[...] Ordinary people have already made the Internet their own with their hacks, their memes, their protests, and their dreams. The cost of forfeiting control over these things is too high, and too mysterious. We need to expect better, to demand more. It's time that we own and govern what is ours already.

[...] I'm all on board for Paul Mason's and Kathi Weeks' visions for a post-capitalist, post-work future [...] the chances for this scenario becoming a reality over the next two years are not high. The question then becomes what we can do right now, with and for the most precarious among the contingent third of the American workforce [...]

[...] why does a village in Denmark [...] have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for a few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximise use value for the community.

[...] Those funders then run the show. Satisfied with nothing less than 100x returns on their money, they push the founders to "pivot" the business toward outlandish, "home run" outcomes. The object of the game is not to create a successful business, but to "exit" through an IPO or acquisition before the business fails. In spite of their abuse of the environmentalist's lexicon, they do not create sustainable "ecosystems" at all, but scorched-earth monopolies through which no one--no one-- gets to create or exchange value.

That doesn't really matter. All they have to do is extract enough value from people and places in order to sell themselves to someone else--or leverage their monopoly in one market [...] to another one [...]

Looked at from a digital perspective, these companies are really just software, optimized to extract as much value as they can from the real world, and convert it into share price for their investors. They take real, working, circulating currency, and turn it into frozen, static, useless capital. [...]

[...] the big companies no longer actually make their products. That can be contracted out to a competing mass of capitalist suppliers. What the vectoralist firm owns and controls is brands, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, or it controls the networks, clouds, and infrastructures, along which such information might move.

The rise of the so-called sharing economy is really just a logical extension of this contracting out of actual material services and labor by firms that control unequal flow of information. [...]

Silicon Valley is redesigning the corporation itself. These gig companies are little more than a website and an app, with a small number of executives and regular employees who oversee an army of freelancers, temps, and contractors. In the vision of the techno gurus and their Ayn Rand libertarianism, CEOs want a labor force they can turn off and on like the latest Netflix movie.

Third, we need a legal framework for a new regime of accumulation. This takes vision; it's today's equivalent of what a social democratic or socialist economic policy used to be. It means bringing state back in, not only as neutral gatekeepers of economic fair play but as a volonté générale that gives the economy a social purpose and a base in democratic values. There is nothing neutral about the actual economy. It is a complicated, systematized effort to reconcile productivity with the privilege of powerful elites, dominant social groups, and global coalitions. [...] This might mean public investment, public co-ownership and strong incentives for social enterprises.

Some of this might sound slightly awkward to us, since we haven't discussed it for a long time. But we have to have this conversation if we want to implement cooperativism. [...]

What is sold is advertisement, thus the paying customers are the advertisers, and what is being sold are the users themselves, not their content.

This means that the source of value that becomes Facebook's profits is the work done by the workers in the global fields and factories, who are producing the commodities being advertised to Facebook's audience.

The profits of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but subjected, captured as an audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus profits from other sectors of the ownership class.

Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace.

Neither of these business models is very new. [...]

Rather than subvert capitalism, "sharing" platforms have been captured by it.

The time is right for platform co-ops [...] As Silicon Valley's supremacy falters, platform co-ops purveying new tech are well-poised to offer a better kind of web, one that works more equitably for the people that create and use it because it promotes social justice rather than heralds dystopia [...]

But the apps are not only platforms for consumption. They are quickly becoming entry points for work, gateways to people's livelihoods. In this sense, whether or not platform creators like it or realize it, they are engaging in another kind of design--socioeconomic design. This involves the design of how people structure their work, earnings, and daily schedules. [...]