Constructing an Alternative Economy, Session 4: Digital Space as Commons — Platform Cooperatives and Data Democracy
Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: April 28, 2026
1. Question Carried Over from Session 3: Who Owns the 'Code' – Not the Factory, Not the Power Grid
In Session 3, we examined who owns and controls physical infrastructure such as electricity, water, and energy grids. Britain's public energy companies, Germany's citizen cooperatives, Latin America's struggles for water remunicipalization — these were all battles waged around concrete objects: pylons and pipes that occupy space.
But the fastest-growing means of production in 21st-century capitalism is neither concrete nor steel. It is code. Platforms. Data. Algorithms. What Google and Meta own are not factories but search infrastructure and advertising technology. What Uber owns are not vehicles but the algorithm that dispatches workers in real time. Amazon's real power lies not in its warehouses but in all the transaction data of sellers and consumers.
A fundamental question arises: What does democratic ownership of digital means of production mean? What kind of imagination is involved when Baedal Minjok's riders own the delivery platform itself? Can we transform the structure where Google extracts personal data for free and converts it into profit? Can the phenomenon of countless people voluntarily collaborating to create a common resource — as in open-source software — become a model for an alternative economy?
This session unpacks these questions along three axes: platform cooperatives, data commons and trusts, and commons-based peer production. Each of these involves concrete experiments already underway in the digital domain, carrying both sobering achievements and limitations.
2. Platform Cooperatives: An App Owned by Workers – Is It Possible?
2.1. The Problem Posed by Trebor Scholz
Uber, Baedal Minjok, Coupang Eats, accommodation-sharing apps. These platforms share one thing in common: a small minority who owns the platform controls the labor of the majority who work on it and takes the profits. Workers move as the app dictates but have no voice in the platform's ownership structure. If Marx described the worker standing before the machinery of the factory, today's platform worker stands before the algorithm.
In 2014, Professor Trebor Scholz of The New School in New York hit the nail on the head. If a platform like Uber is technologically possible, why can't the same technology be owned by workers and run democratically as a cooperative? He named this vision 'Platform Cooperativism' and in 2016 established the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) at The New School, growing it into a network connecting experimenters worldwide.
Scholz's 2023 book Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet (Verso) summarizes it thus: "If Uber can do it, a worker-owned Uber can do it too. Technology is neutral. The issue is ownership structure." This may sound overly optimistic. Indeed, Tim Christiaens (2025) raised a critique that platform cooperatives are structurally unable to free themselves from capitalist market pressures. Surviving as a cooperative in a hostile environment is a daily struggle.
Nevertheless, the PCC is growing. The "Digital Africa Rising" conference held in Mombasa, Kenya in 2024 attracted 500 participants from 33 countries. In 2025, a conference themed 'Solidarity AI' is planned to discuss cooperative approaches to artificial intelligence. A vision that began in theory is spreading as a global movement.
2.2. Platform Cooperatives That Actually Work
Up & Go, which started in New York, is a cooperative platform for domestic cleaning workers. Launched in 2017, it is an app designed by New York area cleaners together with the cooperative developer CoLab. Users book cleaning services through the app, just like Uber. However, the fee is only 5% of the transaction amount. This is a dramatic difference compared to Uber or TaskRabbit, which take 20–30%.
More importantly, it is about control. On Uber, drivers are subordinated to the algorithm. They cannot know how fares are set or why a particular call is assigned to a particular driver. On Up & Go, the workers control the algorithm. The fee structure, matching method, and service standards are all decided at the general assembly of worker-members. The platform is currently expanding from New York to Philadelphia and Detroit.
Fairbnb.coop, launched in Italy in 2019, is the cooperative alternative to Airbnb. Airbnb's disruption of local housing markets and evasion of accommodation regulations are headaches for cities worldwide. Fairbnb complies with local regulations, ensures transaction transparency, and returns 50% of its revenue to local community projects. Amid criticism that Airbnb even brokers accommodations in illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, Fairbnb clearly positions itself as an ethical alternative. However, its scale remains tiny. In terms of market share, it does not even come close to Airbnb's shadow.
