Upstream - Platform Cooperativism with Trebor Scholz

Episode Date: February 5, 2017

In this Upstream Conversation we spoke with scholar and activist Trebor Scholz, who is an Associate Professor of Culture & Media at the New School for Liberal Arts & co-editor of the book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Trebor has a very wide breadth of knowledge in the field of digital labor, and is able to articulate a very strong critique of the modern day digital landscape. He walks us through how the internet has hit rock bottom, exemplified as it is these days by extreme power concentration, high levels of worker exploitation, and a lack of privacy. But Trebor is also able to draw a very compelling picture of how things could be different. What would #Uber look like if it had cooperative values? What if residents owned #Airbnb? And what role might a universal basic income play in the near future? Darkness and uncertainty loom ahead. Trebor's insights are a flash of light that illuminate and begin to guide us through these tumultuous times.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, to an upstream conversation with Trevor Scholes. Trevor is an associate professor of culture and media at the New School for Liberal Arts and a chair of the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture. He also co-edited the book Ours to Hack and to Own, The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, published by Orr Books.

Trevor will be featured in our upcoming episode on the economics of the digital world. We spoke with him at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in New York City. Well, Trevor, welcome to Upstream. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Let's just start with, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to do the work that you do? So I'm a German-American scholar and activist at the New School in New York City. And since 2008, 2009, I've been working on digital labor. Mostly people know the series of conferences on digital labor that I convened here at the New School since 2009, which from 2009 to 2014 focused really on a critique of the digital economy and for the last two years have shifted more to thinking about alternatives and what

you can do in response to these critiques. So this is how in 2014 I developed this concept of platform cooperativism, which had at its core this idea of co-ownership and democratic governance of online platforms. So put simply, it's essentially the question, you know, what would it be like if something like Uber would be owned by the drivers and would have embedded in the code cooperative values to reflect this business model? And, you know, what would it be like if residents or a network of cities would own something like Airbnb and you can take that to Facebook or social networking and say, like, what would it be like? Basically, what would it be like for the people

who most rely on particular services to actually own the platforms that offer them? This could be labor brokerages. This could be in crowdsourcing. This could be in social networking. You name it. That's like a starting point, and then after 2014

where I wrote an essay on this, 2015 I followed this up with a longer text like a small book if you will which was published and then translated into many languages. What was it called? The Platform Cooperativism Primer was published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and then translated into Spanish, Italian, and now French and Portuguese and other languages. And that really helped to internationalize this idea. And in 2015, together with Nathan Schneider, I convened this event at the New School, which brought really a sort of popularized this idea.

So over a thousand people came and got a sort of popularized society, right? So like over a thousand people came and got a lot of press attention and things really got rolling from there. And so Nathan had been reporting on these companies for a while. And so really there was a nice convergence. Wonderful. So let's's let's zoom out for a second because you're you're talking about the alternatives but let's go back to what concerns you most about the state of the internet economy or as you call digital work what what's what are the problems? Well so I would say that maybe around 2014, the web has hit rock bottom, right? So it's in many ways really worse now than ever before.

And I would give five reasons for that. One is that there's this incredible concentration of ownership. of ownership. So you have really the top five companies that own essentially any platform that you will use when you get up in the morning, have coffee, and switch on your computer. So all of these sites that most of us are using on a daily basis are really owned by so few people

that you can squeeze them into a Google bus. So then secondly, so there's this concentration, what Tim Wu referred to as a sort of master switch, like who is in control. So it's very, very few actors that are in control. Then secondly, there's this question of algorithmic control, so that you have, let's say, Uber drivers essentially being ruled over by an

algorithmic boss that determines their actions, which then also leads to this question of this shift away from direct employment over the past 40 years, which is reflected in those drivers. So now you have independent contractors and other precarious workers, freelancers, domestic workers, day laborers. And that's 55 million people in the U.S. right now that work in this way. And for, I think, the top and bottom two thirds, that's not a very pleasant story because you have a loss of labor rights you know like you have worker rights you have a loss of social benefits and all the protections that came with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 where basically where very few people have a romantic relationship to employment, you know, like who liked their boss anyway.

