice workers are making between two and three dollars an hour in this environment. Just likemigrantworkers,barristers,ortempsinthefastfoodindustry,theyareworkinglonghours,are underpaid and treated poorly by their virtu-albosses,andhavefewornobenefits.

One would think that in a rich and democrat-ic country such as theUnited States, workers

30 flex.amazon.com.


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would be legally protected against such abuse and that operations like Uber would be imme-diatelypowereddown.WewitnessedofficialsinParis indicting two Uber executives31 and cities like Rio de Janeiro are banning the company and alsoenforcesuchruling.32IntheUnitedStates,notmuchisdoneinthefaceofthesecompaniesfloutingfederallawandmunicipalregulations. Wagetheft,forexample,isadailyoccurrenceon AmazonMechanical Turk, which explicitlytolerates this practice. Consignors can rejectaccurately executed work and then avoid pay-ment.Thepurposeoftheplatform,itssystem-ic logic is expressed through its architecture anddesign,aswell as its termsofuse.Wagetheftisafeature,notabug. Amazon.com is indeed a good example—it is part of the monoculture of large, publiclytraded, profit maximizing companies with amissiontocreatereturnsforstockholders. Itisthefiduciarydutyofsuchcompaniestocre-ateevermoreshareholdervalue,togrowandserveplatformowners. Theuber-convenience,speed,price,andover-all dominance of Amazon makes it hard forus not to turn a blind eye to the fact that inthe shadow of our convenience linger heftysocial costs for workers. In one of Amazon’swarehouses in Germany, for instance, thecompany tracked logistics workers and repri-manded them for even the shortest periodsof inactivity with so-called inactivity reports.Surveillance technologies and supervisors are keepingtrackofevenoneortwominutelongchats between two workers and longer disap-pearances in the restroom.33 After two suchdigressions,breaksofanywherebetweenoneandnineminutes,workerscangetfired.Andof

31 Sam Schechner, “Two Uber Executives Indicted inFrance,”Wall Street Journal,June30,2015,www.wsj.com.

32 “RiodeJaneiroBecomesFirstCityinBraziltoBanUber,”The Guardian,September2015.

33 “Amazon′s ′inactivity Protocols′ under Fire,” Deutsche Welle,March13,2015,www.dw.com.

course that’s not only happening in Amazon’s “fulfillmentcenters” inGermany. It is theTay-lorist logic pushed to an extreme that doesn’t even make any business sense. It’s an absolute densification of work, as labor scholar Ursula Huws put it.34 In addition, the U.S. SupremeCourt issued a ruling stating that the mandato-rysecurityscreeningofworkersleavingthesewarehouses doesn’t need to be compensated asovertimedespitethefactthatworkersneedtostandinlineforanywherebetween30and40minutes every single day.35 Legislation fa-vors publically traded companies. But misery is not limited to warehouse work-ers,crowdworkers,itequallyaffectsAmazon’swhite-collarworkers.Wecanshedmore lightonthespiritofJeffBezos,theCEOofAmazon,whotoldagroupofpublishersinabrutalface-off that “Amazonshouldapproachpublishersthe way a cheetah would pursue sickly ga-zelle.”36 It is this spirit that the company also brings to itswhite-collarworkers, its accoun-tants,marketers,andengineers.Thiswas re-vealedthroughthe“InsideAmazon”NewYorkTimes exposé that quoted one executive inAmazon’s book marketing division as saying that“nearlyeverypersonIworkedwith,Isawcry at their desk.”37

Amazonhasbecomeknownforitsunfairlaborconditions but it is by no means an exception within the sharing economy and beyond. No-bodyiswatchingoutforworkersbutwithev-ery worker that ismistreated, there are alsomore people who are pushing for a people–centered Internet.

34 UrsulaHuws,Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cy-bertariat Comes of Age.NewYork:MonthlyReviewPress,2014.

35 Alison Griswold, “Supreme Court Decides AmazonWorkersDon’tNeedtoBePaidWhileWaitingforMan-datorySecurityScreenings,”Slate,December9,2014, www.slate.com.

36 DavidStreitfeld,“ANewBookPortraysAmazonasBully,”The New York Times Blog,October22,2013.

37 JodiKantorandDavidStreitfeld,“InsideAmazon:Wres-tling Big Ideas in a BruisingWorkplace,” The New York Times, August15,2015.


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Thegrowthof thecontingentsector thathadbeen under way for decades, but with the“sharing economy” it gained significant mo-mentumin2008,whenswathsofpeoplehadtofindalternatestreamsofincome. Andthat’swhy,inthesecondpartofthisstudy,I ask ifwe have to continue to rely solely ondigitalinfrastructuresthataredesignedtoex-tractprofitforaverysmallnumberofplatformowners and shareholders. Imean, is it reallyinconceivabletoescapethelikesofUber,Face-book,andCrowdFlower? A People’s Internet is possible! A coalition ofdesigners, workers, artists, cooperatives, de-velopers, inventive unions, labor advocatescan shift structures so that everybody canreapthefruitsoftheirownlabor.

SiliconValley lovesagooddisruption, so let’sgive themone.What follows isacall toplacethepeopleatthecenterofvirtualhiringhalls

andturnprofitsintosocialbenefit.It’sacalltocity councils to consider running businesses likeAirbnbthemselves.Historically,Americancities used to own and operate hotels and hos-pitals and some still do. It’s time to revisit that history. In themid-1960s in NYC, it was Fluxus artistGeorge Maciunas who started to form artistcooperatives motivated by his own precarious situation.Intoday’sNewYorkCity,itisartistslikeCarolineWoolardwhousethelogicofarttotransformtheirownlivingsituationandthatofothers.38

ItispossibletoescapeFacebook,CrowdFlower,and Google. Corporate imperatives like growth andprofitmaximization are not the only op-tion.It’stoohardtofixwhatyoudonotown.Thefightforprivacyandthestruggleforhigh-erwagesofcrowdworkersareimportantbutcooperativeownershipmodelsoftheInternetwouldaddressmanyoftheseissues.

The Rise of Platform Cooperativism

We need to build an economy and an Internet that works for all. How can we take lessons fromthe long and exciting history of cooperatives and

38bring them into the digital age?39

Where shall/should you/one start/begin? 51 percentofAmericansmakelessthan$30,00040 ayearand76percenthavenosavingsatall.41 From 2000-2010, the median income in theUnitedStatesdeclined7%whenadjusted for

38 carolinewoolard.com.39 John Duda at “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet,

Ownership,Democracy,”vimeo.com/149401422.40 “GoodbyeMiddleClass:51PercentOfAllAmericanWork-

ersMakeLessThan30,000DollarsAYear,”Washington’s Blog,October21,2015,www.washingtonsblog.com.

41 Angela Johnson, “76% of Americans Are Living Pay-check-to-Paycheck,”CNNMoney, June 24, 2013,money.cnn.com.

inflation.42Intermsofsocialwellbeinganden-vironmentalsustainability,formoreandmorepeople, capitalism is no longer working out.So,let’sthinkabouthowtheInternetcouldbeownedandgoverneddifferentlyandhowsol-idarity could be strengthened in the process. MycollaboratorNathanSchneiderasked,“canSilicon Alley do things more democratically thanSiliconValley?” Whetheryouarethinkingaboutsecurejobs,min-imumwage, safety,health insurance,pensionfunds—noneoftheseissuescanbeaddressed

42 E.G.Nadeau,The Cooperative Solution: How the United States Can Tame Recessions, Reduce Inequality, and Protect the Environment. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,2012.