Stocksy United, headquartered in Victoria, Canada, is a stock image platform owned by photographers and videographers, founded in 2013. More than 1,000 artist members operate it through democratic governance, with annual revenue estimated at approximately $8.5–15 million (some sources cite $118 million). Compared to Shutterstock's annual revenue of $935 million, this is a drop in the bucket, but it is the most commercially successful example of a platform cooperative. The revenue share returned to member artists significantly exceeds industry averages. Stocksy has proven that a cooperative can be a sustainable business model, not just a niche.
The Drivers Cooperative, launched in New York in 2021, is a ride-hailing cooperative directly challenging Uber and Lyft. Owned and operated by drivers, it guarantees them 8–10% higher income compared to Uber. Profits are returned to drivers as dividends, not to shareholders. It has adopted a strategy of pioneering the public procurement market by specializing in paratransit services for people with disabilities and non-emergency medical transport in New York City.
Smart Coop, operating in nine European countries, is a cooperative network for freelancers. Freelancers are legally self-employed. They are easily excluded from basic worker protections such as social insurance, collective bargaining, and administrative support. Smart brings these freelancers under the cooperative's employment framework, providing social security and collective bargaining. Thousands of freelancers participate in this model. It demonstrates that a platform cooperative does not necessarily have to be an 'app'.
2.3. Where Are South Korea's Platform Cooperatives?
To be honest, there are almost none. The scale of platform labor in South Korea was estimated at approximately 800,000 people as of 2022. These include delivery riders, designated drivers, housekeepers, and cleaners. The problems of their working conditions and algorithmic control have already become serious social issues.
Labor unions such as the Rider Union under the Korean Federation of Service Workers' Unions and 'Baemin Riders' do exist. They have struggled for fare increases and industrial accident insurance, achieving some results. However, a cooperative model where workers own the platform itself does not yet exist in South Korea. A progressive media outlet called Platform C (platformc.kr) is producing alternative discourse, but it is a critical media outlet, not a platform cooperative business.
Why is it absent? The reasons are clear. Even making one delivery app requires server costs, developers, and marketing funds. Competing against the network effects and capital power of giant platform companies is nearly impossible for a small cooperative. Although institutional foundations such as the enactment of the Framework Act on the Social Economy and the enforcement of the Framework Act on Cooperatives exist, there is no specialized financial, technical, or legal support for platform cooperatives.
But we must not accept impossibility as a given. If Stocksy competes with Shutterstock, and The Drivers Cooperative competes with Uber, then there is a starting point in South Korea as well. The imagination of 800,000 platform workers owning a cooperative-type platform may seem unrealistic under current conditions. But as we saw in Session 1, the Haetsal Income Village was also an unrealistic imagination just a few years ago. The start begins with small experiments.
3. Whose Data Is It? The Ideas of Commons and Trusts
3.1. Data Is Not the Oil of the 21st Century; It Is a Core Means of Production
The phrase "data is the oil of the 21st century" is familiar but inaccurate. Oil is a resource that disappears once used. Data is a resource that grows in value the more it is shared and replicated. It is not scarcity that causes conflict, but the monopolization of ownership.
As Shoshana Zuboff analyzed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the business model of Google and Meta takes human experience as raw material, processes it into behavioral data, and sells it as prediction products for profit. An individual's search history, location information, social networks, consumption patterns — all of this is extracted for free. If Marx saw the exploitation of labor power in the 19th-century factory, today's exploitation begins every time we turn on a smartphone.
A key question arises: Is it enough to return data ownership to the individual, or do we need a new idea that constitutes data as a common resource?
3.2. Data Commons and Trusts: Two Paths
Current discussions largely follow two strands.
Data Trusts take the direction of legally protecting individual data rights. The information subject — the individual — entrusts their data to a trust institution, which negotiates on behalf of the individual regarding the use and conditions of the data. The trust institution has a legal duty to act in the interest of the data subject. Institutionalization discussions are underway at the UK's Open Data Institute (ODI) and in Canada. South Korea's MyData system (fully implemented across all sectors in March 2025) also stands in a similar direction. It is a system that gives individuals the right to directly control their financial, medical, and communication data and to provide it for desired services.
