Episode Notes: Take Back the App!
Added 2020-05-01 11:00:00 +0000 UTCWatch / Listen: TAKE BACK THE APP!
Description: Take Back the App! We need platform co-ops now more than ever. If the 19th and 20th Centuries were about storming the factory and taking back the means of production, then the 21st Century is about storming the online platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and the apps that increasingly control our economy and our lives. Increasingly, we’re living online, controlled and manipulated by secretive, for-profit companies, but there are alternatives. Laura talks with coders, activists and tech entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of the platform cooperative movement. If we take the cooperative route, they argue that tomorrow’s online world could distribute rather than concentrate power—but will we? Recorded before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this conversation about the companies that mediate our lives is more relevant now than ever.
Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:
•Forward Thinking on Covid-19: Platform Cooperativism to Keep Your Data Safe
•Forward Thinking on Covid-19: Public Ownership of Privatized Medicine
•How to Make a Democratic Economy
•The Future is Public: Special Report from Amsterdam
•May Day Special Report: 100+ Movements Go Beyond the Moment
•A Co-op Story: Milk Not Jails
Related Articles and Resources:
•Platform Cooperativism Consortium
•MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy: 2019 MIT Platform Strategy Summit
•Apple and Google Build Smartphone Tool to Track Covid-19 by Shannon Bond - NPR
Guest Bios:
Stacco Troncoso is the advocacy coordinator of the P2P Foundation as well as the project lead for Commons Transition, an organization dedicated to spreading and strengthening the Commons worldwide. He is also a co-founder of the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation. His work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship-building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners.
Ela Kagel, digital strategist and co-founder of Supermarkt, specializes in the intersection of society, technology and economy. Since the 1990s she has produced media art exhibitions, designed spaces for cultural exchange and helped establish digital platforms, networks and communities . She is a long-time collaborator and researcher at the Public Art Lab in Berlin. From 2009 to 2011 she was program curator for the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture in Berlin. Central to Ela’s practice is supporting bottom-up initiatives deeply rooted in particular communities of practice. From this perspective she also established and curated Upgrade! Berlin, as well as a number of commons-related research projects. SUPERMARKT, a independent hub for digital culture and collaborative economy.
Micky Metts is a worker/owner of Agaric and a member of the “free software for community building” movement - using tools like VOIP, Drupal, and GNU/Linux. She is liaison between the US Solidarity Economy Network (SEN) a group devoted to ongoing dialog on building the new economy network - and US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC), the national grassroots organization of 4,000 US worker-owners “building power with national and international partners to advance an agenda for economic justice rooted in community-based, shared ownership.”
Featured ‘Music in the Middle’ of the Podcast:
“Facebook Killed The Arts” by T-Q-X featuring Josh Mease from T-Q-X’s album “Global Intimacy” courtesy of the artist. More information...
