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In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic hitting Europe – uniting and socially isolating us all – we caught up (virtually) with Stacco Troncoso, a project lead for the Commons Transition. We talk about the DisCO Manifesto, a novel approach towards forming Distributed Open Cooperatives that provides guidelines for collectives of self-organised people on how to incorporate and become empowered through more distributed forms of governance. We also talk about the role of decommodification, returning to the commons and radical workplace democracy in practice.

Hi Stacco, what are your key research interests and issues you’ve been exploring?

I was part of the P2P Foundation for many years, as an organizer in advocacy and strategy roles. My background politically was more aligned with anarcho-communism, but that shifted during the 2011 protest movements — 15M in Spain, and Occupy worldwide. Since then, the bulk of my work has been focused on advocating for commons-oriented solutions. I have also followed the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem very closely. Bringing all these influences together, the place where I found a coherent narrative with the ecologic side of my concerns along with the possibilities of technology — without getting starry-eyed about them — was the commons. Apart from that, since 2013 I have been part of a cooperative called Guerrilla Translation — the pilot project for Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs). The advocacy work of the P2P Foundation and the practical work of the Guerrilla Translation form a symbiotic relation — we put in practice many of the initiatives and ideas that were proposed by the foundation.

Can you tell us a bit more about the origins of DisCO Manifesto, how did it come together?

The DisCO Manifesto is a result of many conversations among members of the Guerrilla Media Collective and other close friends and mentors. We wanted to reimagine the future of Guerrilla Media, applying our interest in DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), while also being critical of them. One of the tendencies we see in what we call whitepaper culture is to imagine really good systems which distribute value before considering the place of humans. If you think about it, a key system where value distribution takes place is the workplace, and here is where we already have 175 years of cooperative tradition to draw from. We wanted to apply our experiences to the design of another kind of DAO that starts from real world experience. It eventually evolved into the concept of distributed cooperative organization (DisCO). We like the name, as we think that — beyond the wordplay — it symbolises the playfulness, fun, conviviality and approachability that are missing from the blockchain world, CryptoKitties aside. The Manifesto is a conversation, as we didn’t want to start with a whitepaper or technological architecture. Even though we already came up with a detailed and technical governance model, we wanted to tell a good story, based on our experience and our needs, things that excite us. We aspired to create it in an inclusive, journalistic manner and wanted for people to read it — all people, other than the usual suspects in the decentralized space. We also imagined it as a meeting place between various groups — commons, P2P, cooperatives, and social solidarity economy tradition, the feminist economics tradition and the open value decentralized world. Even though these groups have a lot in common, they don’t necessarily talk to each other. We hope to create a conversational space. We want to think carefully about having those conversations and making them accessible to people, also to encourage those who don’t have the loudest voices to participate.

What went wrong with the first iteration of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)? What are the key lessons learned?

DAOs that have been deployed so far are very primitive, used more as a vehicle for financial speculative assets rather than real tools for decentralized collaboration. It’s very easy to make a caricature of the DAO space — incredible amounts of money flowing into a movement that speaks of the new ways of reimagining value. The value system that is based on accumulation is predominant. Even though there have been extensive discussions differentiating “blockchain” from “what you can do on the blockchain”, a lot of the politics that underlie blockchain are symptomatic of accumulatory micro-capitalism or libertarianism, which have been prevalent in the design of many DAOs. The DAO was a cautionary tale of what can happen — and I remember that before the DAO attack, there was a feeling of gold rush, or fear of missing out — similar to the developments of the mid-90s dotcom bubble. When there’s a gold rush things are not done carefully, and also politically they tend to replicate the existing power structures.

We don’t believe that you can build decentralization from the top down, by white males with programming backgrounds designing this great decentralized architecture where they just want to fit humans in. There’s an impatience or not letting other people be part of this process, and a lot of it has been speculative. It’s sci-fi, but maybe not in the exciting sense, somehow removed from reality space. In the DAO space there’s a lot of unchecked privilege, while many other types of people are missing — they’re being mentioned but not included in the design process. There are solutions being designed for people without those people being present.

What are the main differences between DAO and DisCO design?

DisCOs are based on human interactions. There’s a tendency in the DAO space to try and do away with human imperfections. The thinking seems to be that if we just get the math right, all the other stuff will get sorted out on its own. I resonate with the statement that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, meaning that we can’t bypass the difficult conversations, they need to take place. While there’s excitement about auto-executable organizations with programmable parameters, what DAO technology can do for us is value tracking: tracking things such as livelihood work, pro bono work to create and maintain commons, and also carework, which is usually invisible and hard to quantify. I mean: how do you put love on the blockchain? Can we? Would we even want to? You can see different DAOs trying to tokenize all social interactions. DAOs can let us network and transact value among different DisCO nodes. You can still talk about decentralization, but if you don’t check the power of certain nodes, those nodes can become prevalent and imitate the preexisting power dynamics.The technology we want to develop is an enabler for better conversations, never a substitute. In our value tracking system we don’t foresee that it will be a setup where “this is how many tokens you have accrued and this is the value equation so this person gets paid this much, and that’s it”. Frankly, if you’re working with a group of only 10 to 15 people, why not have a discussion first?.

Value tracking is especially important because notions of value are so subjective. When we get into an agreement with a group of people where we say together that this is the type of value sovereignty that we want to practice, and it doesn’t work out after a certain period of time — we are not locked into that system, we can change it. While when you have a big DAO with, say, 400 stakeholder participants it’s very difficult to make exceptions. Those people who can afford to live an immutable lifestyle and are not subject to the back and forth of the material conditions and daily lives may be able to participate in those systems. We also see DisCO as a way to educate people, for example about feminist economics. If you’re not talking about the decentralization of power, or explicitly addressing the trifecta of centralization — colonialism, capitalism and the patriarchy — then your decentralization is very select within a bounded paradigm. DisCOs can provide a space where people can learn about the cooperative tradition, and people from the feminist economics field can take advantage of DAOs.

What are the key lessons can we learn from old models of cooperatives and commons for the decentralised Web movement?

When it comes to cooperatives, it’s simple — they work. In times of an economic downturn, cooperatives always perform much better than regular businesses. They are also much better for the environment in general. Even the happiness index of people working within them is higher than in traditional companies.

