Group items tagged

Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,

High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.

Facebook started flocking to Ello

The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users

looking for ways to build platforms of their own.

VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.

OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world

it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.

Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.

new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.

aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.

Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.

People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.

form of ownership

Cooperative intelligence

Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio

It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.

Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.

Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.

The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses

Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits

multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once

“It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”

Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.

Only one device has been sold

Bitcoin

makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,

The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,

to develop decentralized social networks,

even an entirely new Internet

Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?

Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.

connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own

Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies

The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether

There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.

changing what owning means altogether.