But nevertheless, those protections really matter against harassment, against, you know, for the eight-hour workday, all these things that unions also fought over for like 150 years or so. So that was number two. Number three is, of course, privacy. When you think about how a lot of these services are that are allegedly free online right uh how you become the product right as as the saying goes and uh so there's this corporate data ownership that really leads to like amazon now bought the

patents for predictive shopping based on your data, right? So where they sent you products that you didn't actually order and then you can see based on what they think you would like. And predictive policing and all these kind of things that come with this data ownership, right? That basically the idea is to influence your future self based on what they know about you. So that's a problem. Privacy also on a more mundane level, Uber tracing,

you know, celebrities we just heard about, you know, Beyonce being basically surveyed by Uber whenever she took a ride, or also more everyday citizens, you know, tracking their battery status of their phone to then introduce search pricing if the battery is low, or recording any kind of dependencies or routines to then sort of profit from those insights. For example, a colleague had an injury and her employer agreed to pay her an Uber foreman to work every day.

And after two weeks, she realized that there was search pricing every time she wanted to take the car. And she took her husband's phone, and there was no search pricing for him. So basically, Uber realized that there was a routine, and once there's a routine, they think you're dependent, and then they introduce the device. So this is how you can see that privacy actually really leads to, has very concrete impact. So the data, they are actually used really in this way.

Then number four, you have destruction of public services. So public infrastructure. So already now you have advertisement here by these companies, Lyft and Uber, Already now you have advertisement here by these companies Lyft and Uber where they map out the subway system and basically show how they can go to replace that. And eventually these services might actually be cheaper even than public transportation and so thereby actually potentially replacing them. Number five are the labor conditions that I spoke to already. So in addition to the shift over the last 40 years away from direct employment

and towards freelancing and more contingent work, you can also say that it's a relatively low unemployment rate in the United States compared to Europe, but that the jobs that are actually created aren't really jobs, but incredibly low-paid, low-skilled occupations, so gigs, essentially. And so there's no security to these jobs, and also this goes along with this trend that from 1973 to today, you had a steady increase

in productivity of American workers while their wages stagnated, right, and their rights stalled, essentially. So all these, I think, developments go together, and a lot of it came really on the heels of the 2008 crisis, financial crisis, where basically people were just willing to engage in work, like working for $2 to $3 an hour, like novice workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk do, simply because they had to get by somehow

at this particular time in history. And I think this is how, you know, these crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk actually got a workforce that made it worth it for them. So I hadn't heard of that before. Amazon Mechanical Truck? Mechanical Truck? Amazon Mechanical Truck is a platform run by Amazon.com since 2005. And according to their own records, it's about 500,000 workers. But it's very unclear how many workers they actually have. Other studies show that it might just be 10,000 people who actively work there all the time.

So it's not clear. But it basically is piecemeal work, digital piecemeal work, so jobs are broken up into small parts, and this allows them to distribute the work and then actually pay much less, to the extent that novice workers make $2 to $3 an hour, and very experienced workers who have been with them for many, many years might make it to up to $6 an hour. You know, and there's a lot of stigma attached to it, you know, so the stigma is basically, well, they must be all incredibly uneducated because, you know, who would do this for $2 to $3 an hour?

But the fact is, it's actually absolutely not true at all. Many of them, I think over half of them have a college degree so it's actually not at all uneducated people and also when you look closely it requires actually a lot of skill to perform reasonably well on those platforms it's not like anyone without any you know skill level could actually do this so there are misconceptions around this. Yeah, and it's just interesting because we don't know what we're supporting when we do something like buy something on Amazon. So it's helpful to hear all the different layers and all the things you can't see when it's internet economy.

You can't see the algorithms. You can't see that your price is different than someone else's. There's a lot of hidden things in the internet economy. Right, so there's what Frank Pasquale called the black box society, right? So where exactly, as you say, there's a lot of invisible labor, and there was just a book out on that with that title too. Yeah, I mean, it's very opaque, right? So you're not sure what's happening in terms of governmental surveillance,

but also peer-to-peer surveillance, and, of course, also commercial surveillance. I think one thing that I should add in terms of maybe add not five but six points, and then the six points would really be, again, using a term from Frank Pasquale, which is a nullification of the law, so that actually all of these platforms to various degrees operate illegally. And because basically, you know, these entrepreneurs are very fast and activists and lawmakers are very slow, right?

So they create these realities and then in the case of Uber, basically say, well, you know, look, we have this consumer base and they all love our service, so maybe you really are the dinosaur and maybe these regulations are all inappropriate because obviously these people love it. So why don't you change your regulation in our favor?

So why don't you deregulate to make our business model possible? So that's sort of like the method that many of these companies apply. And so the name of this podcast is Upstream, which is a metaphor. Do you know the metaphor, the upstream metaphor at all? So it's about, you know, imagine you're seeing people drowning and you're jumping in to save them, and that's kind of the problem. And then eventually someone needs to go upstream to find out why is everyone falling in the river in the first place and so it's kind of like going to the root of the issue so you you know very clearly

laid out all the current problems in the internet economy what would you see as the root causes is it is it capitalism is it our? Is it our divisions from one another? Is it the speed at which the Internet is going and we're not catching up? What do you see as the root causes of the problem? Well, there's a slogan, right? Things are f***ed up and bulls***. And that's maybe a way to start. But if you focus on the digital economy, of course, which you can never think about outside of the rest of society, right? It's, of course, never, this, in fact, was a problem historically, and also on the legal side, where people had this internet exceptionalism, which was basically saying, well, it's all

different on the internet, right? So when, in fact, it's now very, very clear that those problems are already, you know, we see this in the physical habitat, like in society all around us every day, right? But the same kind of issues are actually now also very clearly reflected, right? So this idea of consolidation, so that all these players in the way that Tim Wu describes is in various stages, like where you have initially these monopolies actually provide useful services and are appreciated. Let's say, think of Gmail.

But then once they are monopolies, they basically stop to innovate and also sort of turn against the consumer in a way. So then because there's no more competition, they actually turn out to be not so beneficial at all. So that's sort of like the cycle that you see there. So but at the heart of it, if you want to really think about the digital economy more narrowly, I would say that it is this logic of investor-driven enterprises.

Because once you take this money, right, the if you talk to i don't know the ceos of airbnb right and you're not terrible people but once you start a service like this and it becomes an international success the way these companies have had the fortune to to have experienced, then you really have to follow it. You have to pay back. So on an 80 to 24 month basis, you have to actually show a return on the investment. And if you don't do this, you are seen as a failure and you are shut down. So as Twitter, which made $500 million in a quarter, right, which was seen as a failure because it wasn't enough, right? And it's not what the investors had expected. Then you see how these services deteriorate. And now Twitter being for sale, you can see how, you know, now you have much more video advertisement introduced, right? So basically a service that people really appreciated and that really

offered something for the common good, if you will, is screwed up by this market logic and will sort of make this into something that you don't really want to use. So that's the problem. So what is the Internet that you envision? If you were to vision your ideal or the better Internet that it could be, what would it feel like? You mentioned you wake up and you use different things and they're all owned by a handful of people and everything. So what would it feel like to be in a different Internet world?

And who would own the platforms? And what would the products, what would the services be used for? If we were to dream big. Yeah, no, I think it's very important. So I think it's important to have this sort of long-term vision, right? And I would, just like anyone, would want to see my life opportunities being delinked from wages. So something like universal basic income, which I'm supportive of in the United States, for sure. And that's a long discussion to sort of have a more fine-grained discussion about that.

But yeah, sure, I support that idea. And to have a post-work society. But what I think is a real problem with this discussion over the past decades, for activists in particular, is that there are no steps of transition mapped out clearly that can be concretely taken to get there. So what you end up with is these visions that let's say we are shared by Occupy Wall Street or by other protest movements but without tangible things that can be next. So there's this idea of you know we will

all live in this post-gender, post-work society but like how do we get there is not mapped out, not concretely mapped out. And this is where I think that platform cooperativism, for example, comes in as a, by all means, imperfect, but nevertheless short-term point of transition. What would this feel like? Well, I think it would just create more fairness and it would be a far less, it would be a more equal society.

