These New Co-op Apps Show How to Build Worker Power In the Age of Uber

Summary

Here’s how it works: Publications that want to use an image from Stocksy pay a fee raging from $10 – $500. Fifty percent of that goes directly to the photographer. That’s a much fairer commission than the 20 percent paid out by the corporate service Getty Images, according to photographer and Stocksy member Thomas Hawk. That’s not the only reason Hawk left Getty for Stocksy in 2013. “The exciting part,” he writes on his personal blog, is that “the members of Stocksy actually own the agency.” Stocksy reflects this by distributing 90 percent of its profits-which are handled separately from commissions-directly to artists. That deliberately prevents anyone from getting rich from Fairmondo. “We need to find a way to address the problem of inequality on our planet,” says [Felix Weth], “I don’t think it helps if we have businesses that are designed to make certain people very rich.” Advocates hope that the old platforms will be “deleted” as users embrace new, more equitable ones. Janelle Orsi, director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, has a name for the end-goal of this process. Dislodging the corporate giants that control the tech industry at present would be “the opposite of an apocalypse,” she said at a November 2015 conference billed as a “coming out party for the cooperative Internet. It would be a “co-opalypse.”