[...] a chief ambition of fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value, which is now feeding speculative capital, and re-invest it in the development of open, ethical productive communities. [...] Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and unnecessary waste; they must become open.

[...] technology is not the barrier to making a platform; if anything, the advances in technology have made platform-building easier. The barrier is finance. How else but with mountains of money, could a few unelected men [...] command hundreds of programmers and thousands of marketers and lawyers to build a platform they alone own and which millions depend on? It is the platform of finance, and the intensely unequal control of that platform in our world today, upon which so many other unequal platforms have been built.

[...] While coding may sound like a solution to current market woes, in truth, it will only delay the eventual degradation of such digital labor. When everyone can code, those jobs too will go the way of other forms of work--outsourced, undervalued, underpaid, or automated. However, a digital skills curriculum anchored in labor theory and labor history--a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing, and worker agency--has the potential not only to generate a new app or platform, but to reconfigure how digital labor is brought into being and how we imagine continuing to live in and through digital platforms, networks, and infrastructures.

The blockchain is what we call a "trustless" architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust [...] proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. [...] we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption [...] betrays a worrying politics--or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. [...] The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.