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fundamentally without the reorganization ofwork,withoutstructuralchange.Noneoftheseissues can be addressed effectively until wereinvigoratesolidarity,changeownership,andintroduce democratic governance. “Old school” companies typically give workers as little as they can get away with. The distrust inthewillingnessofownersandstockholderstowatchoutfortheworkers,thedistrustintheold, extractive model, the economics of sur-veillance,andmonopoly,andtheproliferationof the workplace without borders, led manypeople to revive the spirit of cooperativism.Whatarethelong-termprospectsforplatformcooperatives? Aren’t cooperatives an outlived organizationalmodel forwork?Anybodywhoismakingthatclaim,shouldfirstconsiderthatworldwide,thesolidarityeconomyisgrowing;cooperatives employ more people than all multinationals combined.43 Democratic Presi-dentialcandidate,U.S.SenatorBernieSandersofVermont,ispromotingworker-ownershipasonepracticablewaytomoveforward.44Today,coops employ 900,000 people in the UnitedStates.45 In her book Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes the Black experience in co-operatives in the U.S. as one of activism,groundedintheexperienceofthestruggleforhuman rights. The Japanese consumer cooper-ativeunionserves31%ofthenation’shouse-holdsandMondragon,Spain’sseventhlargestindustrialcorporation,isanetworkofcooper-atives that in 2013, employed 74,061 people.EmiliaRomagna, anarea in Italy thatencour-agedemployeeownership,consumercooper-atives,andagriculturalcooperatives,haslow-er unemployment than other regions in Italy.46

43 ThestatisticsinthisparagrapharetakenfromMarjorieKelly’sOwning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revo-lution.

44 Dave Johnson, “Bernie Sanders Proposes To BoostWorker-Ownership Of Companies,” Common Dreams,August18,2015.

45 E.G.Nadeau,The Cooperative Solution,37.46 dept.kent.edu/oeoc/oeoclibrary/emiliaromagnalong.

40%of agriculture inBrazil and36%of retailmarketsinDenmarkaremadeupofcoopera-tives,accordingtoKelly.45%oftheGDPofKen-yaand22%oftheGDPofNewZealandcomefromcooperatives.Despitemany setbacks, itwouldbehard to successfully argue that thecooperative model is done with. In the United Kingdom, for example, therearecurrently200,000peopleworkinginmorethan 400 worker cooperatives. In Berlin, citi-zensarecurrentlyformingutility–cooperativesto buy and operate the city’s power grid.47 In theGermancityofSchönau,anothersuchcon-sumer-cooperativerunsandoperatesboththepowergridandthegassupplyforthatcity. For2016,NewYorkCityCouncilMember MariadelCarmenArroyoreportsthatNewYorkCityapproved a $2.1 million Worker CooperativeBusinessDevelopmentInitiativeforthecity.48 In 2015,women almost exclusively operated thecoalition of 24 worker-owned cooperatives inNYC. Low-wageworkerswho joined these co-operativessawtheirhourlyratesincreasefrom$10to$25overthepasttwoyears. Undoubtedly,thechallengesforallco-opsarevast.JustthinkofWalmart,whichis,aftertheU.S.DepartmentofDefenseandChina’sLiber-ationArmy, the third largest global organiza-tion.49Forcooperatives,tocompetewithsuchgiants is nowalk in thepark.But still, in thisstruggle about the imagination of the futureofwork,whoshouldbe thedrivingagentsofchange?Isittheplatformowner,shareholder,CEO,andVC,ordowefocusonthecollectiveofworkersalongsideacitizen-ledmovement?Theanswercouldbe:alloftheabove.

Butforme,theproblembeginswhenchangeissoughtmainly intheboardroomsofSilicon

htm.47 www.buerger-energie-berlin.de/das-ziel.48 fpwa.org.49 DanielSchlademanofOurWalmartatPlatformCooper-

ativism:TheInternet,Ownership,Democracy.


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Valley. Tim O’Reilly convened the Next:Econ-omy inNovember 2015,50 for instance,whichwasvastlydominatedbySiliconValleybusinessleaders.Andas if theselectionofspeakers—despitetwoorthreelaboradvocates,predom-inantly corporate leaders—did not make it clearwhowas identifiedasagentsofchange,theconferenceregistrationfeeof$3500clari-fiedthatonceandforall. FormerSecretaryofLaborRobertReichpoint-edoutthatinorderto“safecapitalism,”work-ers have to have minimal social protections;otherwise there will be a rebellion. Robin Chase, co-founder of ZipCar, echoed Reich’ssentiment. And sure enough, if you want toretain socialpeace, youhave togiveworkerssomething.Youcanappealtothebest incor-porate leaders,asTimO’Reillydoesperhaps,youcanhopefortheirgoodwillbuttheques-tionremainsifsuchpleascanchangethecoremission of these enterprises. It is true thatworkers need solid protections and somebodywho really cares for their long-term welfare.Being “realistic” also means to realistically as-sessifplatformownerswillgobeyondhandingout small concessions to workers. Being real-istic means to acknowledge the historical suc-cessesandfailuresoftheextractive“solidarityeconomy”andofthesolidarityeconomy. Youcannot countereconomic inequalitywiththebenevolenceofowners;togetherwemustredesigntheinfrastructurewithdemocracyatits core.

Aspartofthisredesign,itisalsoworthre-ex-amining thehistoryofbuildingstructures forcooperativism and mutualism in the United States. Here, spiritual communalism and co-operativemovements,playacentralrole.TheGerman Mennonites, including the Amish,started coming to the U.S. as early as 1684.In the spring of 1825, Robert Owen opened

50 conferences.oreilly.com/nextcon/economy-us-2015/public/content/speakers.

thedoorsoftheNewHarmonycommunityinIndiana. In the 1930s, TheNationof Islamaswell as the Catholic Worker Movement set up hundreds of communal projects. The Catho-licsocialteachingofdistributismis influentialin that context. It suggests that communities could co-own property and tools. Three de-cades later, the Hindu Kripalu Yoga AshramandtheBuddhistKarme-CholingCenterwerefounded.Spiritualcommunitiesandco-opsha-venoftenproventohavemorestayingpowerthan secular cooperative businesses.

Since the first modern cooperative in Roch-dale,England,in1844therehasbeenenoughtimetotalkaboutworkercooperatives,criticsargue,andintheirmindstheevidenceshowsthatthemodelisn’tworking.Andpartially,theyareright;mostworker-ownedcooperativesinthe United States did not succeed. But it is also worthkeepinginmind,astheauthorJohnCurlobserves,that

The very existence of cooperatives challenges corporations and capitalism; corporations have always worked hard to weaken, discredit, and de-stroy [cooperatives] through waging price wars, enacting legislation that undercuts their viability, labeling them in the media as subversive and a failure, and using several other stratagems.51

Also Rosa Luxemburg was cautious when it cametothinkingaboutcooperativesasall-outalternatives to capitalism.

The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the ut-most absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur—a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ inter-ests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.52

51 “Ver.di.InnovationUndGuteArbeit-DigitaleArbeit,”ac-cessedDecember5,2015,innovation-gute-arbeit.verdi.de/themen/digitale-arbeit.

52 PhilGasper,“AreWorkers’CooperativestheAlternativetoCapitalism?,”ISR,2014.


13

Useismadeofallmethodsthatenableanen-terprise to stand up against its competitors in themarket,Luxemburgwrote.53

Thereis,however,theundeniableandimport-anteffectthatco-opshaveontheworkers inthose systems. Existing cooperatives have shown to offermore stable jobs and reliablesocial protections than traditional extractive models.It’dbeunhelpfultoseeco-opsasrosyalternatives; they function within a capitalistcontext where they are forced to compete.Networks of cooperatives like Mondragoncannot truly decouple themselves from theexploitativesupplychainsthatfuelcapitalism.

Onecommonobjectiontocooperativesisthatthey are just asmuchbound tomarket pres-suresasanyothercapitalistenterprise,whichmakeself-exploitationunavoidable.Eventually,co-opstoo,canresorttothegambitofunpaidinternships and uncompensated volunteers. Co-opsareexposedtothepitilesscompetitionof themarket, but in the light of the 20% to30%profitthatcompanieslikeUberaretakingasprofit,oneapproachwouldbeforplatformcooperatives to offer their services at a low-erprice. They could runon10%profit,whichcould then be partially translated into the social benefit for workers. Cooperatives could alsoflourishinnichemarkets,takingonlow-incomeclients/consumersastheirtargetgroups.

Co-opshavebeen important instruments forbuilding economic power for marginalizedgroups.KarlaMoralesofthechildcarecooper-ative Beyond Care describes the simple bene-fits: “Inmyworknow I have sick leave, vaca-tions, and employment entitlements.”54 The southernstatesoftheU.S.,forinstance,havea longhistoryofagricultural coops thathavebuilt economic and social self-determinationfor African American communities. At times,though,co-opshavereinforcedhierarchiesof

53 Ibid.54 vimeo.com/149516216.

raceandgender,reproducingratherthanchal-lenging the practices of the broader society.Juliet Schor says that

If you are interested in social justice, then you should know that in non-profit spaces, there are high levels of race, class, and gender exclusion. People act in ways that reinforce their own class position or their own racial position. These spaces are often more problematic from the perspective of race, class, and gender than many for-profits. So if you want to build a platform that attracts people across class, race, and gender, you need to start with the group of people that you want to attract to your platform.55

Skeptics bemoan the fact that credit unionshaven’t really transformed the economyas awhole and that worker owned cooperatives havenotbecomethebeachheadsofsocialismthat they were promised to be. But then there is the indisputable long-term benefit for theworkersinthoseenterprises;and,doesn’tthatcountforanything?Here,workerscontroltheirownworkinafashionthatcontributestotheirown wellbeing. Cooperatives, however small,canfunctionasethical,self-managedcounter-partsthatprovideamodelforbusinessesthatdon’thavetorelyontheexploitationof theirworkers. Cooperatives can bring creativity not onlytotheconsumptionofproductsbutalsotothereorganizationofwork. TherehavebeenfrequentreferencesrecentlytoHannahArendtwhoobserved thata straydoghasabetterchanceofsurvivalwhenit isgivenaname.So,welcometoplatformcoop-erativism.

Together we will grow oldwe will holdeach other close and we will hold each other closerWe will hold each other as the country changes;we will hold each other as the world changes.

Anonymous56

55 vimeo.com/14954041756 JohnCurlandIshmaelReed,For All the People: Uncover-


14

The concept of platform cooperativism hasthreeparts:

⇒ First, it is about cloning the technologi-cal heartofUber, TaskRabbit, Airbnb,orUpWork. It embraces the technology but wants to put it to work with a differentownershipmodel,adheringtodemocraticvalues, so as to crack the broken systemofthesharingeconomy/on-demandecon-omythatonlybenefitsthefew.Itisinthissensethatplatformcooperativismisaboutstructuralchange,achangeofownership.

⇒ Second, platform cooperativism is aboutsolidarity, which is sorely missing in thiseconomydrivenbyadistributed,andsome-times anonymous workforce. Platformscan be owned and operated by inventive unions, cities, and various other forms ofcooperatives,everythingformmulti-stake-holder and worker-owned co-ops to pro-duser-ownedplatformcooperatives.

⇒ And third, platform cooperativism is builton the reframing of concepts like innova-tionandefficiencywithaneyeonbenefit-ing all, not just sucking up profits for thefew. Iamproposing tenprinciplesofplat-formcooperativismthataresensibletothecriticalproblemsfacingthedigitaleconomyrightnow.Platformcapitalismisamazinglyineffectiveinwatchingoutforpeople.

The concept of platform cooperativism or atleastpartofit,hitthewall.Peopleunderstand

ing the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Move-ments, and Communalism in America, Oakland, CA: PMPress,2012,378.

thecooperativebitbutthe“platform”partre-mained mysterious. What do you call the places whereyouhangoutandgeneratevalueafteryouswitchonyourphone?Aplatform, inthecontextofthisstudy,isatermusedtodescribean environment in which extractive or coop-erative intermediaries offer their services orcontent. Rightfromtheonset,whenexplainingthecon-ceptofplatformcooperativism, letmeclarifythat this is not about a technological aurora borealis;platformcooperativism isnotaboutthe Western infatuation with advancementsintechnology;itisamindset.EvgenyMorozovandSivaVaidhyanathanareabsolutelyrightintheir stance against “technological solution-ism” and Internet centrism.

Platformcooperativismisatermthatdescribestechnological, cultural, political, and socialchanges.PlatformCooperativismisarectangleofhope.It’snotaconcreteutopia;itisanemerg-ingeconomy.SomeofthemodelsthatIwillde-scribenow,alreadyexistfortwoorthreeyearswhile others are still imaginary apps. Some are prototypes,otherareexperiments;allofthemintroducealternativesetsofvalues. Next, Iwill introduceyoutovarioustypesofandprinciplesforplatformcooperatives.Thiswill be followedby reflections about the co-operative ecosystem, objections, and challenges.

Toward a Typology of Platform Co-ops

Early examples of platform cooperatives al-ready exist but they are merely emerging.

Naming them here inevitably excludes other important projects. Not introducing concreteinstances would leave us open to the sugges-tionthatplatformcooperativismisnothingbuta pie in the sky.


15

Cooperatively Owned Online Labor Brokerages and Market Places

Quite likely, you’re familiarwith themodeloftheonlinelaborbrokerage. Justthinkofcom-panies like TaskRabbit where you can schedule someone to assemble your IKEA furniture intwenty minutes. The app on your smartphone serves as an intermediary between you and theworker.Witheachtransaction,TaskRabbitgetsacutof20-30%. The “sharing economy” lawyer and cartoonist Janelle Orsi notices a decisive uptick in the in-terest in cooperatives. She reports that dozens oftechstartupsandtraditionalbusinesseslikefloristsorlandscapershavereachedouttoherSustainable Economies Law Center57 because theyareinterestedin“crowdleaping,”themi-grationoftheirbusinesstotheco-opmodel. In San Francisco, Loconomics58 is a freelanc-er–owned cooperative (in beta) where mem-bers-freelancers own shares, receive divi-dends, andhave a voice in running the com-pany. There is no bidding and no markup. Lo-conomicsoffersmassagesandotherservicesthat are locally in demand. Membership in Lo-conomicscosts$29.95permonth.Thefound-ers tested the app in the Bay Area and started toallowusers fromother cities in theSpringof2016. AliAlkhatib,aStanfordPhDstudentinComput-er Science,workedwithMicrosoft FUSE Labson designing a “generalizable, worker-centricpeer economy platform” that allows workersto own, operate, and control the software.59 Theprojectisstillinitsearlieststage. InGermany,Fairmondo,startedasadecentral-ized online marketplace owned by its users—a

57 www.theselc.org.58 loconomics.com.59 ali-alkhatib.com/media/presentations/PlatformCooper-

ativism.pdf.

co-operativealternativetoAmazonandebay.Withits2000members,itaspirestoeventuallybecome a genuine alternative to the big play-ersine-commercewhileatthesametimestay-ing true to its values. The site also promotes a smaller number of fair trade and ethicallysourced companies. Intheprocessoftransfer-ringtheirmodelfromGermanytoothercoun-tries,theyareaimingforadecentralizedglobalonline marketplace that is collectively owned byalllocalco-ops. Coopify60 is a student-built cash-pay laborplatform that will soon serve low-incomeon-demand task workers. It was created byCornellTech’sMBAprogram,financedbytheRobinhoodFoundation (NYC).Workers using Coopifywillbecomprisedoflow-incomeNewYorkers who are under- or unemployed andwhodonothavesufficientcreditratingordoc-umentation that would allow them to partici-pate in the existing online markets. The plat-form, which has its own referral system andmultilingual support, will offer workers alsosupport with taxes and allow them to be paid incash.TheCenterforFamilyLife(CFL)inSun-setPark,NYC,isasocialsupportagencythatiscurrentlytestingoutCoopify.CFLhasbeenin-cubating worker cooperatives as a way to pro-vide living wages and dignified working con-ditionsto low-income immigrantssince2006.Thecentersupports9coops,1coopnetwork,andatotalof180worker-owners—mostlyLati-nawomen.Coopifywillhelpthese9co-opstobetter compete with the likes of Handy andAmazonFlex.

City-Owned Platform Cooperatives

Aftertalkingaboutculturalproducers,nowletme make a big leap and discuss public owner-ship,whichhasanimageproblemintheUnitedStates.Thepoliticaleconomistandfounderofdemocracycollaborative,GarAlperovitz,writes

60 seed.coop/p/V1RtF0JQe/more?wrap=true.


