People love gig economy apps like Uber and Airbnb, but some are increasingly dissatisfied with how those companies treat people and communities. One group of hackers, academics, policymakers and weirdos thinks they can do it better. It won’t be easy.
Via giphy.com
Academic conferences tend not to be overbooked. But at November's Platform Cooperativism conference, hosted by New York City's New School, nearly every session was standing room only. Last year, when associate professor Trebor Scholz put on his annual Digital Labor conference, a few hundred scholars showed up. This year, more than 2,000 registered to attend.
To be fair, it's a hot moment for the kinds of problems Scholz (and the conference) are interested in. Digital platforms like Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and more have redefined how (some of us) live our lives. But these companies have also become known by some for their tendency to compress labor, treating human workers as little more than dots moving around on a digital map. Lawsuits, protests, and attempts at organizing by the workers who drive Uber cars and carry Instacart loads attest to this. Scholz thinks there's a better way. He and Nathan Schneider, who co-convened the conference, are looking to see what would happen workers owned the platforms themselves.
At the event, Scholz announced his intention to create "a foundation that would bring together open source programmers to work on a kernel for labor platforms." Such a body would likely be based out of New York's Civic Hall, a coworking and civic hacking space funded by the Microsoft, Google, and the Omidyar Network, among others.
This idea isn't new: Household name companies including Cabot, R.E.I. Land o' Lakes, and Sunkist are run as cooperatives. And a number of civic-minded, anti-capitalist programmers are already working on — and in some cases successfully running — cooperative platforms.
One of the most successful, at this point, is probably Stocksy, a stock photo website that is owned by a collective of nearly 600 professional photographers. Stocksy sells its unique inventory to a number of clients; in its second year, it brought in $3.7 million dollars, according to founder Brianna Wettlaufer.
There were plenty of hopefuls at Platform Coop — people who, accustomed mostly to theoreticals, were excited to imagine their ideas playing out in a digital reality, like Wettlaufer's were. But there were also people who have tried this before, and knew that it's harder than it looks.
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