A tech-eternity ago, in 2016 and 2017, one of us helped organize a shareholder campaign at Twitter, asking the platform to explore strategies for ma

Let Users Own the Tech Companies They Help Build

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2021-06-19 22:00:04

A tech-eternity ago, in 2016 and 2017, one of us helped organize a shareholder campaign at Twitter, asking the platform to explore strategies for making its users into co-owners of the company. Twitter was then entertaining acquisition offers from the likes of Disney and Salesforce. To those of us in the campaign, it seemed wrong that a platform of such personal and political importance, attracting such love-hate devotion from its users, was really just a commodity to be bought and sold. The tech press covered our campaign but mostly dismissed it as quixotic. We presented our proposal at Twitter’s annual meeting, and it won only a few percentage points of the shareholder vote.

Yet soon after, in 2018, Uber and Airbnb wrote letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing what sounded eerily like what we had asked Twitter: to be allowed to grant company equity to their users—their drivers and hosts, respectively. Regardless of whether they are (or should be) regarded by law as employees, contractors, or customers, these are people the platforms rely on, and who rely on the platforms in turn. Somehow, what seemed impossibly utopian in 2017 was now the corporate strategy of the biggest gig platforms. Without much fanfare, user ownership was quietly emerging as an industry trend.

Morshed Mannan is a Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. He is completing his PhD on democratic firms in the platform economy at Leiden Law School and is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy. He serves on the boards of Start.coop and Zebras Unite.