Data Commons take a different path. According to definitions by Marina Micheli and others, a data commons is "a community that collectively and sustainably governs data and its relationships." It is an idea of managing data as a common resource, neither individually owned nor corporate owned. Just as Elinor Ostrom proved that local communities can successfully manage natural commons like water, forests, and fisheries, digital commons are also possible.
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. The trust model, which strengthens individual data sovereignty, and the commons model, which aims at collective data governance, operate at different levels and can be combined in practice.
3.3. Data Cooperatives That Actually Work
Driver's Seat Cooperative, based in Oregon, USA, is a cooperative where ride-hailing and delivery drivers co-own their data. Uber and Lyft drivers generate enormous amounts of trip data through the app, but all that data belongs to the platform company. Driver's Seat collects and analyzes this data collectively so drivers can develop better income strategies and use it as evidence for policy proposals. When the subject that owns the data changes, what the data says also changes. Uber does not answer the question, "In which time period and in which zone should I drive to earn more money?" Driver's Seat uses data to find that answer.
Switzerland's Midata.coop experiments with cooperative governance of personal health data. Members entrust their health data to the cooperative and collectively decide for which research purposes and under what conditions the data will be used. Unlike the existing model where pharmaceutical companies buy data, it is a structure where data subjects participate in governance.
The UK's Digital Commons Cooperative develops data mapping and analysis tools for solidarity economy organizations in a cooperative manner. Combining GIS (Geographic Information Systems), linked data, and open-source tools, it helps local communities visualize and analyze their own economic ecosystems. It shows that a data cooperative is not just about 'collecting data,' but also about co-producing the tools that utilize the data.
4. Commons-Based Peer Production: What Open Source and Wikipedia Have Proved
4.1. A New Mode of Production Captured by Benkler and Bauwens
If platform cooperatives are a matter of 'ownership structure,' commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a matter of 'the mode of production itself.'
In 2006, Yochai Benkler of Harvard Law School captured a remarkable phenomenon in The Wealth of Networks. The Linux operating system, Wikipedia, and countless open-source software projects are created by thousands of voluntary participants collaborating without the command hierarchy of a capitalist firm or the price signals of a market. Someone writes code, someone else fixes bugs, and yet another writes documentation. There is no boss giving orders, no wages providing motivation, yet the output is of a quality competitive with commercial products.
Benkler's analysis was this: As digital networks reduce the cost of producing and sharing information to near zero, a third mode of production — neither market nor firm nor state — has emerged: 'commons-based peer production.' If capitalism operates on the two axes of market and firm, CBPP offers new axes of 'commons' and 'peer.'
Belgian-born theorist Michel Bauwens founded the P2P Foundation and radicalized this insight. According to him, CBPP is not merely an exceptional phenomenon in software production. It is the germ of a post-capitalist mode of production emerging within capitalism. The principle of "contributing to the commons and deriving value from the commons" fundamentally conflicts with the private property principle of the market. As Bauwens argued in a 2021 paper, the key question is how this germ can build its own ecosystem while avoiding capitalist capture.
4.2. Achievements and Paradoxes of CBPP
The achievements CBPP has already produced are undeniable. Linux powers over 70% of the world's servers. The Android operating system is built on the Linux kernel. Wikipedia has become the most comprehensive repository of human knowledge and drove the Encyclopædia Britannica out of the market. Apache web server, Firefox browser, Python programming language — a significant portion of today's internet infrastructure is maintained by the unpaid labor of voluntary contributors.
Yet the paradox is also clear. The companies that make the most money on top of these commons are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Google built its cloud empire on the basis of Linux and open-source technologies. 'Commons capture' — taking from the commons for free and packaging it as a private platform to sell — is a core operating principle of digital capitalism. Bauwens calls this the 'parasitic stage of capitalism.'
