Not Quite Everything

Summary

A professor of media studies as well as a journalist, Schneider, and his collaborator, the scholar-activist Trebor Scholz, are responsible for some of the more inventive digital efforts unfolding under the name of “platform co-operativism,” which they define as an effort to develop “shared governance and shared ownership of the Internet’s levers of power.” […]even as the New Deal focused on regulation and redistribution, the socialist dream of the cooperative commonwealth, transforming not just outcomes but the underlying ownership of the economy, was realized in local and federal government programs, especially in rural areas, where government loans to nascent cooperatives, for example, brought electricity to large swaths of the country. Or are there good reasons to think that Ocean Spray, the Associated Press, and the international credit card interchange system – while technically cooperatives – may simply not be playing on the same side as the idealistic young platform cooperators trying to remake the world that Schneider spotlights? Consider Schneider’s account of Barcelona, centered around the captivating figure of Enrique Duran, the anarchist bank robber made famous by his brazen acts of expropriation-through-debt in the lead up to the financial crisis and his later metamorphosis into tech entrepreneur, as the founder of the blockchain-powered, grassroots-centered Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC). In response, I’ve called for a “pluralist commonwealth” in order to make explicit the elements at different scales that were already present in the populist call for a cooperative commonwealth – notably the transformation of monetary policy and the public ownership of large industries (“public” as in national or sub-national forms like the regional scale Tennessee Valley Authority).