I mean, I grew up under socialism, so I have some vague memory of what that felt like, though, of course, that was not, you know, perfect either. But, you know, like where humans are not discarded by society if they don't fit into these imperatives of the capitalist logic, right? So where you actually retain some dignity and some fairness in an economy and also in life itself, where people don't relate to each other just on the basis of competition, but more, you know, maybe thinking about like Kropotkin

along, you know, mutual aid principles. So that's one thing. And then I think also concretely we have to think about is automation, right, and artificial intelligence because you see this coming already. I mean, and it will be, I mean, there's this often constantly quoted study, which is probably misleading, but which basically said that 47% of all jobs in the United States will be affected in some way by 2020,

affected by automation in 2020. So that means that they are, you know, artificial intelligence will be somehow playing a role in their job. But in our context, I think it would be to think about what would it be like for a taxi cooperative, for example, to run something like Uber, and to then, of course, be part of the same process. So buy self-driving cars as a cooperative,

invest in self-driving cars, and cooperative, invest in self-driving cars. And, yeah, sure, this will make the drivers obsolete, but it turns them at the same time into owners of artificial intelligence, right, of these vehicles. And so indifference to like an Uber or, you know, Lyft model, which is basically just thinking about these drivers as disposable workforce. And so that, I think, shows you the value of the cooperative model by placing value on those workers, also in a work regime that is dictated by artificial intelligence. You've talked about this briefly, but the benefits to a platform co-op as opposed to a regular one. So we have the ownership. What else? What else is there? Well, I mean, it depends. So there's like, you have to really think about a vast typology, right?

In my book, Überworked and Underpaid, I mapped out a typology of digital work and started to create a typology of platform cooperatives. Because, of course, that's very different depending on what you talk about. Is this a taxi cooperative or is this an Airbnb-type operation? So these are very different ways of operating. But what would this look like? Well, very different ways of operating. But what would this look like? Well, there would be a very different relationship to treating the reputation of the workers, right? So because right now you have these reputation systems

on Uber or on Airbnb, and essentially they fail, right? They fail because on Airbnb they don't actually account for market failure. Tom Slee has shown in his book that basically these repetition systems don't work because everybody or the vast majority of people give extremely high evaluations. So that means even if people screw up, that's actually not reflected in the review. And on Uber, it creates an incredible pressure on the drivers,

but also in terms of emotional labor to having to not sink below 4.7. So if they sink below 4.7, they are, as the company calls it, deactivated, so fired. And to create a reputation system set could also be carried to another service, right? Would be something that a platform cooperative could do where you are not tied with your resume, if you will, or with your worker diary or whatever you want to call this. So basically your track record of your good performance

is completely locked in one platform now, right? So you might work for TaskRabbit for five years, and if you then go to another platform, you are starting from zero. There's nothing, right? All of your experience and your good reputation isn't carried over because it cannot. So that's like an intervention. Then, of course, data ownership is ownership is another one. So there's a Swiss platform co-op that creates basically a cooperative that could help patients to own their health data. So when you go into a hospital you can selectively disclose your data. You decide. So it's not that you don't have any awareness of what is emanating out of your tests. So a bit more control over that. So data ownership, I think, is a really

big one, as much as platform ownership. So as you can see with models like Stocksy, which is a Canadian platform cooperative for stock photography, they don't just offer an incredible product, so it's really fantastic photography at a very good price, but they are also sharing the ownership of the platform of this cooperative where they are selling the photos with about 1,000 photographers who are selling their work there. And in the last year, they had a revenue of $7 million. So you see that it's also not just a pipe dream

or some sort of counter-cultural fantasy, but it's actually something that people do, and it has actually a positive revenue model as well. So you can dispel those who say that, oh, this will never work anyway. I mean, it's working already, and there are hundreds of examples of this working. There are, of course, also others who struggle, right?

