Platform cooperative movements solve the abuses of tech platforms.

Platform Cooperatives Digital networks have immense capacity to enable sharing and cooperation. Unfortunately, tech companies have captured much of these social energies for their own purposes, namely, to carry out the usual work of capitalism on powerful platforms. They call the result the “sharing economy” and “gig economy,” but in fact it is simply a new species of markets designed for microrentals, piecemeal labor, data mining, and consumerism. Platforms like TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk have re-introduced piecework on a massive scale by offering pennies for a variety of microtasks that computers can’t perform, such as image tagging, transcription, and data cleaning. Other platforms entice us into converting our cars, apartments, and private time into rentable assets to compensate for our plunging incomes. As sophisticated computer algorithms constantly ratchet down wages for “independent contractors,” it is eroding the very possibility of stable jobs with benefits. To counter these trends, the platform cooperatives movement arose in 2015 as a field of experimentation. Its goal is to try to develop more socially constructive websites and mobile apps. If people can own and manage their own platforms as cooperatives, argues Trebor Scholz, one of the catalysts of the movement, they will be able to reap greater long-term benefits and control in the face of well-capitalized tech giants like Uber and Airbnb. “What if we owned our own version of Facebook, Spotify, or Netflix?” writes Scholz. “What if the photographers at Shutterstock.com could own the platform where their photos are being sold?”30 A number of efforts are underway to do just that. The idea is to help producers and users co-own member-driven websites for distributing stock photography, streaming music, and other artworks. Another type of platform cooperative is apps codeveloped by city governments and local users. Seoul, South Korea, for example, has been developing a Munibnb platform to enable apartment rentals on better terms than Airbnb, with revenues earmarked for public services. The app is also intended to prevent the conversion of stable rental properties into “ghost neighborhoods” used mostly by tourists, a problem afflicting many major world cities like Amsterdam, London, and Barcelona. While still an emerging strategy, platform coops hold great promise for preventing monopoly, exploitation, and data surveillance in digital spaces. They can also help democratize ownership and control over platforms, and assure greater self-determination for working conditions.