When it comes to the lessons learned from the commons, let’s explain first where they begin. We can say that commons are a mode of social organization — before agriculture, before feudalism and of course before capitalism. Even though they are often invisible, the commons are always present. Especially with the collapsing systems now it’s more important than ever to have an understanding of the commons. A commons is a social process, and for there to be a commons we need 3 elements — we need a resource, we need a community that gathers around this resource, and we need a set of rules to govern this commons. A lot of work that has been done since the 90s in the commons has influenced free software and open source and that in turn has influenced the phenomena in the blockchain ecosystem — but perhaps there’s not that much familiarity with those influences. You can also think of it as of social conscience — to get away from replicating normative power dynamics — privileged people who have early access. Why would we need privilege to obtain the initial access?

DisCOs need to produce commons, which leads to decommodification. Let’s give an example. People need houses and people get paid to build houses. In a DisCO setup people could build open source houses. This can turn into a process from commodification to decommodification, from products to commons. This is where distributed ledgers are interesting because we can measure all sorts of values to make sure that no one gets exploited, no one is freeriding.

What about tracking and quantifying carework?

Carework is tricky. Tokenizing something like affection is a very difficult thing. We need to have a lot of small scale conversations where people really feel comfortable about sharing their values and the things they care about, and they want to be rewarded for that — and getting rewarded doesn’t necessarily mean getting paid in crypto tokens.

Let’s come back to the path towards decommodification, how does it take place?

Anything that gets distributed digitally leans towards decommodification. Wikipedia is a great example of decommodifying knowledge. Economic historian Karl Polyani wrote a number of books on this topic, the main among them is the Great Transition where he coined the term “false commodities” — land, money and labour. Land would be a commons, labour is your productive energy and money is a social agreement, with other agreements put on top of it to keep it scarce. All of those should be decommodified. I’d also add another false commodity, which is knowledge. We want to decouple knowledge and wealth from material realities, but this knowledge economy thrives on legal artefacts such as copyrights and patents to create artificial scarcity. If you’re using an app, why do you need to pay extra for these features? Usually because there’s a number of investors who need a return on investment. In the sense we’re privy to this whole debt structure. What if we really shared things? What if we decommodified? Decommodification brings about a number of challenges. Simply put, when stuff becomes “free” to make and consume, the taxable base which finances social services crumbles. How do we tackle this? These are political challenges that have to be included in the conversation.

In order to decommodify we need different types of economics and politics. Distributed ledgers can be an answer but the design of whatever DAOs we build on top of them really need to be distributed, socially and power-wise. There are other considerations beyond server connectivity and information being replicated and consented to. There’s a much bigger social layer that needs to be taken into account.

What are your recommendations then?

If you don’t include the people that you’re designing the solutions for in your design process, if you don’t talk to them, treat them with respect, you’re doing them an intellectual disservice. Let’s take a good look at what distributed means and let’s try to walk the talk. Let’s take responsibility. Let’s not become crypto billionaire philanthropists designing for those who can benefit from whatever wealth we’ve accumulated later down the line, while exacerbating existing power systems.

Let’s learn from the Wikipedia example — which, despite its shortcomings, not only democratized access to knowledge but also democratized the production of knowledge. You don’t need to be a professor to write about a subject as long as you’re passionate and knowledgeable about it.

How do you envision “radical workplace democracy”, in practice?

The notion of radical workplace democracy is very prevalent in the work on cooperatives. I’d recommend checking the work of Marjorie Kelly, and Richard Wolff on the topic. We have supposedly democratic political systems, but in the workplace all these democratic ideals are thrown out of the window. Here you are subject to your boss and your boss is subject to the investors. So in your workplace, unless you are a cooperative, you don’t get to decide what to produce, how much to produce and how to go about it. A common example being used is that a cooperative-owned enterprise would never choose to, say, pollute a local river or outsource work overseas. That’s the basic workplace democracy being talked about in co-ops. In DisCOs we talk about radical workplace democracy because we add the feminist and the carework dimensions, beyond what’s in the contract or beyond legal agreements. Co-ops can be totally socially regressive — there’s many conservative co-ops, with chauvinistic dynamics, that may not be as democractic. Just because you have really good legal statutes that talk about equality, does not mean that equality is being practiced. Descriptive equality is not the same as equality of outcomes. Having spaces for deliberations, for conversations, for carework — is essential. Having spaces for those who may not have the loudest voice, or those who may not be the most influential or eloquent — making sure that those people are being heard is important.

We’ve all been through this at Guerilla Media, Enspiral or Loomio. It’s a new kind of cooperativism that addresses one of the shortcomings of co-ops: sure, you can have workplace democracy, but the activities of the co-op might not be socially or environmentally beneficial. The other part of radical workplace democracy is acknowledging and accounting for carework, including providing emotional support or so called “emotional labour”. We try to incorporate all those aspects so that people who are benefiting from carework at least are not blind to that, at least it’s recognized. We plan to do workshops with communities and projects to help them figure out their governance models, help them have difficult conversations about values. If you don’t have those difficult conversations, tensions inevitably arise, and the person with the most tokens gets to decide — that’s not radical, or any kind of, workplace democracy.

How can we define “carework” in the digital distributed work context? Can it and should it be quantified? What about commoditisation of care in formal and informal networks, is this something we should worry about?

Sure — value tracking can feel invasive. That’s why we insist on small groups. This needs to be based on consent. It’s also uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable for those who are privileged already do not want some of their privileges questioned. My hope is that this all makes for happier workplaces. The way we do it at Guerilla Media is by what we call community rhythms.We have daily check-ins, biweekly and monthly assessments following adaptable templates. When someone has emotional or family problems we make sure that this person is really supported.

Just having a conversation about care is a radical step. What you can do is to define among your group as to what constitutes carework. We decided to make everything that you would call admin — carework. Because we don’t want an admin layer. This idea comes from Parecon, participatory economics — which is an anarchist economist proposal. Part of their proposal calls for balanced job complexes, meaning that, say, one day you’re programming but another day you’re cleaning the toilets. And everyone gets to clean the toilets, so to speak. It’s about fairness.

