I found an interesting disccusion on Mastodon about Platform Cooperatives. On Mastodon a heated discussion is waging on how ethical and principled one should be. The trigger of all of this is Aral Balkan and his frustration that people working to improve technology keep on being sponsered by Big Tech and using the tools of these surveillance capitalists (see: I was wrong about Google and Facebook: There is nothing wrong with them).
On Mastodon he just posted:
Google/Facebook are to the health of our human rights and democracy what Philip Morris is to the health of our bodies and what Exxon Mobil is to the health of our habitat.
If you’re a doctor, you do not get sponsored by Big Tobacco. If you’re an environmentalist, you do not get sponsored by Exxon Mobil. If you’re a privacy advocate, a human rights activist, or a democrat, you do not get sponsored by Google, Facebook, or any other surveillance capitalist.
It’s that simple.
And it came to platform cooperatives: the platform cooperativism consortium (PCC) at the new school, receives $1,000,000 google.org grant with the by-line “Google.org Foundation Grant Will Support the Development of Cooperatives in the Digital Economy”. To which Aral responded (and he is right):
Well that’s a million reasons to love surveillance capitalism right there
OTOH, as far as I know, the platform cooperative movement has never taken a stand against surveillance capitalism. So it is what it is. Afaics there’s nothing in being a platform cooperative that stipulates you must have an ethical business model or bars you from being a surveillance capitalist. It’s just a flatter structure for sharing profit.
So summarizing and refering to the topic title: Something more is needed to ensure that Platform Cooperatives are the key solution, but the business model can be of help in getting closer to HT goals.
Some of the interesting resources that came with the article:
