R. Trebor Scholz, Own This! How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet, London/New York: Verso, 2023, 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1-83976-455-4.
Trebor Scholz’s Own This! presents platform cooperatives as a concrete alternative for worker ownership and democratic governance in the digital economy in response to the precarity, inequality, and concentrated corporate control generated by the platform economy. Examining experiences across different fields, from Uber-like platforms and domestic services to agriculture and fishing, Scholz argues that digital technologies do not necessarily have to be owned by investors and large technology companies; they can instead be owned and collectively governed by workers, users, and communities.
At the heart of the book is the relationship between ownership and control. Under platform capitalism, workers not only have limited say over their working conditions; the digital infrastructures they use, the data they produce, and the technologies that regulate their work processes are also generally controlled by companies. Platform cooperatives seek to reverse this relationship by enabling workers to become co-owners of the platform, participate in decision-making processes, and have a say in the distribution of the value generated by economic activity. In Scholz’s approach, cooperativism thus becomes not merely an alternative business model but a means of expanding economic democracy in the digital economy.
Own This! also addresses the question of how individual platform cooperatives can compete with capitalist platforms. Scholz’s answer is not so much for cooperatives to grow independently by imitating existing companies, but rather to achieve scale by building federations, solidarity networks, and cooperative ecosystems. The book therefore conceives of platform cooperativism not as a collection of isolated small enterprises but as part of a broader solidarity economy capable of developing shared technological infrastructures, financing mechanisms, and supportive institutions. Relations between trade unions and platform cooperatives are also an important element of this framework.
One of the book’s notable features is that it extends the discussion of worker ownership towards data ownership and data democracy. Democratic control in the digital economy is not limited to the question of who legally owns an enterprise; it also encompasses decisions about what data are collected, how they are used, and who owns the value generated from them. Scholz therefore discusses models such as data cooperatives and collective data governance as new domains of economic democracy in the digital economy. The ability of farmers or small producer communities to decide what data are collected about their activities and how those data are used is one of the key examples of this approach.
Scholz also does not present platform cooperatives as a substitute for trade union organisation or traditional labour struggles. On the contrary, he explores the connections between worker organisation, trade unions, cooperatives, and broader networks of social solidarity. The experiences of platform cooperatives such as Mensakas are significant because they demonstrate the possibility that workers fighting for rights within existing platforms can simultaneously create their own alternative forms of economic organisation. A bridge is thus established between the struggle to improve working conditions and the pursuit of more direct worker control over the means of production and digital infrastructures.
In this respect, Own This! proceeds from a critique of platform capitalism to place at its centre the questions of who owns, governs, and controls digital technologies. The book’s significance lies not only in documenting existing platform cooperatives but also in bringing worker ownership, workplace democracy, federative organisation, and data democracy together within the same discussion. By showing that the technological infrastructure of the platform economy should not be regarded as fixed but can instead be reorganised under different forms of ownership and governance, the book provides an important resource for discussing the possibilities of worker control and self-management over digital labour.