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thattherearemorethan2000publiclyownedelectric utilities that, along with cooperatives,supplymorethan25%ofthecountry’selectric-ity.61 Alperovitz points out that there is a long historyofhotel-ownershipinthecaseofDallasandhospitalownership in the caseof variousother cities in the United States. Contrary to public opinion, this model has been workingrather well. Janelle Orsi has detailed ideas about ownership and the Internet. Corresponding to my proposal to clone and reconstruct sharing economy tech-nologieswithdemocracticvaluesinmind,Orsisuggests a city-designed software/enterprise,similar to Airbnb that could serve as online mar-ketplace owned and democratically controlled by the people who rent space to travelers. OnesuchprojectisalreadyunderwayinSeoul(SouthKorea),whichisproposingtocreateaCit-iesAllianceforPlatformEconomy(CAPE)forthepurposeofgettingcitiesorganizedaroundsuchplatform idea. It is calledMunibnb and couldbe created as a collaboration between a large numberofcitiesthatwouldpooltheirresourc-estocreateasoftwareplatformforshorttermrentals. These cities then, couldmandate thatshort-term rentals in theirmunicipalitieshavetogothroughthisportal.Feescouldlargelystaywith the hosts or partly go to the city govern-ment,whichcouldthenuseittoservicetheel-derlyorfixthestreets,forinstance.Orsiasks:

Why should millions of traveler dollars leak from our cities into the hands of wealthy corporate shareholders especially if it wouldn’t be all that hard to run these operations through something like Munibnb.62

Anotherapp,suggestedbyOrsi,iscalledAllb-nb and it would entail residents to be paid a dividend from theprofitsof such rental plat-form, comparable to the Alaska Permanent

61 “Socialism, American-Style,” The New York Times, ac-cessedJuly26,2015.

62 NathanSchneider,“5WaystoTakeBackTech,”The Na-tion,May27,2015.

Fund,whichpaysresidentsofthestateafewthousand dollars every year, a percentage oftheprofitsthatAlaskamakesfromsellingoil.These threeapps seemultimately feasible toimplement;theywouldallowcitiestonotonlyplayaroleintheregulationoftheon-demandeconomy;theycouldbeactivelyshapingit.

Produser-owned Platforms

I am using the term produser, which is not atypobut a portmanteauof user andproduc-er.63 Produser-ownedplatformsarearesponseto monopolistic platforms like Facebook andGoogle that are luring users with the prom-iseofthe“freeservice”whilemonetizingtheircontent anddata.What ifwe’downourownversionofFacebook,Spotify,orNetflix?Whatifthe photographers at Shutterstock.com would owntheplatformwheretheirphotosarebeingsold? SiteslikeMember’sMedia,Stocksy,andReso-nate are a step in thedirectionof answeringthis question. They offer produsers the op-portunity to co-own the site through whichthey are distributing their artwork. Produs-er-owned platforms allow artists to build ca-reers by co-owning the platforms throughwhich they are selling their work. The Berlin-based Resonate,64 is a cooperative streaming music system owned by the people whouse it. InResonate, users streama songuntiltheyownit.Thefirsttimetheyplayasong,it costs 0.002 cents, the second time 0.004cents,andbythe4thor5thplay,theyconnectwithit;andeventuallytheywillownit.

Stocksy65 is an artist-owned cooperative forstock-photography.Theco-opisbasedonthe

63 The term produsage was developed by Axel Bruns in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage,NewYork:PeterLangPublishingInc.,2008..

64 resonate.io/2016/.65 www.stocksy.com.


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idea of profit sharing and co-ownershipwiththe artists who are contributing photos to the site. Artists can apply to become members and whenacceptedlicenseimagesandreceive50%commissiononsalesaswellasprofitsharingat the end of the year. The objective of thecooperative is to create sustainable careers for itsmembers.By2014, theirrevenueshadreached $3.7 million dollars, and since theirfounding they’vepaidoutseveralmilliondol-lars in surplus to their artists. Member’s Media66 is a cooperatively owned mediaplatformthatisdedicatedtoproducersand fansof independent,narrativefilm. Thepeopleusingandproducingforthissite — theprodusers — ownthemajorityoftheplatformalong with the original founders and inves-tors.

Union-Backed Labor Platforms There are several examples from Denver toNewark where cabbies and unions started to worktogether,buildapps,andorganizethetaxisector.Andifcompaniesaresmart,they’dwel-come the unions because studies have shown that unionized workers have a better retention rate and at least the same productivity.67

InNewark,NewJersey,TransUnionCarservicestartedasanon-for-profittaxiservicewithdriv-ersbeingpartoftheUnitedTransportationAlli-anceofNewJerseyandaffiliatesoftheCWAlo-cal1039.Driversbenefitfromtheunion’smanyprotections such as credit union, immigrationsupporthealthcare,aswellaspensionbenefits.The company is planning to expand to Atlantic City,Elizabeth(NewJersey),andHoboken. Alreadyin2007,taxidriversjoinedtheCommu-nicationsWorkers of America local 7777 and

66 membersmedia.net67 JackTriplett,The Measurement of Labor Cost, University

OfChicagoPress,1983,101.Andforamorerecentdis-cussionbytheEconomist:www.economist.com.

twoyearslater,theymanagedtokickoffUniontaxi,thefirstdriver-ownedcooperativeinDen-ver. They are also getting support from theorganization 1worker1vote.org that supports unionizedcooperativesbyhelpingthemfigureouthowtonegotiatewages,benefitplans,andtraining programs. The upfront capital costs,oftenabigchallengeforcooperatives,arelessofanissueherebecausedriversalreadyowntheequipment. TheCaliforniaApp-BasedDriversAssociation(CADA)68 a not-for-profit membership orga-nization that unifies drivers from Uber, Lyft,andSidecarandotherapps-basedcompanies.CADA’s drivers are not employees and there-foretheycannotbecomefullmembersoftheunion. However, the Teamsters Local 986 inCalifornia,canlobbyfordrive-friendlyregula-tion.TheymakesurethatLyftandUberdriversarespeakingwithaunifiedvoice.

Co-operatives from Within

Another alluring if imaginary proposal is theidea of worker cooperatives forming insidethebellyofthesharingeconomy.Uberdriverscould use the technical infrastructure of thecompany to run their own enterprises. Such hostile takeover by workers could be imagin-ableasaresultofananti-trustlawsuitcompa-rabletotheonebroughtforwardagainstMic-rosoftafteritslaunchofInternetExplorer.

The Platform as Protocol Perhaps then, the future ofworkwill not bedictatedbycentralizedplatforms,eveniftheyare operated by co-ops. Perhaps, peer-to-peer interactions can be facilitated solely byprotocols.InIsrael,forexample,La’Zooz69 is a distributedpeer-to-peer ride rental network.

68 cadateamsters.org.69 lazooz.org.


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Where Members Media wanted you to think of them as Netflix for filmmakers and fans,ownedby thoseprodusers,La’ZoozcouldbelikenedtotheBittorrentofridesharing.Any-one driving around a city can earn crypto to-kensbytakinginfellowtravelers.Indifferencetothesystempreviouslydescribed,thisoneisentirelypeer-to-peer,thereisnocentralpoint,noHQ.70

10 Principles for Platform Coopera-tivism A technical discussion of values, rules, andguidelinesforplatformco-ops,nodoubt,isforthealreadycommitted.First,ofcourse,mustbe the creation of a longing for cooperativesolutions. Astra Taylor holds up the wisdom of Elaine Browne, former leader of the BlackPanther Party: “You never organize ormobi-lize around abstract principles.”71 On the other hand, once committed, principles and valuesassociated with platform cooperativism be-come essential.

Juliet Schor conducted two hundred interviews withworkersinthesharingeconomy.Hersug-gestionis:

Make sure that you get the value proposition right. What you are offering needs to be of economic value to the people that you want to attract. In the non-profit space this is often missing. The for- profit space is getting that right more often.

BeyondSchor’spoints,influencedbythethink-ingoftheGermanserviceworkerunionver.di,72 I’mproposingthefollowingprinciplesforplat-formco-ops:

70 Also in Israelbutnotaplatformco-op,Googlehasre-leased theWaze app, which links up passengerswhowant to get to their workplaces with drivers who have to make a similar trip. Drivers get paid depending on the distance they drove but the system is set up in the way that drivers cannot turn this into a business.


72 “Ver.di,InnovationUndGuteArbeit-DigitaleArbeit.”

1) Ownership: One of the main narratives ofwhat used to be called the sharing economy wasabouttherejectionofownership.Millenni-als,weweretold,arenotinterestedinphysicalpossessions; they just want access to “stuff.”Theydon’tdownloadtheirmusic;theystreamit.Theydon’tbuyacar; theyare fansof ridesharing.Ournarrative, incontrast, isaboutapeople–centeredInternet.

