Peer2Politics

“Diverse and devolved ownership, power and capital, alongside user, consumer and employee participation in governance and decision-making, are principles that we can all agree with. Unlike any other policy agenda, mutual, employee-owned and co-operative models, and their underpinning ideals, have attracted cross-party support and have been promoted as foundational players to our public institutions, private services and businesses, not just in this Government’s lifetime, but the ones that have preceded it also.

Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong (formerly of Facebook) is doing the right thing. He’s planning to make Reddit’s users into owners, depending on their contribution to the site. There’s a way to create a form of liquid ownership that doesn’t require Wall Street. This new method is based on the bitcoin blockchain. That technology makes it possible to issue ownership to contributors in a decentralized and trusted way. The combination of blockchain stock, Yishan’s example, and the experience of participants will set in motion a wave of change in Silicon Valley. The message is: if you want to build an online company, you better find a way to make your customers/contributors owners.*

This could be an important initiative aimed at creating a greater awareness of open cooperativism within the CIC, while also overcoming the problem of client-provider relationships between the Commons-oriented structure and productive projects.

"On your key point Henry below that the Levellers (civll rights movement) and Diggers (the commons and commonwealth movement) took separate paths, you are right. But this was not any intention as key Diggers were Levellers and they described themselves as True Levellers.

In recent years, the collaborative economy has been growing exponentially , reaching a stage of co-dependency with the emerging new forms of the for-profit economy, which we have described in our recent book, ‘Network Society and Four Scenarios for the Collaborative Economy‘. The new ‘netarchical’ (= net-archy, the hierachy of the network) form of capital, is no longer investing in its own production through the hiring of labour, and making products that it sells on the market, but, as Google, Facebook and other platform owners show, is directly capturing profits from the free cooperation and contributions of the 99%. While it may seem a good thing for users that platforms are being built ‘for free’, or that buyers an sellers can directly connect with each other for a fee, it is also very problematic as it creates a deep value crisis, not just for the increasingly precarious workforce, but also for capitalism itself. Indeed, how can we imagine a successful capitalism, that produces products that it can no longer sell, because an increasing number of contributors are no longer paid for their value creation ? Thus today, after an increasing exodus of especially young people out of the system of paid labor for capital, the social tensions are not just between salaried labor and capital, but increasingly, between peer producers and netarchical platform owners.

Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong (formerly of Facebook) is doing the right thing. He’s planning to make Reddit’s users into owners, depending on their contribution to the site. There’s a way to create a form of liquid ownership that doesn’t require Wall Street. This new method is based on the bitcoin blockchain. That technology makes it possible to issue ownership to contributors in a decentralized and trusted way. The combination of blockchain stock, Yishan’s example, and the experience of participants will set in motion a wave of change in Silicon Valley. The message is: if you want to build an online company, you better find a way to make your customers/contributors owners.*

* Dissertation: Towards a New Form of Economic Development: Why the Need for an Ownership Revolution Has Never Been Greater. By Jerome Birolini. Schumacher College, MA Economics for Transition. 2014

This text is the result of my intervention in the ‘Hacking the City’ workshop organised by radarq that took place in Seville, Spain, on September 2012. My goal was to think about the concept of Tactical Urbanism and its ability to empower citizens, considering the possibilities offered to us by the digital sphere and new technologies.

Now that the first round of intellectual debris left in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s explosive best-seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has begun to settle, it may be time to look more closely at the gaping hole it has left not only in political-economic analysis but also in conventional political strategy. After Piketty documented long-running trends that have turned over ever-increasing shares of national income to the owners of capital at the expense of the vast majority, the best solution he could muster was what he termed a utopian idea: a global tax on capital. Liberal economists, for their part, have largely rolled out the usual list of progressive tax reforms, often conveniently forgetting to confront the extraordinary political obstacles that stand in the way of any one policy remotely powerful enough to tackle the forces Piketty documents.