We also have a mutual support system in which we support each other via regular check-ins. Once a month or so we have a call. When the person assigned to me takes care of me, they call me and listen to how I feel, and I do the same for the one I support. It’s just about being there for another person. We also think that organizations need to have certain boundaries — or otherwise they would be communes.

Some people say that having relationships like this will take so much time — sure, it will take time but these can be some of the best times of the day. We managed to create a safe online space, which is an increasing rarity. Everyone’s happy and if someone is not happy — everyone knows straight away and does something about it.

It seems like these processes are incredibly important for digital organizations too, where these social aspects need to be introduced as well.

These processes need to be co-designed. The cultural and structural aspects of projects are vitally important. We provide relevant resources for people but we don’t want people to copy and paste our solutions, but instead to challenge them and create better solutions for their individual circumstances. The more use cases we have, the more solutions we have that can work for other people in other contexts, thus creating a commons of DisCO pattern solutions. If you want to become a DisCO, you can but you don’t need to follow our governance model, the only thing you really need to do is to follow the 7 DiSCO principles, which are simple but also surprisingly demanding, they give you a set of constraints that can be really creative challenges. I’ll run them down:

First of all, you need to be oriented towards socio-economic outcomes in your statutes. Secondly, the projects should be multistakeholder, there should be different types of constituents. Thirdly, projects need to actively create the commons — don’t just take from the commons but make sure that you’re creating shared resources. The fourth principle is that they need to be transnational in nature — this is something where the DAO space has excelled now, and this is where legislation needs to follow. The fifth one — they need to be incorporating carework. The sixth one is that they reimagine the flows of value — including pro bono work, livelihood work, carework. You may want to measure carework, but not tokenize it. The final one is that they are designed for federation, sitting on top of a distributed architecture. We just need to remember that behind those nodes, behind those servers, behind those computers are human beings, and they need to be cared for. The best way to care for people — intellectually, spiritually — however you want to qualify that — is to be able to have a cognitive bandwidth to get to know those people, and to listen to them. According to the Dunbar number, 150 is the number of people with whom you can have meaningful social interactions with — but that doesn’t tell you what the intensity of the bandwidth of those interactions are. Make sure that the home DisCO is 15–20 people and then just federate and create different “nodes”, which can do regular check-ins. The value models need to be informed by proximity, -for a group of 15 people you don’t need a blockchain. We’re talking about a spectrum from trustless to trustworthy — blockchains excell at trustless interactions, but do we want all interactions to be trustless? Or do we want to empower trust in small groups?

Can DisCOs create profit?

They can create livelihoods for member-owners. When we critique profit, we mean to critique absentee shareholder profit. For a for-profit corporation, as Milton Friedman would say, their only responsibility is not to the society but to the shareholders. You can argue that tokenholders in DAOs are the equivalent of shareholders — have they really created the value that informs the profit? The question is what do you do with this profit, is it being centralized or is it being recirculated? Guerilla Media Collective is legally constituted as a non-profit, socially oriented coop. This means that we have to reinvest all profit — in education, development and creating commons, doing pro bono work and sharing it with others. The value model pays for this. Internally we pay ourselves the same rates while profits enable the pro bono activities.

Let’s talk about the role of trust in the digital distributed organization and how to account for it.

Beyond onchain and offchain, everything happens “onlife”. What we’re doing with DAOs in the strictest sense is subjecting trust to agreed-on algorithms. But the fidelity of this algorithm is very brute — you’re encouraging trust in monetary transactions, whether this is fiat money, crypto or digital assets. Why? Because you don’t want to get taken advantage of and want to transact with strangers without third party intermediaries — so you create a third party which is technology. But technology is not neutral.

What does it mean that DisCOs are associationist rather than individualistic?

The DisCO Manifesto is the result of many conversations. It was written by my partner Ann Marie Utratel and I, and many people contributed and helped edit it. This includes our closest collaborators in the DisCO sphere: Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield, Decal), Ela Kagel (SUPERMARKT), Irene López de Vallejo (AIOTI, BDVA, BlueSpecs) and Phoebe Tickell (DGov Foundation, Enspiral), as well as people like David Bollier (Commons Strategies Group) Jaya Klara Brekke (Durham University, DECODE), Pat Conaty (Synergia Institute, New Economics Foundation, Co-operatives UK), Primavera De Filippi (Berkman Klein Centre, CNRS, COALA, DaoStack), Eleftherios Diakomichalis (OsCoin, Radicle), Lynn Foster (Mikorizal, Value Flows), Sam Hart (Avant.org), Bob Haugen (Mikorizal, Value Flows), Julio Linares (Circles UBI), Elena Martínez Vicente and Silvia Molina Díaz (P2P Models), Nathan Schneider (Internet of Ownership) and Lisha Sterling (Geeks Without Bounds).

When we say “associationist”, we are referring to the notion of associative democracy. This describes the community effort of people who want to associate together and who want to actively share ideas, feelings and things, unlike in a DAO where you don’t have to get to know people, you just anonymously transact.

Do you believe that businesses globally, as we know them, can become socially responsible? How to bring about a necessary shift on a global level?

My feeling is that the change needs to come from the bottom up. As long as there’s a for-profit orientation and the need to keep the shareholders happy, inequality will keep driving up, a lot of green-washing or decentra-washing will happen and nothing will change. What I advocate for is a lot of more power for grassroots activism, and DisCOs are a way for people to do this. What’s an eye opening figure is that co-operatives globally have an annual turnover of USD 3 trillion, which is the same as the market cap as Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google combined. Co-ops worldwide have this significant power economically and if we could have new kinds of value accounting, and if we could use blockchain and DLT for social causes, and if we can make sure that we’re using this technology for advancing of planetary priorities — rather than priorities of IBM, Goldman Sachs etc. who are investing massive figures into blockchains, and if we learned how to federate, then we would create this more distributed future. We need to create more commons and we need to have people less and less dependent on the big institutional and corporate players. And of course the latter will resist it as much as they can, but it’s a losing fight because shit is collapsing. We’re waiting for some kind of Mad Max type of collapse where everyone gets a gun but collapse is already happening and will continue. When you think of big corporations as technologies, they will not introduce radical workplace democracy. Legislation is written by those with the most power, so a corporation will have much more beneficial legislation that a co-op. How about we push for a change in legislation so that we can run this cooperative experiment? This is the vision for our commons transition and we think that DisCOs are an approachable way to get into this.

