I apologize because I’m entering this promotional phase. I’ll be reaching out again asking you to help, if you’re so moved. But I don’t apologize about that, really, because the book shares stories that I believe need to be known—stories of the promise and struggle in the new generation of the cooperative movement. At a time when democracy is on the rocks, when the economy seems to run on a mix of autopilot and superheroes, we need these reminders that cooperation has helped build our world and can shape its future.

Learn more here. Retweet this. Maybe even place a preorder. Let me know if you’d like to publish a review or interview, or to schedule an event. Together, let’s help bring this radical tradition back to life.

Various dystopias

In the meantime, there are powers-that-be to troll. Here are some recent publications of mine more or less in that vein:

• Facebook isn’t a startup anymore. It’s not yet a real “community.” It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to give up control. (Vice)
• Some people want to turn more and more of life into cryptocurrency-powered auction markets. (America)
• Journalists and researchers could share a whole lot more of the data they collect. But should they? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Read the first scholarly journal article on platform cooperativism behind an impenetrable paywall. Or not. (The Sociological Review)

Works not cited

Have you read what Mark Twain regarded as his best book? Ted Gioia wades through his pious, late-live tribute to Joan of Arc.

Jessica Weisberg points out that America’s favorite guide to the corporate ladder was himself a precarious gig worker.

Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza learned to organize in the kitchen.

Now is an interesting time to revisit Mr. Zuckerberg’s pre-IPO letter to potential investors.

Scott Korb wonders whether standardized testing has killed the first-person.

Students are already producers; what if they were co-owners?

My CU Boulder colleagues and I stand with our embattled local journalists.

Times and places

• 2018.05.02: Oakland, CA – “User, Worker, Owner!” #platformcoop event
• 2018.05.24: Berlin, Germany – “Mapping the Ecosystem” #platformcoop workshop at SUPERMARKT, 3-6 p.m.
• 2018.07.26-27: London, UK – Open2018: Collaborative Technology for the Cooperative Economy
  
• 2018.11.07: Boulder, CO – Colorado Shared Ownership Summit
• 2018.11.17-20: Denver, CO – American Academy of Religion

If you can come to just one part of it, come to our free, open-to-the-public Friday night event, “What Happened to the Future,” at 7 p.m. on November 10. It will include:

• Alicia Garza, founder of #BlackLivesMatter
• Yochai Benkler, Harvard University
• Alicia Wong, Roosevelt Institute
• Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
  

Learn about the Friday event here, and register for the full conference here. A million thanks to my co-organizers, Camille Kerr, Trebor Scholz, and Palak Shah.

Study and hone

I’m now in my third year of helping to create CU Boulder’s MA in Media and Public Engagement. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because of the busyness of doing it, but now I feel like I should. My colleagues and I have worked hard to create a space where creators of diverse backgrounds can come and study together the crafts of media and social change—activists, social entrepreneurs, narrative hackers, solutions journalists, future academics who want to get their hands dirty, and more.

Maybe this is something you need. Maybe it’s something your community needs. We need you.

Please consider sharing this program with anyone you think might be interested. Let me know if you have questions. The application deadline for this year is January 10. It’s a lot of time and it isn’t.

Bibliography

This fantastic story of a weekend inside a black women’s secret society is just scratching the surface of the much, much bigger story Jessica Gordon Nembhard tells (h/t Phil Klay).

My Study Circle teammate Caroline Savery just published an epic on the Trumpocalypse via the young platform co-op Cosmos.

Bourdieu is useful for analyzing online reputation systems.

This is one of the better Zuckerberg think-pieces lately, but this one takes us to some solutions.

Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is helping me sleep.

Travels

• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. John’s University
• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. Joseph’s College
• 2017.11.10-11: New York, NY – The People’s Disruption #platformcoop conference at The New School
• 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – Platform cooperativism discussion at Harvard Law School
• 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – Mount Holyoke College
• 2018.03.10: East Lansing, MI – MSU Student Housing Cooperative

Want to help bring democracy to the internet? On the heels of the successful platform co-op conference in Toronto, I’m now working with a mighty team of collaborators to organize November’s conference in New York, The People’s Disruption. It’s all about connecting the resources of the present with ambitious visions of a cooperative future online, featuring speakers from #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza to venture capitalist Brad Burnham. I hope you can join us! Space isn’t infinite! Register today (and retweet this).

Communists and Catholics

Over the summer I had the chance to join the MBA program at St. Mary’s University in Canada for a tour of the co-op sector in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. There was plenty to write home about, and I put it together in a dispatch for America magazine, which will appear in the next print issue. Read it and share it online now: “How Communists and Catholics Built a Commonwealth.”

It’s both a report from the field and a reflection on why, as we build a new economy, we should look to our past.

More Where that Came From

I’ve also been writing about stuff like how we can democratize ISPs and the little churches of St. Francis. I turned in a book draft, too! And then there are some live events coming up:

• 2017.09.28: Denver, CO – “Startup.Coop: How to Build a Real Sharing Economy through Shared Ownership” and “Demystifying the Hype: Understanding Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies with an Expert Panel,” Denver Startup Week
• 2017.10.4-6: Alexandria, VA – Keynote and other talks at the Co-op Impact Conference
• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. John’s University
• 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – TBA at Harvard Law School
• 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – TBA at Mount Holyoke College
• 2018.03.10: East Lansing, MI – TBA at MSU Student Housing Cooperative

Thank you for reading, thank you for what you do.

