Want to go deeper on the world of sharing, cooperativism, and an internet economy that works for all of us? Head to the New School November 13-14th for Platform Cooperativism: a coming out party for the cooperative internet, co-sponsored by the Murphy Institute. Register here.
In a new article over at FastCoexist (“The People’s Uber: Why The Sharing Economy Must Share Ownership“), Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz lament the current state of the sharing economy:
For all the things that companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit allow us to share with each other […] ownership and governance are not on offer. This is what the democratic promise of the Internet has come to: a democracy of access, of “collaborative consumption,” but not of control, real accountability, or ownership.
It’s a story that’s all too familiar for exploited workers subject to the micro-monitoring, low wages, and new forms of precarity that have opened up with the sharing economy. Yet, while Silicon Valley hails the new “freedoms” afforded by an internet that allows anyone to monetize any of their latent resources — time, bedrooms, cars and more — many workers are suffering from the gigification that has left them without benefits, stable wages, or any sort of certainty. From this, it’s easy for the future of work to look grim indeed.
Scholz and Schneider, however, take a bold step, opening up a new set of imaginative possibilities: What if, instead of being exploited by the “on-demand” economy, workers ran that economy themselves?
It’s an ambitious question, with striking implications. And it’s more in reach than we might think. Can it really be that, as the writers argue, we can “create a future in which technology nurtures democracy and cooperation, rather than obscuring them”?
Scholz and Schneider argue that it can:
Platform cooperativism is a return to the ambition that the Internet can be a tool for developing better, deeper forms of democracy. It is starting to happen among innovative designers, labor organizers, and tech-savvy community groups. It is getting people thinking about new models of ownership, such as multi-stakeholder cooperatives, in which a platform’s developers and users can each have an appropriate stake. It draws lessons from the success of open-source software, which enables disparate enterprises to collaborate on building tools together.
They provide some instructive case studies:
Taxi drivers in Denver and the suburbs of D.C. […] have set up cooperative companies and control their own hailing apps. In New Zealand, the worker-owners of Loomio produce a decision-making platform now being used by governments, schools, and communities around the world. With the help of Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a company called Loconomics is building a worker-owned alternative to TaskRabbit. Home-care workers throughout the five boroughs, in an industry increasingly reliant on online platforms, are talking about creating fairer apps of their own. In none of these cases is technology the savior; what matters is how people organize around it.
…
Online platforms have shaped this reorganization of work underway, serving as bottlenecks for emerging labor markets. They grant workers new kinds of flexibility, but they also allow employers to act lawlessly and hire and fire much more freely—at great cost to people living paycheck to paycheck. Over the long term, whoever owns and controls these platforms will determine who benefits from the emerging future of work.
For Scholz and Schneider, the answer involves transcending the idea that technology alone will save us. Platform cooperativism builds on our emerging technologies and “needs an ecosystem of its own.”
It needs investors willing to let other stakeholders retain ownership and control. It needs governments that recognize the promise of cooperative enterprise. It needs entrepreneurs, too, who want to see their idea turn into a sustainable commons, not simply an engine of exponential profits and the relentless pursuit of “scale.” New technologies, like the blockchain that underlies Bitcoin, offer fresh opportunities for cooperative enterprise—if we choose to use them that way.
The labor movement has much to offer this emerging — and potentially liberatory — approach to the apps that increasingly shape our lives. The way we use them, the way we own them: these will be shaped by the extent to which we can organize and engage with the realities of our changing work lives. Let’s engage in this conversation: it’s time to start imagining — and building — together.