The Internet was designed as a military scien-tific network in 1969. In the early 1990s, theNational Science Foundation transitioned thenetworktoprivateownership.Sincethen,theInternet has brought us much in almost every areabutithasleftthequestionofsharedown-ership untouched.

This isnotaboutcutekittensonReddit; thisisaboutanInternetofownership.Collectivelyownedplatformcooperatives,ownedby thepeople who generate most of the value onthose platforms, could reinvigorate this ear-ly, public-minded history without. Platformcooperativism can change the ways average people think about their relation to the Inter-net.

2) Decent Pay and Income Security: In 2015,crowdsourcing systems like Amazon Mechan-icalTurknoviceworkers — whoarewelledu-cated—are paid between two and three dol-larsanhour,whichisadisgraceinacountryas rich as the United States. Just like domestic workers were tugged away in people’s hous-es, digital workers remain invisible, tuggedaway in between algorithms. The Domestic Workers Alliance pushed back. At the White HouseWorker’s Voice event they introducedGood Work Code with the simple demand:“Everyone needs fair pay and benefits tomake a living.”73

3) Transparency & Data Portability: Transpar-ency isn’t only about operational transparen-

73 goodworkcode.org.


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cy. The cooperatively owned online market place Fairmondo, for instance, emphasizesthat itmakes theentirebudgetof the co-op publicly available. But transparency is also about the handling of data, especially thedata on customers. It should be transparent whichdata areharvested, how they are col-lected,howtheyareused,andtowhomtheyare sold.

4) Appreciation and Acknowledgement: A good working atmosphere should be part of thisdiscussion. Workers deserve the acknowledge-mentandappreciationofownersandopera-tors. The ability of workers to communicatewith platform operators or owners is centralin this context. When workers are paid late,notcompensatedontime,74orfired,theymusthave theenforceableright togetanexplana-tion.

5) Co-determined Work: Laborplatformsshouldinvolveworkersfromthemomentofthepro-gramming of the platform and along theirusageof it.Thisway,too,operatorswill learnmuchmoreabouttheworkflowofworkers.AsJulietSchorput it, “Fromday1,startwiththepeople whom you want to populate your plat-form.

6) A Protective Legal Framework: Platformco-ops require legal help because they aredeemedunusual.Yourhelp isalsonecessarywhen it comes to defending cooperativesagainstadverselegalactions.Thetriumphofthe shareholder enterprise has been achieved throughtheircontrolofthepolitical,legal,andeconomical system. US laws subsidize corpo-rationsover thewell-beingof all people. Forexample, co-ops may need amenable localregulation tomaintain a level playing field—but federal regulators may try to preemptthat. Entrenched incumbents may try to keep their workers from “multi-homing” on plat-

74 Over70%offreelancersintheUnitedStatesreportthattheyarefrequentlypaidlate.

formco-ops.Lawyerscanchallengethose,orlobbyforstatelawtomakethemillegal.Final-ly, as Frank Pasquale has observed, there isthe bizarre inconsistency in US antitrust law basedonthedifferencebetweenmonopoliesandco-ops.75WhilemonopoliescangetafreepassintheU.S.iftheyarise“naturally”(what-everthatmeans),afederationofco-opstryingto takeonadominant incumbentfirmmightbe liable under antitrust law if it tries to setpricesorevensetstandardsofconduct.WhiletheUnitedStatesisquiteacceptingofmonop-oliesiftheyarevaguelyplayingbytherules,itisquiteunacceptingwhenitcomestocartels.The powers of the government promote thesystemofcorporateruleandthemarginaliza-tionofthemiddleclasses.

7) Portable Worker Protections and Benefits: Both contingent as well as traditional econ-omy workers should be able to take bene-fits andprotectionswith them inandoutofchanging work scenarios. Social protections should not be tied to one particular work-place. The Frenchgovernment is testing thisidea and in the United States, Steven Hill,a San Francisco-based author, is one of thepeople who made this proposal in his latest book Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. Each worker would be assigned an Individual Security Account into which ev-ery businessthathiresthatworkerwouldpayasmall“safetynetfee”proratedtothenum-berofhoursaworkeris employedbythatbusi-ness. Those fundswouldbeused topay foreachworker’s safety net, steering the fundsinto already established infrastructure suchas Social Security, Medicare, injured workerandunemploymentcompensationfunds,andhealth care via Obamacare. In addition, thisplanwouldprovideaminimumof5dayseach

75 FrankPasqualeat“MakingItWork-PlatformCoop2015:Platform Cooperativism Conference,” Internet Archive,November 2015, archive.org. Also see: Ramsi Wood-cock, “Inconsistency in Antitrust,” SSRN, December 3,2013.


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ofpaidsickleaveandpaidvacationforevery worker.76

Animportantconsequenceofthisproposalisthat,byputtingnearlyallworkersonasimilarfooting,wewouldgreatlyreducetheincentivesforemployerstoresorttocontingentworkersas away of avoiding paying for benefits andworkersupports. Thesechangescanbeimple-mentedat the localor state level, Americansdon’thavetowaitforadysfunctionalCongressto move forward. Much will depend on the“smallprint”ofsuchprogram,whichcouldaseasilyjustbecomeacover-upformoredereg-ulation.

8) Protection Against Arbitrary Behavior: Uber is known for its arbitrary disciplining and firingpractices. Without a warning, drivers maybeleftwithoutanincome.77Reasonsforthefiringofdriversareoftenunclearasthecompanyre-fusestorespondtotheenquiriesofdriversde-mandinganexplanation,aproblemthatisalsofacingworkers at others platforms.78On Lyft,driverswhofallbelow4.5starscangetkickedofftheplatform.Consumers take on manageri-alpowersoverworkers’lives,whichcomeswithan enormous responsibility.

Andifthiswasnotenough,Uber’sreputationsystemalsofaultsdriversforfat–fingeredpas-sengers who simply hit the wrong button when evaluatingadriver,therebyputtingthedriver’slivelihoodatjeopardy.

Uber’s worker reputation system is hosted in the“cloud,”onthecentralized,privateserversofthecompany.Justlikewithotherupstartsinthesharingeconomy,thismakesitimpossible

76 Currently60millionprivatesectorworkersintheUSdonot have access to paid sick leave.

77 EllenHuet,“HowUber’sShadyFiringPolicyCouldBack-fire On The Company,” Forbes, accessed December 4,2015.

78 ForadiscussionofthesituationofAmazonMechanicalTurk’sworkers, see Lilly Irany, “DifferenceandDepen-denceamongDigitalWorkers:TheCaseofAmazonMe-chanicalTurk,”The South Atlantic Quarterly,January2015.

for workers to capitalize on their reputation.When they are moving to another platform,theyarestarting fromscratch.Consequently,itisessentialthatworkersestablishtheirown,decentralized reputation and identity systems. Projects like Traity79 and Crypto Swartz80 are working in that direction.

9) Rejection of Excessive Workplace Surveillance: Excessive workplace surveillance along the line ofoDesk’s (nowUpwork’s)workerdiaries81 or the constant reviews on TaskRabbit need to be rejected.

Whereisthedignityofworkinsuchsystems?Howwouldyou like togetupeverymorning,onlytocompeteforthejobthatyouhavetodothatday?Howwouldyouliketobeevaluatedeveryfourhoursbypeopleyoudon’tknowatall? Such surveillance practices leave workers without much dignity.

10) The Right to Log Off: Workers also need to havetherighttologoff.Decentdigitalworkisto have clear boundaries, platform coopera-tivesneedtoleavetimeforrelaxation,lifelonglearning and voluntary political work.

Itisimportanttoarticulatesuchavision,guid-edbysuchloftyprinciples.Itwilltakeusaverylong time to get closer to this vision, whichneeds to be articulated. Our inability to imag-ineadifferentlife,however,wouldbecapital’sultimate triumph. It will not come as a surprise when I say that platformcooperativismisalsofacedwithenor-mous challenges, from the self-organizationandmanagementofworkers,totechnology,UX

79 traity.com.80 Galt.J.“CryptoSwartzWillGetYouPaidforYourGreat

Content.”TheCoinFront,June23,2014.www.disruptek.info.

