What If: A Cooperative?
The Pitch
A worker cooperative that provides online services to regular people.
My Goals
Broadly speaking I have two separate but intertwined goals.
First, I want to provide online services (like email, file hosting, photo hosting, blog hosting, etc. ) as alternatives to those provided by capitalist behemoths like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Second, I want to do a small socialism from inside capitalism.
Services
The internet, and indeed nearly everything, is suffering from Enshittification …
…also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
It is possible to provide services which just serve the people using them, instead of shareholders or venture capitalists. No ads, no data extraction, no privacy invasion, no exploitative “AI” LLMs, etc. The tools exist, and the workers to run them exist, but all of the money is funnelled towards, and captured by, capitalist enterprises.
Not to mention that the world has recently become increasingly motivated to move away from services provided by US based corporations.
Socialism
There is no requirement to bring cooperatives into this… a typical corporation would suffice in the short term.
But I want to put some effort into seeking a better way, to begin redirecting money away from venture capitalists and shareholders, and towards workers, planting a small seed that may grow and contribute to a future coop ecosystem
I want to encourage a model that provides workers with control over their lives, their health, their time, and what happens to the income generated from their efforts.
A cooperative would not need to seek never ending growth of profits and user base in order to please shareholders, likely against the judgement of the people actually providing the service, who care much more about its quality.
A cooperative could be resistant to offshoring and downsizing. A cooperative could be more resistant to taking a buyout offer from a larger corporation, though it’s not a guarantee.
Details
There are many details that need sorting out in order to put this idea into practice.
In particular, I’ll emphasize that I’m talking about a worker coop, a business with the aim to earn a sustainable income for its members; not a consumer coop, non-profit, or volunteer collective.
In order to exist as a legal entity, a coop needs to incorporate somewhere. My intent is to register in BC, Canada, where I’m from. This would, for legal reasons in the short term, restrict membership to residents of Canada (not citizens).
It’s my understanding that international membership would be possible, provided a majority Canadian (resident) ownership was maintained.