Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet

What if taxi drivers were in charge of their own digital platform? At a time when there are so few concrete, near-term solutions to the power of large technology companies, the crisis in the care sector, and threats to democracy, Platform Cooperatives offer an urgent and practical solution to change how businesses are owned and controlled. In Own This!, researcher and activist Trebor Scholz provides valuable insights into this global digital uprising, powered by democratic ownership and shared decision-making. Scholz will take you to the south of India, where a digital cooperative of farmers brings their harvest directly to market; to New York City, where a worker-owned and operated alternative to Uber is transforming piece-rate gig economy precarity into good jobs with stable hourly wages; to Belgium, where artists benefit from the payroll and tax services of a platform cooperative; and to Italy, where a short-term rental platform shares half of its profits with the communities in which it operates.

Table of Contents:
1. Alternative Paths 2. Worker Ownership for the Digital Economy 3. Solidarity at Scale 4. Redefining Value 5. Roots of Resilience: Unions and Platform Cooperatives 6. The Coming Data Democracy 7. Letter from 2035: A Social Vision Realized Epilogue: How to Start a Platform Co-op

About the Author :
R. Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and founding director of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) and the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School in New York City. In 2014, he introduced the concept of “platform cooperativism” as a way of bringing the co-op model into the digital economy. Scholz’s articles and ideas have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and The New York Times, among many other publications.

Review :
Trebor Scholz has tirelessly promoted worker empowerment around the world via platform cooperatives. Going beyond unionization, these co-ops give their employee-owners control over the businesses they run, ranging from banks to taxi companies to recycling firms. Scholz is by turns passionate and analytical, utopian and pragmatic. An excellent read on a critically important topic, Own This! should have global reach and impact. Platform cooperatives are the most exciting and hopeful business model for our collective future. Own This! is the essential, brilliant, accessible guide to this rapidly growing movement. If you are interested in work, technology, climate or the future of humanity-read this book. Scholz is a passionate intellectual activist who devoted himself to looking for alternatives for decades to enhance worker solidarity on a global scale. This is a timely guidebook, a manifesto that provides us hope and light for future generations For over a decade, Trebor Scholz has been an intellectual-activist leader of efforts to bring the cooperative movement into the digital economy. In Own This!, he skillfully combines inspiration and analysis while weaving stories spanning South Korea to New York and South Africa to Maine, confronting challenges through federated scaling, cooperative-union alliances, and state-backed pro-cooperative policies, providing impetus to the endeavor of establishing a pluralist digital commonwealth as a haven against the rising waters of capitalism. Scholz artfully explores a comprehensive panorama of scalable alternatives to the VC-fueled startup model. This book is a wave that, like the gentle yet unwavering force of the ocean, serves as a catalyst for change, redefining our understanding of cooperation in the 21st century Situates these co-ops both in the now vast (and often terrible) platform business sector as well as in the worker ownership and labor movements, outlines how they work, addresses their advantages and challenges, presents provocative cases and lays out possibilities for the road ahead. While the "sharing economy" has proved to be a disaster for workers and a benefit only for venture capitalists, there is a better way, and Trebor Scholz charts the path for a new economy that's genuinely good for workers, customer and society as a whole. Reaching back through the history of worker-owned cooperatives to the front lines of this new economy unfolding around the world, Own This! is a glimpse of a future worth fighting for from a pioneer in building this new workers movement. A call to action for those interested in constructing an alternative digital future.