81 ODesk’s (now UpWork’s) ”worker diaries” document theworkflowofworkers.This includesrepeatedpho-tographsoftheworkerswiththecamerabuiltintothecomputer of the worker and screenshots tomeasuretheprogressofthework.


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design, education, long-term funding, scaling,wage scales, competition with multinationalcorporategiants,andpublicawareness.Otherchallengesincludethescreeningofcoremem-bers of a co-op, insurance, competition withmultinationalcorporategiants,andimportant-ly,publicawareness.Thinkingthroughobstaclesclearly matters. Naivety and enthusiastic arm waving are not enough. Jodi Dean has a point when she poses that “Goldman Sachs does not careifyouraisechickens.”Butcorporateown-erswill become interested if they getwindofthegrowthofchickencooperatives,poweredbyonlinemarketplaces,allacrossNorthAmerica.Tomakegooddigital laborareality, like-mind-edpeoplewillorganizeandfightfordemocraticownership and rights. 828384

Another challenge is thatofworkermobiliza-tion:so-called1099workersdon’tmeettheir

82 Tubaro, “DiscussingPlatformCooperativism,”DataBigand Small, accessed December 9, 2015, databigand- small.com.

83 Turkopticonisaweb-browserextensionthatallowsoth-erwise largelyunconnectedworkersto jointlyevaluateconsignors on Amazon Mechanical Turk, turkopticon.ucsd.edu.

84 wiki.wearedynamo.org.

colleagues during lunch break. They don’t get to hangout in unionhalls. Instead they are,forthemostparts, isolatedfromeachother.“If thesepeoplehave togainownershipanddecision-makingpower,enhancementoftheirsocialnetworksmustbepartoftheproject,”economist Paola Tubaro emphasizes in re-sponse to the idea of platform cooperativ-ism.82 There have been some attempts to cre-atenewformsofworkersolidarity, includinga design intervention like Turkopticon,83 an employer reputation system used by workers ontheAmazonMechanicalTurkplatformandalsoDynamo,apetitionbasedTurkercommu-nity.84Butallofthishaslittletodowithtradi-tional worker organization and it also doesn’t make the task of organizing platform coop-erativesmucheasier.Thechallengeremains:how do you organize distributed workers in thefirstplace?

The Cooperative Eco System

Platformco-opsarenotislands,entireofthem-selves. Every co-op is part of an eco system.NealGorenflowrites:

Part of the magic of tech startups is that there’s a well-understood organizational structure, financ-ing method, and developmental path for entrepre-neurs to use. In other words, there’s a template. Platform co-ops need templates too, but the ones that support a diversity of organizational patterns. What’s needed is a small number of incubators in different global cities working together to give birth to the first wave of platform co-ops. The trick is to get the first few platform co-ops off the ground, and then develop a global ecosystem that

encourages replication of working models across industry verticals and geographies.85

Platform co-ops depend on other coopera-tives, funding schemes, software engineers,lawyers, workers, and designers. Alliances between co-ops are essential. They need tobebasedonstandards,acommitmenttotheopencommons,sharedstrategies,goals,andvalues:ashiftofmentalorientationfromAynRandtoRobertOwen,supportedbyapoliticalplatform.

Financing: Platform cooperatives and co-opsin general are calling for a different fundingscheme than traditional enterprises.Manyofthe traditional avenues for funding are not

85 “How Platform co-ops Can Beat Death Star PlatformstoCreateaRealSharingEconomy,”Shareable,accessedNovember4,2015,www.shareable.net.

https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/

https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/


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available to platform co-ops and regulatorseagerly guard against experiments. What are financing options that broaden the financialpowerofthemany? One the one hand, the upfront capital coststhatoftenpresentthebiggestchallengeforco-operatives are not the biggest obstacle in this case.Atleastwhenyouthinkoftransportation,thedriversalreadyowntheirmajorassets.InSpain,Mondragon,theworld’slargestindustri-alcooperativeintheworld, isfunctioninglikeadevelopmentbank. InGermany,banksalsoplayan importantrole inthedevelopmentofsmallbusines,whichmakesupalargepartofthat country’s economy. Projects like Seed.cooparehelping co-ops togetofftheground.86Crowdfundingdrivescanbesuccessful.TheSpanishcrowdfundingsiteGOTEO is worth highlighting here because it onlyallowsprojectstoseekfundingthatfollowacommons-orientedsetofvalues.87

In his article, “Owning is the New Sharing,”88 Nathan Schneider reported about the world’s first experiment in “crypto equity,” calledSwarm.89 Swarm is a crowdfunding site, theKickstarterofblockchainifyouwill,thatreliesona“swarm”ofsmallinvestorsratherthanbigventure capitalists. The site runs on a crypto currency, not dollars, but as part of its firstdrive,itraisedmorethanonemilliondollars. But regulators don’t make things easier. In 2011,BrewsterKahle’s,founderofarchive.org,attemptedtostartacreditunionbutwasfacedwithabarrageofregulatoryauditsandthebu-reaucracy eventually led him to give up.90 Sili-

86 seed.coop.87 goteo.org.88 “How Platform co-ops Can Beat Death Star Platforms

toCreateaRealSharingEconomy,”Shareable,accessedNovember4,2015,www.shareable.net.

89 Swarm.co.90 NathanielPopper,“DreamofNewKindofCreditUnion

IsExtinguishedbyBureaucracy,”The New York Times. No-vember24,2015.

conValley,whichisbuiltonspeculation,short-termreturns,andjumpingshipthroughinitialpublicofferings,isnottherightfundingmodelfor cooperatives, which grow slowly and aredesignedforsustainability. The philanthropy platform External RevenueService aims to help non-profits so that theyarenot spendingallof their timeonbeggingfor money. With External Revenue Service,userspledgeaparticularamountpermonth,whichisthendividedupamongtheirfavoredorganizations.91 MaxDanaofExternalRevenueServicewrites:

In order to receive pledges from others, a person must first make a pledge of their own annual in-come and allocate it to at least one other person. [...] The external revenue service is not owned by anyone. It is a distributed network of contributors and users invested in the maintenance and devel-opment of the system.92

IntheUnitedKingdom,RobinHoodMinorAs-set Management is a co-op hedge fund thatacts conservatively in the stock market, itsimply operates a data mining algorithm that mimicsthemovesofWallStreet’stopinvestorsto investtheprofits intoco-ops, forexample.Theyask“WhatifcapitalwasP2P?”93

In theUnited States, SlowMoney stands outas a national nonprofit organization that cat-alyzes investment in sustainable food andfarmsinparticular.FairSharessupportsfarm-ing coops and The Workers Lab is the nation’s first union-backed innovation accelerator. In-stitutionalinvestorKanyiMaqubelastatesthatthemost important thing for thecooperativemovementisscalability.AtCollaborativeFund,Maqubelaistryingtohelpplatformsco-opstocreate scale by providing them with enough li-quiditysothattheycanattract largepoolsofcapital.“Weneedallhandsondeck,including

91 slack.externalrevenue.us.92 ThequoteoriginatesfromMaxDana’stalkatPlatform

CooperativisminNovember2015.93 robinhoodcoop.org.


