Beyond Cryptoeconomics: Platform Cooperativism and the Future of Blockchain Governance

I first got hooked on crypto while on tour for my book on Occupy Wall Street, the anti-capitalist uprising that spread around the world ten years ago last month. I had been immersing myself in a micro-universe of prefigurative politics: people trying to imagine a future of deeper, truer democracy by occupying public space and practicing it. They used a radical consensus-based decision process, always exploring ways to make more people’s voices better heard. But after a few months, those public spaces had been reclaimed by the reigning order. What would become of those imaginations, that longing? Whispers from an old friend about the just-released Ethereum whitepaper seemed like a possible answer — that the experiments I had seen in protest might continue online, with blockchains.