Co-ops, Corporate Elites and Crypto
Dear Reader,
As we ease into the new year, the battlefronts of digital policy are already raging with activity.
Gig workers in Europe have faced a tumultuous few weeks. Initial momentum on the platform directive had led to a breakthrough agreement. However, these hopes were soon dashed as a series of member states defeated the provisional agreement at a Council of EU meeting. This comes as a major wrench in the works, as the EU council presidency now moves to Belgium, who will only have a few months to salvage the agreement before European parliamentary elections pose the threat of further setbacks. While unions and advocates have redoubled their efforts to secure this legislation, there are likely to be fierce skirmishes ahead.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, the courts have come to the rescue of workers, temporarily suspending the so-called ‘mega-decree’ of newly elected libertarian president Javier Milei. This new proposed legislation involved a massive deregulation of labor, significantly eroding worker’s rights and protections, and subjecting an already ailing workforce to further bouts of precarity. Parallelly, in nearby Chile, tension is growing between workers within ride-hailing platforms and more traditional taxi driver unions over a recent law that imposes stricter licensing and regulatory requirements for ride-hailing platforms. This has been welcomed by the traditional sector drivers, but threatens to disqualify thousands of platform workers, and is leading to a fierce and troubling dispute within the ranks of labor unions within the country.
In Asia, regional digital integration is high on the agenda, with the ASEAN bloc said to be making progress on its Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA). This first-of its kind regional treaty, aims to coordinate efforts across digital ID, trade, data flows, and payment systems. The process, while not without challenges, points to the acceleration of the digital economy’s sedimentation into regional power blocs.
Finally, in AI news, this month saw critical developments in the New York Times’ highly publicized case against OpenAI for copyright infringement. In its defense, the company has allegedly claimed that it is simply impossible to create tools like ChatGPT without using copyrighted material. That this assertion is being levelled by the tech sector – who have systematically and deliberately weaponized IP regimes over decades to solidify an unprecedented level of proprietary control over the digital – is not without irony. But the argument drives home a pertinent point that many have asserted from the start: the business models behind generative AI are incapable of acknowledging or valorizing the collective data that facilitate these technologies. In the hands of these corporations, it is unlikely that any form of community claim towards the value of this data can be adequately respected.
Moving to our current issue, this month in DataSyn, a series of digital labor scholars from the Global South come together to review a new vision statement on the platform cooperatives movement. In addition, we present two gems from our archives. As this year’s Davos meeting comes to an end, we bring you a prescient critique of its flailing politics that we published in 2022. We also revisit this piece on the cryptosphere and Web 3.0 that cautions against the perils of corporatized innovation narratives, while sketching out what radical experiments with the technology could look like.
The DataSyn Team
PROLETARIAT MATTERS
Is Platform Cooperativism Possible without Tech Solutionism? A Review of Trebor Scholz’s 'Own This'
Alexandre Barbosa, Alexandre Boava, Rafael Grohmann, Aline Os & Daniel Santini
Fast emerging as one of the most prominent movements towards building alternative models for the digital economy, platform cooperativism now boasts of a number of successful enterprises and a steadily growing global community. Check out this review, where several authors come together to critically reflect on a recent book that comprises a vision statement of the movement at its current juncture.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
Rescuing Our Common Agenda from the Post-Democratic Abyss
Anita Gurumurthy
Davos seems to be frozen in time, with each year bringing a variation on the theme of ‘rebuilding trust’, and the global elite would be well served reflecting on the many failed agendas that have been at the root of their discrediting. As a great place to start, here is a relevant critique from Anita Gurumurthy on the democratic deficits and cynical power grabs that have hijacked ‘multistakeholderism’ over the years.
Read on.
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
On Web 3.0 and the Promise of Alternatives: Big Tech by any Other Name…
Ann Marie Utratel & Stacco Troncoso
With the demise of the crypto bubble, one hopes that the promise of blockchain technology might see its next set of use-cases and experiments grounded in the solution of actual problems rather than empty hype. To this end, we revisit Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso’s exploration of radically egalitarian experiments with the DisCO.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
What can data accomplish when it is unfettered from profit motives and allowed to address actual problems in the collective life of a city? Browse through this new report from The New Hanse project, a pioneering experiment in Hamburg in the wake of DeCode Barcelona, using city data to solve urban problems.
Whilst there is much that is universal about gig work, Global South contexts do bring different challenges that are unique to local conditions. Exploring this nuance, listen in as Martijn Arets from the Gig Work podcast unpacks his journey across Indonesia, and speaks to Suci Lestari Yuana about the politics of platform labor within the country.
In the years of the Arab spring, a prominent discourse began to take hold around the democratic potential of social media, and its ‘anti-authoritarian’ tendencies. How do these claims fare a decade on? How has social media played a role in resistance movements of the last 10 years, and where has it failed to deliver? Check out this new episode from the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, where Vincent Bevins addresses these questions.
Originally published in Spanish by the digital magazine, Internet Ciudadana N°, take a look at this interview between ALAI’s Sally Burch and Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami from IT for Change. Here, Sally explores the broad purview of ‘digital intelligence’ which allows us to think about AI in a more situated manner, contextualizing its growth within particular frameworks of human-digital interaction.
Post-script
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