This is CBPP's fundamental dilemma. It has proven that collaborative production is possible, but how the products of that production can grow into a sustainable alternative economy while avoiding capital's capture remains unresolved.
One recent experimental answer to this dilemma is the Public-Commons Partnership. This model, noted by both Benkler and Bauwens, works as follows: the community handles commons production, the public sector provides the necessary infrastructure (servers, legal, financial), and institutional fences are erected to prevent the produced value from being privately captured. Experiments at the local government level, such as Barcelona's 'Digital Commons Policy' and Bologna's 'Regulation on Collaboration between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons,' are underway in this direction.
5. Where Does South Korea's Digital Democracy Stand?
5.1. Platform Cooperatives at the Starting Line
In South Korea, platform cooperatives have not yet been sufficiently raised even as a political agenda. Classical labor issues such as platform workers' labor rights, application of the minimum wage, and enrollment in industrial accident insurance are discussed to some extent, but the idea of "workers owning the platform" remains unfamiliar.
Given the market dominance of Baedal Minjok and Coupang Eats, and the platform ecosystem control of Naver and Kakao, the space for a small cooperative to enter appears extremely narrow. So where can we start?
A possible starting point is niche areas: region-based services that large platforms have not entered, specialized professional groups, and the public procurement market. It is worth referencing how The Drivers Cooperative targeted the niche of New York City's paratransit services. Consideration should be given to ways for the public sector to grant preferential contracts to cooperative-type platforms, and to establish specialized financial and technical support systems for platform cooperatives under the Framework Act on the Social Economy.
5.2. Is MyData Enough? The Path to Data Commons
South Korea's MyData system (fully implemented in March 2025) is progress in terms of personal data sovereignty. Individuals can now aggregate and control their financial, medical, communication, and shopping data in one place and provide it to desired services.
However, MyData is fundamentally an 'individual' model. Returning data ownership to the individual is necessary but not sufficient. The problem is that even if an individual sells their data, the buyer is still Google and Naver. Obtaining the right to sell personal data does not change the structure of surveillance capitalism.
What the data commons and data cooperative model propose is a different direction. Individuals pool their data and govern it jointly, collectively negotiating the conditions for data use. As Driver's Seat Cooperative shows, aggregating data generates insights and bargaining power that are impossible individually. Experiments such as health data cooperatives and region-based data commons could begin in South Korea as well.
5.3. Can the Lessons of Open Source Be Generalized?
South Korea has a relatively developed open-source software ecosystem. There is public sector adoption of open source, active developer communities, and some local governments' policies to transition to open source.
The lesson to be drawn is simple. Open source has proven that people collaborate and produce not only for money but also for meaning, community, and recognition. Can this principle be extended beyond software production to data management, platform operation, and even physical domains like manufacturing and energy?
Bauwens calls this the 'commons transition.' It is a strategy to support the principles of peer production that have succeeded in the digital domain with institutions and infrastructure, and to spread them into the physical production domain. Examples include the open-source hardware movement, co-production in fab labs and makerspaces, and public infrastructure construction where citizens participate in design. These experiments are still in their infancy, but the direction is clear.
6. Toward the Final Session
Up to Session 4, we have examined four axes of constructing an alternative economy.
Session 1 began with Haetsal Income Village, where villagers co-own a solar power plant, and looked at how common ownership of the means of production can start. Session 2 examined the theory and cases of the cooperative model where workers own the enterprise itself — the light and shadow of Mondragón, the failure of Yugoslavia and the success of Emilia-Romagna. Session 3 traced the global trend to democratically reclaim public infrastructure such as electricity, water, and energy grids. Session 4 examined new possibilities arising in the digital domain: platform cooperatives, data commons, and commons-based production.
Now one question remains. Where does the power to connect all of this come from? What political conditions are necessary for Haetsal Income Village to grow into energy democracy, for worker cooperatives to take root as axes of the local economy, and for data commons to come under citizen control?
Session 5 addresses this question. The politics of binding the individual experiments of democratizing the means of production into a single transformation strategy — how to reconstitute the local, the associational, and the national.