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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (eds.), Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, OR Books, 2016
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Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
247-250
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17390
247
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250
Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (eds.), Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, OR Books, 2016
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Book Review                                                            247
    Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (eds.)
Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New
Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, New York and
London, OR Books, 2016, pp. 252

Giacomo Poderi University of Bergen

    According to the editors, Ours to Hack and to Own is a “guidebook
for a fairer kind of Internet” built upon two pillars. First, democratic
governance and democratic ownership are the fundamental aspects of
platform cooperativism and, ultimately, the core topic of the book. In
Scholz’s words: “The term ‘platform’ refers to places where we hang out,
work, tinker, and generate value after we switch on our phones and com-
puters. The ‘cooperativism’ part is about an ownership model for labor
and logistics platforms or on-line marketplaces that replaces the likes of
Uber with cooperatives, communities, cities, or inventive unions” (p. 24).
Second, the book tries to foster a (lengthy, complex and messy) process,
rather than advocating technological solutionism. Basically, the collection
provides a snapshot of an emerging phenomenon and, at the same time,
supports the efforts of co-constructing it, by promoting and vouching for
it. As Scholz and Shneider clarify, the book is a direct follow-up of their
meeting during a two-day event about platform cooperativism, where
they both participated to present their works: “Platform Cooperativism:
The Internet, Ownership, Democracy” (New York, November 2015).
Coming from two separated, yet converging, intellectual trajectories –
Scholz main focus is on platform cooperativism (Scholz 2016), while
Schneider’s one is on shared ownership and governance (Schneider 2014)
– the two embarked in this book project which resulted in a rich collec-
tion of short essays that, in my opinion, reads more like a manifesto for
platform cooperativism than a guidebook for it.
    In a historical moment when the imagined future of the “sharing
economy”, together with its promises, has been progressively unmasked
and replaced by the dominant orders of so called technocapitalism (Sua-
rez-Villa 2001), gig economy (Todolí-Signes 2017) or platform capitalism,
platform cooperativism emerges as a noteworthy alternative. For STS
scholars, who have always been interested in the politics of technology
(Winner 1980) and the infrastructuring processes that shape and
(re)configure socio-technical power networks (Mongili and Pellegrino
2014), platform cooperativism can represent a relevant occasion to look
at these themes and at how they play out through Internet from a per-
spective which we might call of “inverse infrastructuring” (Egyedi and
Mehos 2012). In particular, this anthology can act as a thought-provoking
work supporting STS scholars to get closer to the theme, and looking at it
from the vantage point of those ones who are actually shaping it. The
248                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