To answer your question: can businesses become socially responsible? To me the definition of business is transactional by nature. Again, the infamous quote by Friedman reads: “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”. I think a better question is whether “work” can become socially responsible. In that case yes, but it won’t happen through systems which are structurally oriented toward absentee profiteering and normalized exploitation.

What are the realistic solutions to the pitfalls of the gig economy?

Platform co-ops! Breaking down the big players and turning them into co-ops. They are an easy solution but they also face challenges: investors don’t want to invest into co-ops, it’s very difficult for them. To give an example, FairMondo, the online marketplace, or FairBnB, the platform coop alternative to Airbnb who are launching now, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Stocksy is a platform coop for photography or stock art. SMart is mutual / coop for freelance workers who get social security, financial advice… There’s lots of them. You can check them out on the Platform Coop directory. Are they successful? Yes, because they exist but they do face massive challenges which are easily dodged by their platform capitalist counterparts. Platform co-ops are more ethical and future minded, yet don’t have the impact of the big, venture-capital backed online platforms. Ironically the economy is not friendly to co-ops but co-ops, despite co-ops being demonstrably better for the “real” economy.

What would you advise to investors these days, in the crypto space and beyond?

This is what I’d advise venture capitalists: if we have perhaps 10 to 15 years left of the current order, instead of doing things that rely on mass computing power to keep furthering inequality, you may want to invest in systems that are future-proof, that address the collapse of our ecological order and the collapse of our social relationships. Invest in the future — and the future is the survival of the species and the biosphere. Read feminist economics and feminist literature, and be okay with being uncomfortable. Being challenged and becoming a more rounded person can be a beautiful and rewarding process.

Read about the commons — check out commonstransition.org — sign up for our commons newsletter. Read the book Free, Fair, and Alive by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, a wonderful introduction to the commons or Peer to Peer: a Commons Manifesto. For people from technological backgrounds, my advice is to get into the “soft stuff”, and be aware of your power and privilege — don’t see that recognition as an affront to your identity but maybe as something you can use to help enrich others.

Thank you for your interesting insights. What’s the best place to get in touch for those who are interested in collaborating or exploring DisCOs?

E-mail us at hello@disco.coop. If anyone wants to contact me: stacco (at) stacco (dot) works. You can also sign up to our newsletter for updates.

Gemma Copeland is an interdependent digital designer building digital tools that facilitate and empower grassroots movements and organizations. She is part of a London-based nonprofit workers cooperative of software engineers, designers and organizers called Common Knowledge. In this interview, I talked to Gemma about the ins and outs of running a grassroots activism focused co-op, about the nature and best practices for contemporary protest and political organizing, as well as about saving ourselves from a dystopian future.

Hi Gemma! What’s your professional background and what are the key areas you’ve been working on?

Gemma Copeland: I’m a digital designer, originally from Australia, but I’ve spent most of my career working in the Netherlands and the UK. I have mainly been working within the cultural, educational and social innovation sectors. I’m particularly interested in organizations that have social engagement element in their work. I’m also part of the self-organized education and design collective in London, called Evening Class. The idea behind which is providing a space for self-education outside of industry and academy. Over time, it has evolved into a space for solidarity and consciousness-raising, as well as prototyping alternative practices within design. We collaborate on projects together and often work with other activist groups. Being part of that collective got me interested in self-organized and cooperative structures. It’s important to focus on not just the type of work you do, but also to look at how you do the work, how you structure the organization. Through Evening Class, I found Common Knowledge earlier this year, and have recently joined them.

What kind of organization is Common Knowledge?
Common Knowledge is a nonprofit workers cooperative building digital tools for direct politics. It started last October in London. There are seven members, four of whom are active at the moment. We are a mix of software engineers, product designers and researchers. We all move between various skills and specialities, and we all in some way or another come from an activist background as well. We are specifically focused on designing and building tools that enable direct rather than representational politics. We collaborate with grassroots activists — for example, with people having problems in their workplace, facing housing crises or responding to racism — rather than traditional political organizations. This kind of direct activism is about people coming together and collectively responding to those problems within their own communities.

Are you working with individuals or communities and existing organizations?
We are doing a broad range of work. One of the products we are developing is an app called Catalyst, which is focused on connecting people who want to get involved in political activism but aren’t already. The app asks them what they are concerned about and then connects them to different organizations in their area that are addressing these concerns. Our next step is to partner with the organizers of these existing groups themselves, and to co-design tools that improve their processes. The final aim is to give people the tools, confidence and network to start groups themselves.

What are the groups that you’re engaging with?
Some of the groups we’re currently working with are the Left Book Club, a radical book club in the UK founded by Pluto Press; London Renters Union, which demands better housing rights for Londoners; and United Voices of the World, a workplace rights union. The idea is to research and build tools with them in a democratic and bottom-up way, rather than relying on our assumptions and imposing these on them. Eventually we’ll make it into a generic program that we will be able to roll out more broadly. The idea is to document everything as we go and eventually make it open source, so that others can build upon what we make.

What are the organizational practices and the roles and responsibilities within Common Knowledge coop?
We endeavour to enact the cooperative and democratic processes that we recommend to others in everything that we do. We have four active members at the moment, each with different areas of expertise, who take on a range of different roles within the co-op.

In terms of digital tools, we use Notion — it has become our collective brain and we find it much better other than using something like Slack. With Notion you’re building a knowledge base, a wiki, collectively. You can have conversations, but they are made directly in the context of the specific documentation you’re creating. It’s also interesting to watch this gradually build up as people contribute to different areas. You can see what people are working on, without having to communicate it all the time. It’s also great for onboarding new people.

In terms of other practices we apply, one of them is following agile sprints and build-measure-learn cycles. What we really want to do is to harness the power of technology to democractic ends, which includes the organizational practices favoured by start-ups. We believe that the Agile methodology is inherently really democratic — gives people lots of autonomy, is quite non-hierarchical and demands open communication between individuals. Agile teams, if implemented well, are efficient self-organized groups. Another example would be the Sprint book methodology — doing a week of concentrated work, focused on prototyping very quickly, and directly learning from your users.

