From Airbnb to city bikes, the ‘sharing economy’ has been seized by big money

Evgeny Morozov has a point:

And we are still waiting for the co-operative alternatives, the platform co-ops exists in some places (not only in the dreams and imagination of co-operators) but are seriously lacking in investment, so it is hard to see them growing to the extent needed to compete at a large scale in the near future, I’m not saying we should give up, but rather we need to not be under illusions that, for example, social.coop is going to be able to compete with Twitter in the near term… It is probably going to be a long slog and there is also the danger that the old style of nationalisation is likely to be seen as a quicker fix than co-operative alternatives, I remember a speaker on the platform at the Ways Forward 6 Conference: Co-operative Solidarity, earlier this year, calling for Facebook to be nationalised…

2 Likes

Ah, very nice topic and of course, thought provoking stuff!

I do think things like ActivityPub, Diaspora and OStatus protocols (See The Free Network) are foundational components for making social change. Mastodon and co. are brilliant proof (beats the ‘it is a lovely idea but will not work’ argument for all to see) that we can do things another way.

But if social.coop was competing with Twitter on such a scale, would you think it would still retain it’s cooperative principles in practice? As far as I know, the “best” examples of big scale cooperatives are Mondragon and they do a lot of very questionable things (mass lay offs, excluding large swathes of workers from decision making, hiring sweatshop labour, etc.).

What examples do we have to rely on here to think this would be a good thing?

That’s pretty interesting. I was thinking that this would imply the political force to implement the nationalisation. Then I was also thinking that we have rising right-wing power in goverments and then I was reading about how Franco and Mussolini were supporting cooperative movements!

I basically read Are workers’ cooperatives 
the alternative to capitalism? | International Socialist Review after reading this :slight_smile:

1 Like