book does not use STS vocabulary or constructs and, strictly speaking, it
is not an academic work. However, it does address the topic by de-
constructing and addressing it at many different levels. The lead title –
Ours to Hack and to Own – is emblematic to this regard. Aligned with
hackers’ practices the book provides scaffolding tools for creating,
spreading and supporting platform cooperativism, by including chapters
as design guidelines for its technical protocols, its social and cultural as-
pects, as well as the economic, legal and organizational ones linked to the
institution of cooperatives. Central idea threading among the chapters is
always the preservation of the ownership of all the value aspects – not
limited to the economic ones – emerging from a platform cooperative. It
is in this light that, in my opinion, “hack” comes to hint at the original
hackers’ culture and suggests platform cooperativism as “an hack to the
system of platform capitalism”.
    Despite the number of topics dealt by the many small chapters can
sometimes feel bewilder, I was positively surprised by how many of these
chapters implicitly talk to each other and manage to square the circle for
the materialization and sustainability of platform cooperativism, without
betraying its founding principles. The followings are two valuable exam-
ples.
    First, in her chapter, Blockhains and Their Pitfall, Rachel O’Dwyer
raises a warning about the diffusion of the distributed database technolo-
gy, known as blockhain. Mainly used for handling and accounting digital
currencies and their transactions (e.g. BitCoin), blockhain is being adopt-
ed as a technological fix in other domains beyond the original one. How-
ever, O’Dwyer points out that “blockchain is what we call a ‘trustless ar-
chitecture’. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mech-
anisms like social networks and co-location” (p. 230). She warns us that
complex and time-consuming processes cannot be replaced by technical
solutions and that similar technical tools must always be accompanied by
broader considerations. In From Open Access to Digital Commons, Da-
vid Bollier takes stock of the warning when proposing blockchain tech-
nology as means to shift from open platforms – where access is free, but
value is exploited by platform owners and not users – to communal own-
ership and management of digital artifacts and their related values. Here,
the case is made for seeing blockchain as a complementary tool to a com-
plex social, cultural, and technological reconfiguration process. Second,
in The realism of Cooperativism, Yochai Benkler elaborates on four fun-
damental challenges which platform cooperativism needs to deal with in
order to emerge and consolidate, and provides indications on how these
might be tackled. The most troubling one relates to the means of long-
term sustainability for platform cooperatives: these usually build on the
organizing practices of peer production, although this typically relates to
volunteer contributions by people who already have other means of sub-
sistence. Conceptually, platform cooperativism could rely on commons
Book Review                                                                  249
governance (Ostrom 1990), but it would still need practical means to
break the ties with capitalist investments in the long term. Money is the
Root of all Platforms, by Brendan Martin, deals with this issue: he identi-
fies in the private and market oriented investments a constant danger for
platform cooperatives. A way out is to see finance and platform financing
as a platform: turning finance into a (pervasive) platform cooperative.
    Ours to Hack and to Own includes contributions by activists, hack-
ers, entrepreneurs, policy makers and researchers who are actively en-
gaged with the core topic of the book. Each chapter begins by introduc-
ing and defining a challenge, approach or key aspect of platform coopera-
tivism and, in a few pages (pp. 4-5), provides a direct answer to strength-
en, pursue or solve it. Although for some chapters the feeling of remain-
ing too much on the surface it is stronger than in others, I personally ap-
preciated the assertive tone, and the clear and focused messages of each
chapters, regardless of the limited available space for problematizing is-
sues and dwelling into the details. The book is structured around four
main parts (“Something to Say Yes to”; “Platform Capitalism”; “An In-
ternet of Our Own”; “Conditions of Possibility”). The first one serves an
introductory scope: the conceptual bases that define “platform coopera-
tivism” and clarify its foundations are captured here. The second sets of
essays collects critical reflections on platform capitalism that highlight the
challenges and opportunities in the existing on-line (or sharing) economy.
With fifteen and twelve chapters each, plus two showcase sections, the
third and fourth parts of the book are the most substantial ones. The
former addresses issues concerning the practical design and creation of
on-line platforms cooperatives. The latter takes a broader perspective and
deals with the ecosystem that is needed to widely support a shared, dem-
ocratic ownership and governance of Internet. The showcase sections in-
clude more than a dozen of one-page sheets each. These describe note-
worthy examples of running platform coops and ongoing projects that
support platform coops from an ecosystem point of view. It is a pity that
the book ends without a bibliography or an end-notes section, and only
with a minimalist “Further Resources” section.

References
Egyedi, T.M. and D.C. Mehos. (2012) Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Net-
       works from Below, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
Mongili, A. and Pellegrino, G. (eds) (2014) Information Infrastructure(s): Bound-
       aries, Ecologies, Multiplicity, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars.
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for
      Collective Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, N. (2014) Owning Is the New Sharing, in “Shareable”,
       https://www.shareable.net/blog/owning-is-the-new-sharing (retrieved
       November 4, 2017).
250                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

Scholz, T. (2016) Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing
       Economy. New York, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Suarez-Villa, L. (2001) The Rise of Technocapitalism, in “Science & Technology
       Studies”, 14 (2), pp. 4-20.
Todolí-Signes, A. (2017) The “Gig Economy”: Employee, Self-Employed or the
       Need for a Special Employment Regulation?, in “Transfer: European Re-
       view of Labour and Research”, 23 (2), pp. 193–205.
Winner, L. (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics?, in “Daedalus”, 109 (1), pp. 121-
      36.
