Platform Cooperatives: Flowing with the Shift in the Market

Summary

When Trevor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, editors of “Ours to Hack and to Own” share their misgivings about “what the democratic promise of the Internet has come to: a democracy of access, of “collaborative consumption,” but not of control, real accountability, or ownership,” they are not venting against the platform model itself, which is clearly a model of our collective future, but against the control structures that traditional business ownership has carried over to the online platform world. With the platform cooperatives vision and movement, we are seeing the development of an ownership model coming just in time for the close to 60 million independent contract workers in the United States (according to a report by the Freelancers Union and Elance-oDesk) to take control of their careers and long-term futures, and not just make a bit of cash on the side as they struggle to piece together a living.