The People’s Uber: Why the Sharing Economy Must Share Ownership

Workers are often taken advantage of by the on-demand economy. What if they ran it instead?

We can’t expect the depressing trend of platform labor to change unless we demand and create a different way of doing business. Platform cooperativism is a return to the ambition that the Internet can be a tool for developing better, deeper forms of democracy. It is starting to happen among innovative designers, labor organizers, and tech-savvy community groups. It is getting people thinking about new models of ownership, such as multi-stakeholder cooperatives, in which a platform’s developers and users can each have an appropriate stake. It draws lessons from the success of open-source software, which enables disparate enterprises to collaborate on building tools together.