And I think you came up in one of your questions that you sent me. You also asked about scale. So this is also another common objection, right? Especially when people say, like, well, this doesn't scale, right? So, like, you can't be an Uber worldwide without $60 billion like they have, or without the $30 billion that Airbnb has. And that is true. But then also you really need to say that in some areas, it doesn't need to scale up.

In some business models, it doesn't need to scale up. Where, of course, if you want to create something like an Amazon or an eBay, it does. Then you really do have to match this question of scaling. Or I'm thinking about like Fairmundo. They create it per country and then they share it so that it can be created in each country. So you don't even have to scale it. Right, right, right. That's the idea. I think what's important about this is

also that we are realistic so that we are not living in some kind of dreamland but also to acknowledge the the difficulties right and like one of the i mean for mondo it's a difficult model right because that actually really does require incredible scale and this kind of eBay, Amazon model. And that's tough. But then there are others like Loconomics are now here in New York, Up and Go, which are basically labor brokerages for cooperatives. So if you want a babysitter, you hear the baby in the background, or you hear pet care or house cleaning, you can basically just use their app and or their web presence

and access cooperatives that are offering these services. And they hope to scale this up from beyond New York, but right now it's just here. Loconomics in San Francisco offers massage therapists and other freelancers similar to a platform like that. So, you know, not all models have to always scale up. But it's also really important to think about, like, that there are really particular sectors in which this will work better than in others. So I think, for example, that home health care, which is, there's an incredible need for that in this country. And, you know, in Germany, I think they are looking for one and a half million home health care professionals over the next two years that they don't have. So there is a lot of demand and vocational licensed nurses are often very exploited

by like say temp agencies who charge up to 50% if you go through them. So if they form a cooperative and make themselves available through an app as this one cooperative in Southern California does, it's called Nurses Can. And so they do exactly that and offer services to low-income women to do follow-up house visits when they are pregnant. Because there is often the issue that when they are pregnant,

they go to a doctor initially, and then there are all these follow-up visits that are requested, and because they have children already, they often can't afford the childcare, so they can't leave the house, so they can't go to the doctor. So these nurses go to them. So you see that there's a real need for that, right? And again, really to think about your product is very important,

and to think about that it's not working equally well in all areas. So you mentioned the size of some of the existing platforms like Airbnb and Uber and TaskRabbit and Google. I mean, they're just so large. So I'm wondering, because you're mentioning a lot of new platforms. So, I mean, I can imagine it's both and, that we should both try to transform the current existing platforms into platform co-ops as well as creating new alternatives.

But for me, just the large ones seem so huge and so vast in there. Like, how would that even happen? That one thing that we've seen is people are advocating for nationalization first i mean i don't even know if that's even like a likely idea but like nationalizing facebook and then cooperatizing it or nationalizing airbnb and then because if it were the railroad company with the amount of money that it makes it would be nationalized you know many years ago. Well, I mean, there's a huge cliff between Europeans and Americans here. I think that a lot of proposals in that direction come from Europeans

that if you live in an American context, you see that that is just not going to happen. I mean, Facebook will not be nationalized. Because of their resistance or because of size? Because the corporate interests are much too much enmeshed with government. Whereas in Europe, it's a different situation. There's also a history of social democracy, right, and with a very different approach to corporate power,

at least to some extent. I don't want to idealize it either, but there is a difference. So pointing to government regulation, so federal regulation, I think is, you know, as Tim Berners-Lee called for a public cloud, right? Like publicly owned, state-owned cloud services, right? So that you don't rely on Google or Amazon all the time. I think that's very wise. Also extremely hard to imagine in this country, right?

So I think in the United States, I would rather go with what Murray Booksheen would have proposed, which is municipalism, right? So that to actually really rely on your local situation and on your municipalities to lobby your mayor or your local officials and work with them locally. Because if you follow the news even for a few seconds, you will have noticed that there isn't very much hope

radiating out of the White House these days. And I think this is where platform cooperatives actually can play a very positive role in a climate that is politically and economically hostile to workers. I think you can insulate yourself to an extent from this onslaught from the right that we are experiencing now. The Trump administration already sending intimidating union leaders and sending a clear signal against organized labor, which as it is barely exists in this country, right? It's already so diminished. I think it's 7%, 6% or 7% in the private sector. One other thing with national intervention or local government. Yeah, go ahead.