How do you make decisions within the co-op?
For decision-making, we use a process called sociocracy, which I really like. The idea is that decisions are made through consent rather than consensus. Rather than looking for everyone to be completely onboard with every decision, someone makes a proposal that is directly discussed within the group. People can ask questions about the proposal and state their “critical concerns”. If someone has a critical concern, it means that they believe the proposal diverges from the core vision, aims or ethics of the group. Otherwise, the framework for deciding whether we should go ahead is “is it good enough for now and safe enough to try?” This idea of “good enough for now” is also about experimenting, trying to see if things work, and reflecting, which is also related to the build-measure-learn cycle.

What are the digital tools that enable this way of working?
We use Loomio quite a lot, it’s one of my favourite digital tools. It’s quite simple but it can be super powerful. You can make decisions together and there’s a range of options for how decisions are structured — a poll, ranking options and so on. Everyone can vote and add comments, and in the end you have both the outcome of the decision and a digital record of it. This works very well as a means of practicing sociocracy. Loomio grew out of Occupy Wall Street, when activists and social entrepreneurs realised they needed to solve the same problem: fast, inclusive, effective decision-making without meetings. It’s really interesting to see a tool that itself has these autonomous, self-organized origins.

Can you talk more about the transition from someone learning about the co-op and starting to volunteer to then becoming a member and participating in the decision making and financial planning process?
I can only speak from my own experience, and I think that with any collective, it’s very important to make sure that there’s a good personal match and affinity, even more so than what you can technically bring to the group. It’s so much about whether you can trust a person. When I joined Common Knowledge, we had a bunch of meetings and we were working out how I could fit. They also asked me what I wanted to get out of it, rather as in the traditional hierarchical structure which is all about what value you can bring to the company.

Once I joined, I was able to participate in organizational and financial decisions straight away. The reasoning behind this was that making decisions together is an important part of acting together and working together — it seems strange to have less input just because you’re a new member. It feels like a lot of the systems that we use, like sociocracy, provide necessary safeguards anyways. The outcome is that each person has a lot of autonomy within the collective, which is empowering but also quite interesting as an exercise.

Are you planning to grow the cooperative and include more people in it, including the communities you are serving?
That’s the eventual aim but, in my opinion, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. The co-founder of Loomio, Richard Bartlett, proposed the idea of “microsolidarity” in 2018. He argues that there is so much that can be achieved by small groups of people and that it’s better to build multiple small teams to work together and share knowledge directly, rather than to build huge co-ops. These teams can then connect and work in solidarity with a wider network. They can can also include collaborators in a non-hierarchical way, rather than just acting in traditional roles of client and service-provider.

Can you talk more about your general financial management — do people get paid for their work maintaining the co-op, or is it mainly for direct consultancy work?
One of our principles is that people should be paid fairly for their work, and our eventual intention is for this to cover the labour that goes into running the co-op as well. When doing consultancy tasks, we have a flat financial structure — everyone gets paid the same. We have transparent finances within the co-op at the moment and the goal is to also make these public.

Do you have a written set of rules?
The key part of any self-organized groups is having a shared vision but also a very clear protocol. Everything needs to be well-documented and explicit. It’s also important to note that while it’s explicit, it’s not fixed. Everything is open to change, proposals can be adjusted. It enables a way more fluid collaboration — everything is on the table and nothing is hidden. In general, I think it’s very important to spend time thinking about organizational rules and principles. I really like this way of working — you don’t define the rules before you do the thing, but instead you try it out, then document it and adjust this as you go

Are there any best practices for running a co-op that you could share?
Establishing clear communication and openness around freely questioning and discussing everything. Actively giving members autonomy and ownership from the outset.

That makes sense. Let’s talk about the projects you’re working on in detail.
The main project so far is called Catalyst, which I mentioned before. We’ve been working on it for about a year, in five concentrated sprints. We started with a mix of ethnographic research and rapid prototyping in Hackney, London, where we interviewed a bunch of organizers about their own path towards activism, and the tools they use in organizing. We built an experimental service based on existing software, such as Typeform, WhatsApp, Airtable. The prototype asked people “what issues are you concerned about and what’s your capacity?” and then connected them directly to relevant events and organizers. This was definitely an interesting process, both the interview and prototyping stages. It confirmed a couple of hypotheses throughout the process. Organizers are using existing consumer technology but are limited by it, and frustrated. We learned a lot about what gets people actively engaged in politics. We also found out that, yes, it is possible to use digital tools to get people to go to events. The surprising aspect was that it’s almost easier than expected to get people to go to events, but that you also need a buy-in from the organizers themselves. Based on that, we decided that the next focus of work will be on organizers, and how to improve their capacity.

Can you talk a little bit about Extinction Rebellion, the fastest growing direct action climate change organization?
Extinction Rebellion (XR) is interesting — it has had a global viral growth and has a different demographic to the norm. I think that part of the reason is that climate crisis affects everyone, it’s widespread and we really have to work together to address it. Part of it is also the urgency of the situation. Politics these days is so chaotic, constant crisis is normal and people don’t trust the usual institutions, or even what we were taught is real or true. The outcome is that people are alienated from politics, and they are scared. These are perhaps the reasons why there have been so many global climate strikes. XR has been clever with having clear demands. It’s also great that anyone can use their banner in their own in an independent, non-hierarchical way.

Do you have any other examples of any other contemporary protest movements that stand out in terms of their organizational practices?

The protest movement in Hong Kong is very interesting in the context of self-organization and technology. There are Telegram groups with tens of thousands of people where they use polls to collectively decide where to go next, whether they should assemble somewhere or disperse. They have been using Airdrop to create ad hoc peer-to-peer networks where they can share instructions, which is really cool. These types of communication tools have a huge importance within activist organizations. “Misusing” these technologies in a non-hierarchical and ad hoc way, that’s really clever.

It’s interesting how far we’ve come from the Arab Spring, which marked the onset of social media powered protests.