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investorstocreateamorecooperativeworld,”Maqubelasaid.94

Platform Cooperativism for the Commons: The In-ternet has been associated with the commons andnon-marketexchangessinceRichardBar-brook’s Hi-Tech Gift Economy, YochaiBenkler’sWealth of Networks,DavidBollier’sSpiral Viral, Dmytri Kleiner’s “Venture Communism,”95 as well as Michel Bauwens’ work with the P2P Foundation.Overtenyearsago,DmytriKlein-er coined the term venture communism to de-scribethepossibilityoffederatedcooperativesto create communication platforms that canovercome some of the centralized, capitalist,verycontrolledandprivacy-violatingplatformsthathaveemergedrecently.HecallsonustoinvestigatehowtheInternet,whichstartedoutas a decentralized and cooperative network became centralized and corporate.96

Platform co-ops build on the commons; theyrely on open design, and open source hard-ware licenses for 3D printing; they facilitatethe cooperative eco system. Michel Bauwens is currently working on the commons-basedreciprocitylicense,97whichwouldforinstanceallowcooperatives to sharepiecesof code inthe commons. Cooperatives could freely usethe code while others would have to pay. Free Software for Platform Co-ops: Thebackendofplatformco-opsneedstobefreesoftware.Notonly must the code be accessible to the work-ers so that they can understand the parameters and patterns that govern their working environ-ment,thesoftwarealsoneedstobedevelopedinconsultationwiththeworkersfromdayone. In the transportation sector, for example,we’retalkingaboutatleastfourapps.There’s

94 vimeo.com/149532379.95 “Venture Communism,” P2P Foundation, accessed De-

cember11,2015,p2pfoundation.net.96 vimeo.com/149381439.97 “Commons-BasedReciprocityLicenses,”P2P Foundation,

accessedNovember8,2015,p2pfoundation.net.

one app for the passenger and one for thedriver,andthesehavetobeprogrammedforAndroidandtheiPhone;andthosewouldhaveto be constantly kept updated and usable as operatingsystemsandphonesarefrequentlychanging.Thisalsomeansthatfundingforthedevelopersneedstobeongoing.Platformco-operativescannotbebuiltbasedonone-time-crowdfundedinitiatives. Free software developers could publish coreprotocols and then allow various independent open-sourceprojectstobuildtheirowndiffer-entbackendand frontendcomponents.Thiswould accommodate the various service sec-tors—fromcrowdsourcing,undocumentedmi-grants,anddomesticcleaners,tobabysitters.

Blockchain Technology as Algorithmic Regula-tor?Asco-opsstarttotakepartinonlinelabormarkets,theybecomemoredistributed,moreinternational. The trust among members that existed in local organizations, is no longer agiven. Blockchain technology is one way to ad-dresstheproblemoftrust. Blockchain is the protocol underlying the vir-tual currency Bitcoin. But the most relevant developments for platform co-ops are notsolelyaboutBitcoinitself;“blockchain”hasap-plications well beyond cash and currency. “The blockchain is a distributed dredger that runs under the Bitcoin currency,” Irish researcherRachel O’Dywer explains. Blockchain technol-ogy can constitute a public database that can thenbeusedforallkindsoftransactionsthatrequire trust. Governments, for instance, ex-perimentwithblockchaintechnologyforvotingapplications. The Honduran Property Insti-tutehas asked Factom, anAmerican startup,toprovideaprototypeofablockchain-basedlandregistry,forexample.98

98 “TheGreatChainofBeingSureaboutThings,”TheEcon-omist,October31,2015,www.economist.com.;AlsoseeRachel O’Dwyer’s talk at the Platform Cooperativism event:livestream.com.


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O’Dwyercautionsthatwhilethereislotsofposi-tivepotential,currentlymostoftheapplicationsofblockchaintechnologyareclosertoventurecapitalism than venture communism: Thinkbetter sharing between private banks and “im-proved”formsofdigitalrightsmanagement. But this technology also allows for middle-man-freepeer-to-peermarketplaces. Imagine “decentralized autonomous organizations” and virtual companies that are basically just setsof rules for transactions executed betweenpeers.99Sure,whodoyouturntoifsomethinggoes wrong? Blockchain-based programmingis also used as “consensus mechanism” forplatforms/tools that facilitate democratic de-cision-making in cooperatives. Here, bylaws,membership,shares,andvotingrecordscouldbe irrevocably stored. On theotherhand, “blockchain technology isbasedontheideaofdelegatingtrustawayfromcentralized institutions like the state but also social institutions and putting that instead into a technical architecture. Some people call this trust in the code but this trust also presumes that we no longer have to trust in each other. Instead,youareaskedtotrustsomekindofal-gorithm.Somehaveevencalledthisaformofalgorithmicregulation,”O’Dwyersaid.100 There is also the concern that blockchain-enabledmarketplaces could make it easier to avoid payingtaxes,forinstance.

A Foundation Focused on the Creation of the WordPress of Platform Co-ops: Inourexperience,working to connect people interested in coop-erativesandtheInternet,wenoticedthatdevel-opers across the country are working on similar projects. Underfunded system designers on the WestCoast would set up an online labor market while an East Coast project does something

99 Thenon-for-profitEthereumishelpingsuchenterprises.100vimeo.com/150040123.

similar but neither of them would considerjoiningforces. Myproposal is for various developersworld-widetoworkundertheauspicesofaPlatformCooperativism Consortium that would be able toraisefundsfortheongoingdevelopmentofthekernelofsuchfreesoftwareproject.Con-trarytoJeremyRifkin’sproposalofamarginalcost society it is still extremely expensive to program and constantly update an online la-bormarket and such foundation could assisttheseefforts.

Democratic Governance: Cooperative structures callforcollectivedecision-making,conflictreso-lution,consensusbuilding,andthemanagingofsharesandfundsinatransparentmanner.Then,thereisalsotheoverallmanagementofworkers.Oneofthecentralquestionsinthisdiscussionishowitsabusesofpowercanbekeptatbay.Oneoftheessentialquestionsisgovernance,basical-ly.Howcouldtheplatformgovernitselfinadis-tributed,trulydemocraticway?Convincingtoolshaveemergedoverthepastfewyears.Loomio, Backfeed, D-CENT, and Consensys. Loomio,aka“theFacebookofthecitizenweb,”is aworker-owned cooperativebased inWel-lington,NewZealand,andNewYorkCity101 that produces open-source software, very muchguidedbythevaluesofOccupy.Itisawebappthatfeaturescommunicationandpollingtoolsthat make it easier to facilitate democraticcommunities.102InSpain,27,000citizensjoinedLoomio to connect a nationwide grassroots network to the rapidly growing political par-tyPodemos.Altogether,100,000people in93countries are using Loomio already. Backfeed.cc is a distributed collaborative or-ganizationbasedonblockchaintechnology; it

101Wikimedia Foundation’s head office moved off emailintoLoomio,enablingcollaborativedecisionswith180staff.

102 loomio.org.


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supportscoordinationwithinaself-organizednetwork.103 D-CENT was born out of the recent activismwork in Catalonia, Iceland, and Greece. Theyarecreatingasuiteoftoolstobeusedforrap-idlyimplementingdemocracy,andothercoop-erativeplatforms.Theirgoalistogivepoliticalpower to people who are able to propose pol-icies,debateoptions,draftandscrutinize theproposal, vote,andmakedecisions.104

ConsenSys105 is a venture production studio building decentralized applications and various developer and end-user tools for blockchainecosystems,focusingprimarilyonEthereum.

Designing for Convenient Solidarity: Alltoooften,technologistsbelittletheimportanceoffront-enddesign.Thisisunfortunatebecauseonthelevelofuserexperiencedesign,freesoftwareplatforms have to rival the habit-creating se-ductiveness of the approaching Uber taxi onthescreenofyourphone.Or,atleast,design-ers need to decide how much of a consum-er-mentality theywant to integrate.CameronTonkinwise,Directorof Design Studies atCarn-egieMellonUniversity,cautionsthat:

A lot of these platforms enable interactions be-tween people. Political decisions are being made at the level of software design, at the level of in-terface design, and the sorts of people who are making these decisions are designers and they are very ill-equipped about the political ramifications of what they are doing. Politics is now happening at the level of micro interactions and it’s very im-portant that designers are understanding the so-ciology and anthropology of what they doing.106

Whatcandesignforplatformco-opsdodiffer-ently? Cameron Tonkinwise calls for a design

103Foradiscussionofblockchaintechnologysee:NathanSchneider, Trebor Scholz “The Internet Needs a NewEconomy” The Next System Project, November 8, 2015,www.thenextsystem.org.

104dcentproject.eu.105consensys.net.106vimeo.com/149541466.

that facilitates “convenient solidarities,” a de-signthatmakessmallactsofsolidarityeasierand more seamless.107Heproposes,for exam-ple, that design should literally provoke soli-daritywith aworker. If I can see thatworkerAhas three children, ismore expensive thanworkerB,andthatsheisabouttobeterminat-edbyTaskrabbitorUber, Iamfacedwiththedecision whether or not I want to support her. Whilemakingsolidarityabitmoreconvenient,such approach would also bring about obviousprivacy issues. Gooddesignforplatformcooperativesbeginswith the development of a relationship be-tween the designers and their clients. UXDesignforplatformco-opspresentsagreatopportunity.The interfaceof theseplatformscouldinstructusersaboutthefairlaborstan-dardsoftheco-opandcontrastittothelack-ing social protections in the sharing economy. Inotherwords,suchplatformscouldvisualizetheunfairnessof theestablishedon-demandeconomy. I’malsosuggestingtheuseofMozilla’sbadgetechnology108 to certify that the particularplatformfollowstheprinciplesthat Ioutlinedabove.Notunlikethefairtradecoffee,thatforallitsshortcomings,hascapturedasegmentofthemarket,thesebadgescouldcertifyethicallabor practices behind the screen.