But you ask about the transition. I think that's very important. So while I don't have much hope of, I mean, I think I would follow the antitrust discussions around Uber and others, and maybe there's some miracle and there is actually antitrust legislation against these big players. But then the hope to think that out of a federal regulation, you would get a cooperative small company is, I think also relatively misplaced hope so this is what I sort of mean with this realism I think these ideas like nationalization and also splitting up Uber and then creating a part of it and making turning it into a cooperative are very very good you know like they trigger the imagination and in that

sense they are spreading information about this business model. But I don't think that that's a realistic step forward. I don't think that will actually happen. Maybe I'm too pessimistic. But I think it's important to be realistic about these things. What I think is much more realistic, and you can immediately do,

and of course is maybe much less sexy and doesn't sell itself as well as this idea of whatever turning twitter into a cooperative or facebook into a cooperative or nationalizing facebook is to work with existing cooperatives which sometimes have not that great a reputation right so in germany for example like there's this sort of chain of groceries. It's called EDK. I mean, probably in your own country, probably in England, similar ones. I don't know, Co-op, for example.

I don't know if you think of Co-op, you really think of sort of highfalutin values. So they are not really projecting their values outwards. It's often just a business model. This is sort of like after 200 years of co-ops, this is sort of what you get, unfortunately. So there's often, you know, in Italy, you have people thinking about red co-operatives and thinking about the self-exploitation in those.

There are all kinds of arguments against co-ops, but, I mean, in Italy, you have 10 million people in co-operatives. So they are a major economic power. In Spain, that's 10% of the economy. So you can actually do a lot with those existing powers that also have some experience in the market. So I think this would be one way to start. And another one is to start, of course,

with just sort of starting from scratch with a startup, like a cooperative startup, or create a startup in a VC-financed way, and then turn it into a platform co-op once there's a user base, right? So like some people have suggested that as well. So that's another route. There are many different ones, and it all depends on the particular type right the typology there is important yeah so so one thing i'm hearing kind of invitation for listeners is to try to find cooperative versions of of you know things that we're engaging in platforms like a cooperative email service if there is one or fair mundo or you know that kind of thing so that's one thing that we can do is that we can kind of remove ourselves from the current dominant digital economy

and then move ourselves more into the other one. Credit unions. Credit unions, yeah, both in physical reality and in internet reality. So we can do that. The other thing is, I'm just noticing with, your work has had great response you know from the short relatively short time that you know this idea has really come up I mean the books uh the the events

the conferences platform co-op seems to be a huge thing so I imagine you as a as an academic is like you're shining a light on something the the small examples, and by doing so, you're bringing it more into presence or into being. Well, I mean, just to be clear, right, I mean, this is more, it's, I think the sort of theory comes a few steps after the practice, right? So in the sense that I just gave this name to something that I saw in existence, but it's not like I created those companies or this whole ecosystem, but I noticed it and basically gave it a name and that made it more tangible for people.

And I think the resonance comes because you have so much uncertainty and also, as you can see from surveys of Millennials that they identify as anti-capitalists to much larger degree than people would have thought right in the United Kingdom as much as in the United States they don't really see a place for themselves in capitalism anymore right so it's almost sometimes fields like they are sort of sitting in a self-driving car heading to Armageddon or something, right? In a situation like that I think something it has to do with technology which they are already

quite prone to or interested in and then also self-organization, right? Not having a boss in the traditional sense. This is something else you can see in this economy which is basically that younger generations are very skeptical of these big institutions and their hierarchies and really don't want to, like I said, have a boss, right? So they want to think outside the boss, if you want. And this has, I think, to do with indifference to their parents, who had actually very tangible benefits and perks bestowed on them by these, by all means, flawed institutions. They don't experience that.

