Platform Cooperativism: The Next Big Thing?

My class project partner Simon and I have been working on a mobile app that would apply block-chain technology to a local agriculture-centered food distribution and purchasing service. The idea is that by combining local farms, co-ops, and farmer’s market into one network that incentivizes volunteering, a resilient and low-cost food market for local communities could be established. We both became a little deflated, however, when we realized that there was little or no opportunity to profit from the app, so it would likely never see the light of day.

But just recently, I’ve been exposed to the notion of “platform cooperativism”. It’s a pretty simply concept: rather than Silicon Valley investors owning a sharing service company like Uber or Airbnb, they would be owned by the drivers, or the home renters, collectively. Many employees of these services are beginning to notice the “sharing economy” is more like the “exploitation economy”. Uber and Lyft drivers exist on the thinnest of margins, while investors guide the direction of the company according to it’s stock price, and pocket the biggest gains.

Platform cooperativism addresses a whole range of issues inherent in this potentially exploitative model. By making the employees the stakeholders, there is no pressure to cut salaries or benefits for profit, or to sell off valuable assets to inflate a stock price, or to sell out to another company that plans on cannibalizing the organization. The workers are put first.

Immediately, this opens up a huge new arena of possibilities for designers and developers. Rather than focusing on pitches to investors, community-minded entrepreneurs can focus on building local networks without respect to hypothetical investor profit. Tools and services that serve the community can be created with buy-in from the users. In Denver, hundreds of taxi drivers have each put up $2000 to create a ride-sharing service that will compete with Uber and Lyft. It will be interesting to see how successful they are, because it could inspire a lot of people in the tech-saturated area.

The future of platform cooperativism isn’t limited to sharing-economy companies, though. It could also solve a range of problems with social networks. Concerns over privacy and exploitation of user data would evaporate, if Facebook or Twitter were owned by their users. At this point, social networks have proven their utility, and it’s not hard to imagine the user base ponying up $1.00 to create an ad-free, privacy-ensured experience.

I’m excited about the future of this ownership model, and it will definitely approach how I think about the design process in the future.