Yes, right now there seems to be so many more private group chats, rather than broadcasts or public Facebook communities. I have so many apps on my phone for various political organizing. Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Mattermost, Slack, Discord, RocketChat… that’s way too many!
Apart from Signal and Mattermost, there are major security and privacy concerns with most of them, as well as fundamental UX problems. If you have a group with thousands of people, so much messaging gets lost, you can’t tell who you are talking to. Even though there’s a use case for appropriating these tools, everything has to be retrofitted for political organizing. It is kind of crazy that an organization like XR is using Basecamp — it seems not fit for purpose and also not secure. Same with all these different groups using Google Drive, which seems so antithetical to their principles… I’ve talked to a number of different organizers and noticed they use Google Drive, but a lot of the time is the same answer — everyone is already there, it’s easy, it’s free. Companies like Google and Facebook have so much unfair advantage when creating tools like this — they have so much money from advertising that they can offer products for free. At the end of the day, it’s not working in your best interest at all to use them, as a political organizer.

Yes, that’s a big challenge. Speaking of which — what are the characteristics of the digital tools and platforms suited for political organizing?

End-to-end encryption is a huge one. Making it open source too, as this is the way we create a commons and build networks, as well as give people the ability to understand what they’re working with. The ability to have control over the tool you are using, that’s a pretty fundamental aspect.

Is there any other protest movement that sparked your attention lately?
The Fck Boris protest in London against the election of Boris Johnson as the UK Prime Minister was very interesting — it was organized by a coalition of different groups in London. They were able to mobilize very quickly and get a huge turnout (about 10,000), especially among young people. It’s a really good example of different grassroots organizations working together and pooling their knowledge, and acting much more efficiently because of this. The protest had a very clear visual language and atmosphere — it was almost like a flash festival. I was very impressed at what they managed to put together in such a short time.

Perhaps, in the end, it’s not only about the tools that people have but also the energy behind it, the levels of anger and frustration..?

One of the things we come back to a lot is that yes, we want to make digital tools, but that’s not really our end goal. What it really comes down to is about people, and connecting people with other people. The tool itself is not really important if you don’t have the social and political will behind it.

It’s interesting to see how the nature of protest evolved in the digital space. There used to be a time where people engaged in “clicktivism” from the comfort of their smartphones, which gave them a feel-good illusion that clicking “like” on a Facebook page or tweeting incendiary messages is equivalent to activism that effects change. It seems that now the time has come to walk out on the streets.

Yes, it seems like there’s a widespread rejection of major digital platforms. People are really wanting to move away from them and to show up physically. I personally first heard about Extinction Rebellion because I saw their stickers around London, it wasn’t through social media.

Let’s talk about another issue area you are focusing on — workers rights in the digital economy and the fate of employees of digital platforms. According to recent data, between 2016 and 2019 the number of people working for digital platforms in the UK doubled to 4.7 million, one in ten of the entire workforce. Millions of people are now in some form of precarious work, their wages fail to keep pace with the rising living cost, they’re facing lower pay and poor working conditions… Is this something that you also address? What are the ways to empower these people?

When I think about the key challenges facing those people… it’s so many! It’s hard to pinpoint one issue to talk about, and it all feels dystopian and depressing. You have the layer of surveillance, which applies to everyone. People are just exhausted and accept this as a given. Then you look at the gig economy and how technology is used to dehumanize these workers… Under surveillance capitalism, we are all forced to be these isolated consumers, operating in a competitive environment, while everything around us is monitored and harvested for data. In a way, technology is confining us and keeping us separate from each other. It makes it difficult to have self-determination or form strong social groups. What we really want to do is to give workers, and people more generally, access to knowledge and tools — in a sense, consciousness-raising. It also comes back to connecting them with others, building networks, connecting them with unions and helping unions to connect with them — getting them to work in collaboration and in solidarity with others in order to collectively change their situation. In Training for Exploitation?, Precarious Workers Brigade frame self-organized groups as a way of not just dealing with capitalism, but also of creating an alternative to capitalism, building places of identity, solidarity and education, in parallel to the structures that already exist.

Where does the accountability lie? We can empower workers, but in this marketplace situation we also need awareness on the side of the consumer and technology companies.

Definitely, there needs to be solidarity between workers and consumers, recognizing that we are all basically in the same situation under capitalism. A company like Uber for example, the way that its enabled by technology — it really lends itself to be a platform co-op. It feels like the “sharing economy” has interesting foundations, but because it was made in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists, it went a certain way. But we need to take these things back and build them in a way that the workers own them instead. A huge problem for platform co-ops is that it’s expensive to start those things — how do you get the initial seed funding if you can’t go to a venture capitalist? One of the things we want to look at and share knowledge about is financial structures, how can we make these things sustainable.

In order to shed light on those issues and effect change, do you want to exert pressure directly on the companies? Are we giving up on policymakers and regulation? What’s the ideal route?

Our focus at Common Knowledge is not about regulation. I recently read The Shock Doctrine of the Left by Graham Jones, which has informed a lot of my thinking about these approaches. It describes different ways of direct political action: Smashing: protest and disobedience; Building: building viable alternatives next to mainstream ones (which I would say is our main focus); Taming, which is about regulation and working within the electoral political system; and Healing, which is about reproductive labour. You can approach problems in all these different ways. For such complex and society-wide problems, there’s no one single answer or approach. The way we have strength is having lots of different people trying lots of different things. Regulation should still be a focus, it’s just not ours.

Can you share some examples of various groups working together towards shared goals, for example from one of your political action communities on Telegram?

From the environmental perspective, I’ve gone to a few meetings run by a group called Divest Islington, focused on divestment campaigns specifically for Islington (a borough of London). They succeed in getting Islington council to divest from fossil fuels, and have now been looking at what a Green New Deal could look like, specifically for Islington. More recently, they organized a meeting with representatives of different local campaigns — other divestment groups, general environmental activism groups and groups focused specifically on air pollution around schools. Each group has a different focus, whether it is lobbying or direct action, but in the end they all recognize that we have the same aims. In the meeting we spoke about how we could support each other and work together. The strength comes from having a really broad range of groups and recognizing the solidarity amongst them.

Final question: Given the general perception of an impending dystopian techno-capitalist doom, are you optimistic about the future?

I think optimism is a very interesting thing to talk about. On one hand I’m very sceptical of techno-optimism and believing that technology will save us. I really don’t believe that and I think it’s what has led us to a lot of trouble in the past. Technology on its own is not going to solve anything, but I do think that technology can be a very powerful tool.