They don't see those benefits from those institutions. All they see is hierarchy and horribleness. So that's, I think, also another reason for people responding so positively to this. I think also another thing to sort of underline or highlight is the relationship to technology when we talk about platform co-ops, which is embracing technology. So it's not the kind of Luddite approach that would reject all that, but to think about it in how it's about the social organization of technology, right?

So how do you actually, so you embrace it, but you try to embed your values, right? So as I said, like sort of you rip the algorithmic heart out of Uber, but then you embed your own values in that, right? Implant your own values in that. And it just seems like the time is so ripe for this. As you mentioned what's happening in the White House, I'm just imagining the worker crisis is going to get worse and worse, and so the space for more co-ops,

both in physical reality and Internet, is going to be greater and greater. So this time is really happening. So where is right now your main point of intervention? Because I can see that you could one work with Uber drivers or people who are renting on Airbnb and like kind of encouraging them to get off and do other sites or things. There's the average person as a consumer asking them to change where they're shopping or buying. There's also, you know, I'm imagining doing talks at tech schools, like people graduating who are looking for their first job in tech. And great, wouldn't

it be great if we got them to then think about platform clubs? So, you know, or existing people in tech who are maybe open. So where do you see is the point of intervention for you and your work? Well, there are many points of intervention that are possible. I completely agree with you. To influence these young minds of technologists would be fantastic. So, I don't know, giving a talk at Google would be great. But there are many other opportunities. So, you know, just personally, I don't know,

I get approached almost every day by some group of people, like from dog walkers in los angeles to who started a cooperative to babysitters in argentina to a group of programmers in india to i mean you name it it's like constantly different people like just now from a platform co-op that just started in mexico. And they have some very tangible needs. They need to connect to other platform co-ops. They have legal questions. They have technical questions. And of course, I can't answer those

because I don't have these competencies. So what we created is a consortium at the New School, which basically brings together actors in this ecosystem that are all trying to help those emerging co-ops and with very different in very different ways so some with research some with as it was a legal consultancy so we try to create online legal templates and to make it easier to start a co-op, but also with design advice and many other things, like speakers, as you mentioned, but also we were working with people

in Hong Kong who want to start sort of an Asian hub. We are working with people in Nairobi and Kenya to maybe implant this idea there as well, because in the African countries, you have now also already in 12 cities, Airbnb and Uber starting, which Africa, with its rich, rich history of cooperative practices, it is rather ironic that they would be so welcoming to these and to basically sort of put the seat down there before it starts. Also, a Portuguese translation of my book, the Primer on Platform Co-ops, will come out

and so we're going to try to do an event in Rio or Sao Paulo to also work there. So it's like to basically work with cities. I'm also working with Barcelona, the city of Barcelona, which is really on the forefront of much of this. So they have made platform co-operativism Barcelona, the city of Barcelona, which is really on the forefront of much of this. So they have made platform co-operativism policy for the city, as much as Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour Party, who included platform co-operativism in his Digital Democracy Manifesto. And here in New York, we have the New York City council members,

like Brad Lander, for example, who are really in support of this work as well there are several council members who are supporting this so basically to locally make headways with this but also to connect with other rebel cities if you like that have a critical stance a stance that doesn't just open the doors to these monopolies and lets them rule freely, but actually thinks about how to also invest in alternatives that can then lead to a more diverse digital landscape. So the goal of platform cooperativism is not to eliminate the death star, if you want, as Neil Guernfellow put it, but the goal is much to to strive for these monopolies existing next to these smaller alternatives right so like a diversified landscape wonderful so i just have two more questions how

does buddhism influence the work that you do and maybe what would a buddhist approach to the internet economy look like well you mentioned that you're studying right livelihood here. So I think this has very much to do with that, right? And also this summer, I was traveling Europe and giving talks and also doing Skype interviews with people who are really active in this larger community. And what you find is basically that a lot of idealism, of course, and there's also a lot of spirituality in many of those people who really push this. And I haven't really drawn any sort of grandiose conclusions from this insight, but I think there's a link there. There's something there.