Scale: In order to build an economy that is so-cially fairer and ecologically sustainable plat-formco-opshavetomovebeyondthegrowthimperative. Cooperatives don’t always have to scale up. Democratically controlled business-es such asworker cooperatives, could targetsmaller,localnichemarketswithouthavingtofocusonscalingup.Sucheffortscouldstartin

107Cameron Tonkinwise speaking at Platform Coopera-tivism:The Internet,Ownership,Democracy,platform-coop.net.

108“Badges,”MozillaWiki,May22,2012,wiki.mozilla.org.

http://www.thenextsystem.org/the-internet-needs-a-new-economy/


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citieslikeParis,Berlin,RiodeJaneiro,andothermunicipalities thathavebannedUber. If yourpriority is to take care of yourworkers, thenscaling up is not an immediate imperative. In differencetocountlessstartups,thegoalisn’tto jumpshipbywayofacquisitionbut it is tobuild lasting businesses over decades to come.

Learning and Education: One of the reasonsthat the Spanish Mondragon is so success-ful is that they have a cooperative universitythatdirectly feeds into theirnetworkofbusi-nesses. In the United States, various univer-sities set up centers dedicated to the prepa-ration of students for cooperative work:University of Wisconsin (1962), Kansas State(1984), UC Davis (1987), and North Dako-ta State (1994). In New York City, The Labor Studies Program at CUNY is offering a grad-uate course about worker cooperatives.109110In Boston in 2016, MIT’s Sasha Costanza-Chock

109 murphyinstituteblog.org.110 codesign.mit.edu.

teaches aproject-basedco-designcoursewithworker-owned cooperatives.110 Teaching coop-erativedesignandvaluesisoneapproach,an-other would be to think up and build a college thatisbuildoncooperativeprinciples,aBlackMountainCollege2.0. How could alternative learning institutionsbetterprepareyouthforcooperativeworkingand living today? Again, the work of JanelleOrsiisquiteessentialhere.Inherco-authoredbook,The Sharing Solution,Orsidemonstratesin a practical, hands-on manner, the variouswaysinwhichsharingcanbecomepartofoureveryday life: everything from sharing hous-ing,householdgoods,space, tasks,childcare,transportation, and even work. The Sharing Solution lays out the practical ground rules that could orient college students to a more coop-erativeapproach to life.Orsi’sbook feels likeThe Whole Earth Catalogofgenuinesharing.

For All People

We must invent a new Web in the service of a via-ble macroeconomic model, rather than develop-

ing a completely ruinous economy of data.111

Bernard Stiegler

Right now, platform capitalism is getting de-finedtop-downbydecisionsbeingmadeinSil-iconValley,executedbyblackboxalgorithms.What we need is a new story about sharing,aggregation,openness, andcooperation;onethat we can believe in. Theco-operativemovementneedstocometoterms with 21st century technologies. It’ll take someworktomakethenotionofonlinecoop-eratives as American as apple pie. It’ll also take

discussions in various national and local con-texts,fromPeru,GermanyandItaly,totheUK,SouthKorea,andIndia.111

Theimportanceofplatformcooperativismdoesnotliein“killingdeathstarplatforms.”112 It does not come from destroying the dark overlordslikeUberbutitcomesfromwritingovertheminpeople’sminds, incorporatingdifferentowner-shipmodels,andtheninsertingthembackintothemainstream.Inthelate1960s,early1970s,counterculturalists,formedutopiancommuni-ties;theyleftcitiestoforcetheirideaofthefu-ture into existence by living it in the mountains. Frequently,theseexperimentsfailed.

111“StiegleronDaeshand‘TheAgeofDisruption,”accessedNovember29,2015,www.samkinsley.com.

112“HowPlatformco-opsCanBeatDeathStarPlatformstoCreateaRealSharingEconomy,”Shareable.

http://codesign.mit.edu/


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Tosuccessfullydevelopplatformcooperatives,it does take more than practical wisdom and giddyenthusiasm.Ananti-theorystance,are-jectionofcriticalself-reflection,will—aswesawwith American counterculture—become an im-pediment. We need to study the failures andsuccessesofthepast.Weneedtoidentifytheareasinwhichplatformcooperativesaremostlikely to succeed. We need to spread an ideol-ogy of felt mutualism, communitarian ideals,andcooperationthatmakeallofthispossible.Platformcooperativismcan invigorateagenu-ine sharing economy. It will not remedy the cor-rosiveeffectsofcapitalismbutitcanshowthatworkcanbedignifyingratherthandiminishingforthehumanexperience. Platformcooperativism isnotabout thenextdeviceor “platform”; it isaboutenvisioningalifethatisnotcenteredontheshareholderen-terprise. Making change is not always a dinner

party,orwritinganessay,orconveningacon-ference;it’snotsoconvenient:platformcoop-erativismisalsoaboutconfrontation.

Tostrengthenandbuildoutplatformco-ops,itisessentialforlike-mindedpeopletoorganize.YochaiBenklerencouragedthismovement,“Ifyoucanimagineit,itcanhappen,ifyoudoitintime and capture a market.”113

We cannot waste any more time. Politicians andplatformownershavebeenpromisingso-cialprotections,access,andprivacy,butwearedemanding ownership. It’s time to realize that they will never deliver. They can’t. But we must. Throughourcollectiveeffortwewillbuildpo-litical power for a social movement that willbring these ideas into existence.

113“Making ItWork—PlatformCoop2015:PlatformCoop-erativismConference.”

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The Global Crisis of Displacement and EvictionsAHousingandLandRightsResponseByMiloonKothari-December2015

Growing from the ConcreteLeftElectoralPoliticsintheUnitedStatesByEthanYoung-November2015

“We the Peoples”? The United Nations on Its Seventieth Anniversary ByJamesA.Paul-October2015

Your Liberation is Linked to Ours International Labor Solidarity Campaigns ByDavidBacon-September2015

Power to the People TowardDemocraticControlofElectricityGenerationTradeUnionsforEnergyDemocracy-June2015

Austerity Urbanism TheNeoliberalCrisisofAmericanCitiesByJamiePeck-May2015

Organizing TransformationBestPracticesintheTransformativeOrganizingModelBySteveWilliams-May2015

Roll Back Low Wages NineStoriesofNewLaborOrganizingintheUnitedStatesBySarahJaffe-March2015

Casting Shadows ChokweLumumbaandtheStruggleforRacialJusticeandEconomicDemocracyinJackson,MississippiByKaliAkuno-February2015

TPP and TTIP: Partners in Crime FightingtheCorporate“Trade”AgendaintheUnitedStatesByMikeDolan-January2015

Recent Publications


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Confronting DevelopmentACriticalAssessmentoftheUN’sSustainableDevelopmentGoalsByBarbaraAdamsandKathrynTobin-December2014

Climate Change and the Great InactionNew Trade Union Perspectives BySeanSweeney-September2014

Who Cares ?AFeministCritiqueoftheCareEconomyByNancyFolbre-August2014

Coming in from the Cold TheBlackGermanExperience,PastandPresentByMarionKraft-July2014

Democracy Disregarded HowtheDecayofMeaningfulElectionsDrivesInequalityandInjusticeByJohnNichols-April2014

Self-Determination, Not TerminationPast,Present,andFutureoftheAmericanIndianMovementByWalterR.Echo-Hawk-January2014

More Than Just a GameChampionsforJusticeinU.S.SportsByDaveZirin-October2013

The Unfinished DreamTheMarchonWashingtonandtheRadicalLegacyofMartinLutherKing,Jr.ByAlbertScharenberg-August2013

Lift the Load of PovertyFightingforBlackEqualityintheAgeofObamaByJamesJennings-July2013

War on DemandTheGlobalRiseofDronesByMedeaBenjamin-June2013

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