In some ways the situation is very bleak, especially in terms of the environment, and this sometimes can get very overwhelming. I was reading this great article the other day, called Beyond Hope. The general argument is that hope is not actually useful — if you’re hoping for something you think that some external factor is going to solve it for you. Whereas if you realise that you have agency over something, you just do the work. I agree that it’s a much more powerful mentality. We do actually have agency and we all just need to do something. A crucial part of it is moving from individual mindset to a collective mindset — rather than getting overwhelmed and thinking that there’s nothing one can do, and seeing oneself as a very small part of a much greater whole. There’s something more comforting and powerful, to instead think of oneself within a context of a global movement.

Thank you!

This interview was conducted by Ola Kohut in Berlin on 12th September 2019.

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was among the first journalists to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more recently he authored the book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy, in which he looks at how cooperatives can become the basis of a democratic economy. We caught up with Nathan in August in Berlin, asking him to share his views on the existing cooperative model, how can they be modernized and applied in the digital economy. We also talked about the concept and application of decentralization practices in tech, and exchanged ideas on how to increase accountability and leadership in the Web 3.0 space.

Hi Nathan, one of your main research topics is the feasibility of digital cooperatives. Let’s dive deeper into this. 

Nathan Schneider: Yes, that’s a big question for me. Are there ways in which these digital tools can help new cooperatives get off the ground more easily, but also — can they be used by older cooperatives to claim some of their potential? That’s a big ask because those older cooperatives are very conservative, they are careful with their members’ money and struggling to keep up with better capitalized competitors. There is some promise there though — especially, the ability to use things like DAOs [decentralized autonomous organizations] and shared governance technologies to recapture the lateral member-to-member relationship that made cooperatives take off in the first place.

Could you share some of your favourite functioning examples of cooperatives operating nowadays?

There are a few examples that lurk around in the economy. In the US, the most wealthy corner of the cooperative movement is the credit unions, which is also a powerful movement here in Germany. These organizations grew by serving communities that didn’t have access to financial institutions — they were able to do that because they built upon the member-to-member relationship. They built on the idea that people in a neighbourhood could decide on who was creditworthy — better than some banker who never set foot there — based on relationships, based on reputation systems, based on a stake. And as these institutions grew, they received public policy frameworks and regulation to support their growth, and now they operate like a nicer, nonprofit version of banks. About a third of US citizens are members of these institutions, which constitute a powerful piece of infrastructure where people can put their money in a place that feeds their community. But what does the next generation of traditional credit union cooperatives look like? How can we really use this model as a lever to transform the current economic system rather than just work around the edges?

Another example of a contemporary cooperative is Associated Press. Because it’s a cooperative owned by members of various news organizations, it is very much invested in supporting small news outlets because of its membership model. Nobody accuses AP of spreading “fake news” — its cooperative incentive structure results in factual, reliable information. And this is one of the few media organizations that can compare to the reach of Facebook; AP claims to reach half the population of the world every day.

Not everything in the economy needs to be a cooperative, but that cooperatives can play a vital role that can enable other kinds of businesses to function, and to have better feedback loops.

Why don’t more cooperatives operate on a large scale, competing with the big tech giants?

There is nothing about cooperatives that restricts scale other than really financing access. One characteristic of cooperatives too is that when they work at larger scales, they tend to work as federations so they are not claiming the whole market — they are actually just realigning it. While working at a large scale, they actually exist to support the smaller players and the dynamism of the market, rather than to eat up the whole market all onto themselves. And that is a really exciting difference enabling them to support local and diverse business rather than trying to disrupt and consume small players into nonexistence.

Do you have any data on cooperatives operating globally?

The data is very hard to come by. In the US for example we don’t count cooperatives in our censuses — though that is about to change — and data comes from self-reporting. Globally, 10 percent of employment happens through cooperatives, and certain countries have very significant cooperative economies. In Kenya cooperatives generate half of the GDP, in northern Italy significant portions of agricultural and even some industrial activity happens via cooperatives, and in New Zealand — virtually the entire dairy market operates as a co-op. Everyone who’s been around cooperatives for a long time says that we are in an explosive moment and the interest in this model is very high. But the barriers are also very high, as the online co-op structures that people are trying to create are not yet supported by the economy and the legal frameworks. We are in the process of trying to build the ecosystem to enable appropriate financing for cooperatives in the digital economy.

Are cooperatives a viable alternative to the dominant corporate models?

There’s a perception out there that venture backed companies are more efficient and that’s why they get funding, while cooperatives don’t. But the VC model only became possible when legal constraints on it were lifted. Similarly, co-ops have been able to scale in various sectors when appropriate legal frameworks were put in place; thus, there’s a $128 billion co-op bank in my area in Colorado, and there are co-ops in the United States that own nuclear power plants. If we as a society want to make co-ops more of the dominant economy, we can — we just need to make sure they have the tools and rules in place that they need, like any other kind of business.

What’s the difference between old cooperative models and the most contemporary ones that you explored?

A few years ago I reported on the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a remarkable young cooperative based in Barcelona that is involved in various projects, from farms and a reclaimed factory to urban housing and health care. I thought they must be inspired by the Mondragon Corporation, a massive worker co-op in nearby Basque Country. But they told me no — they didn’t want jobs. Their whole purpose is to get out of this idea that you have to have a job your whole life. Their purpose is to liberate people from capitalism and from the economy, not to just to establish themselves within the industrial order. Catalan Integral Cooperative’s objective is to generate a self-managed, post-capitalist society based on peer-to-peer principles. While there are certainly lessons to be drawn from the older cooperative models, such as Mondragon, the CIC example shows that they are also ways in which modern cooperatives are trying to solve different problems, and have different visions for what they’re trying to achieve.

Is it possible to register a transnational digital cooperative today?

It is, but sometimes we need to bend the rules in order to achieve the things that are commonplace in our online economy. That’s one of the opportunities that the blockchain space represents — offering us a new toolset that we can use to explore and develop what it means to be a cooperative member in the new context.

Through your research in cooperatives, have you come across what is the best jurisdiction to establish your legal entity if you want to create an international worker cooperative?

I don’t think there is a perfect jurisdiction. But for example right now in Colorado, where I live, our state happens to have really flexible cooperative laws which allows for forming multi-stakeholder cooperatives. So Colorado is becoming, as our lawyers say, the Delaware of cooperatives. There’s also an EU-wide Statute for a European Cooperative Society, which aims to help cooperatives who have activities in more than one EU country. You can always work with statutes, and they’re not that hard to change, especially locally. The real challenge is creating an economic market around these businesses that knows how to invest in them and how to help them grow.

From the consumer or user perspective, what would this new cooperative-based economy change?

My hope is that this kind of model could shift some of the accountability problems we currently face, across the spectrum. A new feedback loop of accountability would be introduced and, for instance, tech companies would lose interest in exploiting their users because the users would now be the legitimate business owners. We would have to build a model that is oriented very differently from the outset. Moreover, we would have to create frameworks where, as a society, we have a say in the institutions that we depend on, and where we own our problems — rather than just saying “oh, those evil corporations, they’re causing all these problems.”

We also need to be aware — and this has been recognized in the blockchain space — that just because an organization is decentralized, it doesn’t mean the problems go away. It just means you have a different framework for addressing those problems. And to me, that is the hope.

Do you see blockchain as a really disruptive technology which can make a real difference? What is the hope it brings, and what are the main challenges, in your opinion?

I first learned about the Ethereum whitepaper early in 2014, when I was touring with my book on Occupy Wall Street. I experienced this protest movement as being full of people craving a pure, more accountable, responsive kind of democracy. Ethereum really caught my attention because it represents something where we can actually start trying those new kinds of democracies that people were craving in the protest camps all around the world. It provides a space where we can iterate on governance fast, and where we can develop new, responsive forms of democracy which are both efficient and accountable.

Since then, it feels less like a moment where we are craving for democracy — it feels like the whole idea of democracy is in a massive crisis. And if we don’t sort out some real accountable institutions fast — democracy is going away. So I’ve been excited about the really creative mechanism designs fluctuating in the decentralization space. I want to bring them back to those old co-ops. At the same time, I think there is too much faith in that one mechanism will solve all of our problems. There’s maturity coming into play now where people are recognizing it might be a little more complicated than that. But the truth is, the blockchain space enables tremendous creativity going into what the future of accountability could look like. There’s also a potential to learn a lot of lessons from what came before and apply them in new ways.

The kind of voting systems we have now in democratic governments, for instance, are just so poor at accounting for and balancing preferences. And there is a potential for tremendous innovation in the DAO space. But there are also forgotten lessons to be learned from offline governance. Sortition, for instance, is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. It is a system intended to ensure that all competent and interested parties have an equal chance of holding public roles. It was very prominent in the Athenian democracy, for example — but is much less prominent now. And actually it’s a system that has a lot of really nice features, it’s a way of balancing expertise and populism — but it is going to be very hard to implement that in our governments now. In the blockchain space, however, we could try out 15 different kinds of sortition systems and see how they work.

As we play with all these different kinds of fun mechanisms, we can’t forget that there’s a lot more to governance than voting. And the point of good governance is that it fades into the background. When it’s working well, democracy consumes less of our attention, not more.

In your recent article on decentralization you mentioned tools that are meant to decentralize issues and introduce novel possibilities run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Can you give some examples of that?

First of all, I’m not sure that just more decentralization per se is going to solve any problems. When we look at past systems, it appeared necessary to establish forms of centralization that protect the kinds of decentralization we like. One example is protecting competitive labor markets by having labor laws that are centralized and centrally enforced, or protecting decentralized business markets by having centralized antitrust law, which ensures that when a company takes too much market power, it faces consequences. I don’t think we should be afraid of those things. To me, the more useful question rather than whether the new systems are decentralized is — are the systems we are creating more accountable and liberating? The system can be as unconstrained as possible, but in cases when constraints are necessary — those constraints should be accountable. If enough of us think they are really stupid, we can change them. I think the technologies developed in the Web 3.0 space can be useful — if we reframe them around actually advancing a democratic promise and advancing accountability.

What will it take to overtake incumbents such as Google, Facebook, Amazon? Is it even possible to overtake or replace them with more accountable, decentralized solutions?

If we are going to tolerate the role that they currently play, we should get serious about building accountability into them — because exit is not an option. Perhaps certain aspects of these systems are indeed natural monopolies — but if so, they should be either regulated like crazy, or they should be democratically structured, like a school board.

One project I’m interested in now is how can we start inserting some user ownership into these companies? Interestingly, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb have all been begging the Securities and Exchange Commission to let them share ownership with their users. They do want to align their interests with their users. Let’s take advantage of that desire, let’s give users some equity and change the rules around that. But they also have to give users a voice. That seems like a reasonable compromise.

If you were brought into the Ethereum Foundation because someone asks, how can we be made more accountable — what would be your suggestion?

I think first the question is — what powers they actually have? There’s a lot of lack of clarity about that. My understanding is that there’s the official foundation and then there’s a shadow — a tyranny of structurelessness that is also very much at work. So first, I would say that we need to have clarity about what the power structure is — where the buck stops. And then ask — who are stakeholders, who are the citizens?

And then wonder what is appropriate for those citizens to be involved in, and what isn’t? And then ask how do they get involved. For instance, in a technical context for a startup, you don’t want a thousand random people looking over the shoulders of developers, you want to honour expertise.

Can you speak more about your thoughts on leadership in institutions or cooperatives?

It’s important to recognize that you don’t want everybody always involved in everything. Instead, you want to identify the places where accountability really matters, design for those, and then leave the people who are vested with responsibility — the space to use that responsibility. I spend more time with cooperative entrepreneurs lately reminding them that they are leaders, rather than talking about horizontal organizing or decentralization. They assume that because it’s a cooperative they need to defer on everything to the amorphous membership. But cooperatives have always needed leaders. The question is, how is that leadership accountable? Once that’s clear, let’s free those leaders to express their full selves and put their talents to work — that’s what we want. We don’t want to constrain people, we want to empower them.

As we build new kinds of organizations, we also need to dispense with the illusion that we’re departing entirely from the past: just because we’re dealing with crypto ledgers doesn’t mean we don’t need to have institutions anymore or that humans don’t have to trust each other anymore. I think that evidence is very strong from our experience that whenever we try to escape those things, we’re going to end up with stuff that’s worse.

Thank you!

This interview was conducted by Ola Kohut and Yalda Mousavinia in Berlin on 22. August 2019.