Nathan Schneider as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019

Summary

Nathan Schneider at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019. Schneider is a speaker for the Town Hall 1 – The Capital Conundrum panel discussion .

About This Town Hall
Without access to real capital, the cooperative digital economy cannot thrive. Platform co-ops around the world struggle to access start-up funding given that traditional venture capital is not appropriate for these enterprises. Various groups have received foundation funding. British cooperators are using the Community Shares Model, which allows them to benefit from tax incentives for startups. Adapting the Mondragon process, cities like Cleveland (US) and Preston (UK) follow an ecosystem approach to launching and funding worker cooperatives. Yet others explore ways of creating “user trusts” to democratize the Internet. Learn about diverse financial instruments and strategies that can help groups to launch an upstart without venture capital. Together with the International Cooperative Alliance, philanthropists, and communities worldwide, we need to urgently take bold steps to meet these challenges.

Nathan Schneider is an Assistant Professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale.