Ours to Manage and to Own: Beyond the Sharing Economy
Looking Beyond Platform Capitalism to a Shared Economy, Ours to Manage and to Own
Location: Westminster Forum. 5th floor, Wells Street, University of Westminster. 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW.
Date & Time: 25th May 2015, 1845
The backlash against unethical labour practices in the “collaborative sharing economy” has been overplayed. Recently, The Washington Post, New York Times and Guardian started to speak out against online labour brokerages like Taskrabbit, Handy, and Uber because of their utter lack of concern for the workers.
There isn’t just one, inevitable future of work. Trebor Scholz is proposing to take the platform model and insert a cooperative economic model at its center. Just for one moment, imagine that the algorithmic heart of any of the citadels of anti-unionism could be ripped out, cloned, and brought back to life under a different ownership model. In this Cybersalon, Scholz will lead discussion on the platform economy to advance an intensely practical argument
about what he calls platform cooperativism. While, cooperatives are not a panacea for all the wrongs of platform capitalism, they could help to weave some ethical threads into the fabric of 21st century work.
Join Cybersalon for this last special event in our 2015 Hyperhabitat Series!
Speakers
Trebor Scholz is an author, Associate Professor for Culture & Media, occasional artist, and chair of The Politics of Digital Culture conference series at The New School in New York City. Dr. Scholz convened eight major conferences, presented hundreds of keynotes and lectures at conferences worldwide including the Obama White House and Transmediale in Berlin. He held a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and his book on 21st century labor is forthcoming with Polity. Scholz has authored, with Laura Y. Liu, From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City. He is also the editor of many collections including The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2013), which has become to go-to introduction to digital labor in many universities.
Suggested reading:
Denver Cabbies reject Uber – form unionized hi-tech cabbie worker coop.
