CONCEPT
Platform Cooperatives
Digitally-mediated economic platforms owned and governed by workers and users—alternative to extractive venture-backed platforms, documented by Srinivasan in Detroit.
Platform cooperatives are digital platforms organized as cooperatives rather than corporations—owned by the workers who provide labor through them or the users who depend on them, governed democratically, and designed to distribute benefits equitably rather than maximize investor returns. The model emerged as a response to the gig economy's extractive logic: platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit that capture value from workers' labor while providing no job security, benefits, or governance voice. Ramesh Srinivasan documented platform cooperatives in Detroit and other cities where marginalized communities were building alternatives to corporate platforms—worker-owned ride-sharing, collectively governed freelance marketplaces, community-controlled data trusts. The cooperatives represent governance from below rather than regulation from above.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The platform cooperative movement gained momentum in the mid-2010s as the gig economy's costs became visible: precarious employment, algorithmic management, value extraction from workers and communities without corresponding investment. Trebor Scholz, who coined the term 'platform cooperativism' in 2014, argued that the technology enabling platforms could serve collective ownership as readily as it served venture capital—that the