And yeah, of course, I mean, an ethical livelihood is, of course, for people who are interested of working online, is not something that, you know, should be overlooked. They should also take those ideals and those demands on what you want your work to look like and how you want to impact the world with what you do. It's, of course, not devoid from the discussion about the Internet, right? So, like, why would you exclude that in this discussion? So I think it's, in a way, an extension of that, too.

So you mentioned earlier, you said in the very beginning, you said that platform co-ops may not be the next system. You said it's imperfect. It's almost like a transition. It is. Or something. So what is it a transition to? What do you feel like we're transitioning to when you say platform co-ops? And why aren't they how you envision?

Well, I mean, so, you know, traditionally people would talk at this point sort of about socialism or communism. But these terms are like very much, they have a lot of luggage, right? There's a lot of, they are quite heavy and they're also discredited in the minds of many people. So Nick Shvetnich and Paul Mason

consequently sort of talked about more of a post-capitalist world. And, you know, with that is marked by, I think there is no way around something like universal basic income right so no matter how qualified you will be there just will not be enough work right so because of automation so and in that world like what will people do how will they survive? So there are people like this economist, Owen, at the New York Times, who would say that basically by 2020, you will have 10% of people making over a million dollars or be quite wealthy,

whereas the rest will make $5,000 to $10,000 a year. as the rest will make $5,000 to $10,000 a year. So basically sort of to think about this inequality that we're seeing now extremely accelerated, right? And if you don't want political unrest, I think there will have to be some solution to this issue. And you see, like the CEO of Tesla talking about universal basic income, there are, I mean, Silicon Valley,

which is sitting on trillions and trillions of dollars of unused funds, which is somewhat sympathetic also to this discussion for maybe all the wrong reasons, but also thinking about this, you know, they never pay taxes, so maybe now this is a way of giving back. I mean, there are all kinds of different ways, of course. That's a long discussion. Like I said, it's a huge discussion to talk about universal basic income,

but it's something that people in Europe are already warming up to. You have in Switzerland, in their direct democracy, had a vote on this, right, like last summer, where all Swiss people voted, basically, on whether they want $2,500 in tax in universal basic income. And I mean, it was rejected, but it is absolutely doable, right? I think so they looked at what it would actually take to pay this. And so for all everyday goods that you buy, you would pay like a few cents more, like that it like with that that would be enough to pay this so yeah but that's a long discussion but i think this is where where

things are heading and it's inevitable i mean i think there's just no uh there's no way around that yeah and so what direction is your work taking what are kind of your big insights right now or your big questions? What are you kind of chewing on right now as like what you want to know or what you want to focus on right now in your work? Well, to an extent, it's like how to actually help the people that come to us with these needs, right? And so how to make this model succeed to some extent to promote and and really also help develop this sort of much more sustainable model and like i said so the but the big questions i think they sort of shine they were shining through the discussion that we

had for the last half an hour but i think one of the big questions is this question of artificial intelligence and how that will play out in relation to the cooperative model. Because if you don't watch out, and you see this already, like Apple disclosed information about their Apple car, which they say will be proprietary, right? And if you look at Google and their plans for their car, they are not meant to be in private ownership they are meant to be in Google's ownership

as infrastructure for the city so basically they just drive around the city and you just grab one whenever you please and they are not owned by you so basically which creates an almost Gmail-like service for cars in your city, but then also complete reliance on those companies. So you will live in a Google city or an Apple city, right,

where all your transportation will be relying on these monopolies who also have all this other data about you. So it sounds Orwellian, doesn't it? So to somehow think about, and I don't have an answer to that, but to start thinking about how the cooperative model could play a role in that, to push back on that and to offer also other models, I think is very important. Wow, thank you so much. Sure, thank you.

It's been wonderful. Thank you. you've been listening to an upstream conversation with trevor scholls he will be featured in our The sun is rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our hopes that break To the morning we run to shoreline Calling us to speak of surrender Waves under the earth and throes Casting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea

As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hot waves Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run to the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Blades under the earth and rose

Crossing mostly shadows Tall like giants As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Thank you. O Ooooooo

Ooooooo Ooooooo © transcript Emily Beynon