The big oil and electric companies are largely unaccountable to the communities they power and pollute. But the U.S. power grid has other kinds of companies, too. Seventy-five percent of the landmass of the country gets electricity from electric cooperatives—a wildly successful New Deal program, long maligned as communist, and now little-remembered, even by its members. These co-ops’ lobby just fought hard to end the Clean Power Plan and elect Donald Trump, but they might also become the cutting edge for a renewable-energy future.

This week in The Nation I report on the contradictory state of electric co-ops, from the promise of distributed, local generation to some of their members’ uphill battle for racial justice.

I hope you’ll consider helping to share this story, for instance by retweeting this, retooting this (if you’re in the fediverse), and liking or sharing this on Facebook.

The future of Twitter

At their annual meeting on May 22, Twitter’s shareholders will be voting on a proposal to consider options for converting the company to some form of democratic user ownership. The proposal is an outgrowth of organizing that began with an article of mine in The Guardian last September, along with the brilliant, determined organizing of friends like Danny Spitzberg and Maira Sutton. With just two weeks to go, we’re doing all we can to spread the idea and persuade shareholders. Read more about us in places like Recode, Vanity Fair, and the Financial Times.

We need your help. Tweet your vision for the future of Twitter and sign our petition today. Or simply retweet this.

If you think the idea is crazy or impossible, tell that to the Associated Press.

More cooperative futures

If you’re not watching Jackson, Mississippi, you should be. In 2015 I went there to report on the life of Chokwe Lumumba, the black-nationalist mayor who died suddenly after just a few months in office. But now his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has just won the Democratic nomination, all but clinching the next election. Antar is riding the same platform of cooperative enterprise and local economy that brought his father to office. We have a new rebel city.

And more. In my first article for Quartz, I wrote about why tech startups need new business models, and how we can build them.

Finally, through the delightful Colorado Co-ops Study Circle, I’m co-hosting a new, monthly community radio show, the Co-op Power Hour. Subscribe to our feed and listen up for shows on Black Lives Matter, co-op education, business conversions, and more.

Near and far

• 2017.05.16: Washington, DC – Community Purchasing Alliance annual meeting address
• 2017.05.18: Boulder, CO – “Startup.coop” session at Boulder Startup Week
• 2017.07.19: Denver, CO – Keynote address at the Association of Cooperative Educators (ACE) Institute at Regis University
• 2017.07.17: Bologna, Italy – “An Internet of Ownership” at the University of Bologna
• 2017.06.09: Padua, Italy – Panelist at Pathways to a Cooperative Market Economy

Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become the latest outgrowth of the platform co-op movement that’s the subject of my new book with Trebor Scholz (and 60+ contributors), Ours to Hack and to Own, available for preorder from OR Books.

Articles

• As an editorial for the current issue of The Nation, I’ve proposed that platform cooperativism is on the rise, backing the claim up with the stories of two very different platform co-ops: Stocksy United and Green Taxi.
• Want to learn about economic democracy in business school? Good luck. In The Chronicle of Higher Education (available here for a month before getting paywalled), I consider how and why it’s virtually impossible to study this sizeable chunk of the economy in the United States.
• In addition to the stuff I wrote, I’m featured in two recent articles in Shareable —one on art co-ops and one on gig economies—plus an interview with Grand Rapids community radio and a report that includes my agitating around platform co-ops in Australia over the summer.

Speaking

• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.11.17: Denver, CO – “How Platform Co-ops Can Take Community Wealth Building Online“
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Okay, that’s it. Take heart!

Order your copy today!

Momentum is building. Just last week, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a manifesto that explicitly calls for creating platform co-ops. We hope that this book will help show that online democracy is both a live option and a moral necessity.

Cooperative advantages

I’ve been continuing to follow a bunch of different leads along the cutting edge of economic democracy. In The Nation this week, read about Denver’s 800-driver taxi cooperative vying to turn Uber’s disruption into a push for worker ownership. If they keep

Meanwhile, in the September issue of Vice, I return as economics columnist with a report on Enspiral, a remarkable co-working network based in Wellington, New Zealand, which shows how trust can become not only a cooperative advantage, but a competitive one. If you missed it, also, I recently reported for Vice about the latest on ColoradoCare, the controversial ballot proposal poised to bring cooperative, universal medical coverage to all the state’s residents—now, with the help of Bernie Sanders.

Utterances

Upcoming talks and trips:

• 2016.09.29: Alma, MI – Alma College
• 2016.09.30: Grand Rapids, MI – Aquinas College
• 2016.10.06: Omaha, NE – IGNITE at Creighton University
• 2016.10.12: Quebec, Canada – Collaborative economy session at the International Summit of Cooperatives
• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.12.08-09: Cambridge, MA – Harvard Religious Literacy and Journalism Symposium
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Un-branding

You might have noticed that I’m writing from a different email address. Over the past few months I’ve pivoted from a public self-presentation heavily weighed toward modes of transportation: nathanairplane, The Row Boat, etc. As much as I enjoy transportation, I’ve decided to reorient my self-presentation around the name my parents gave me when I was born. So now this is where you can find me and my stuff:

• Website: www.lelandquarterly.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Social media: @ntnsndr

And watch out, because I’m still playing around in various ways, like for instance with a shorter form of the URL; both https://ntnsndr.in and [email protected] work right now but we’ll see if it really seems worth keeping. In the meantime, see y’all there!

Read the article in The New Republic here. To help spread the word about it, retweet this, share or like this, and upvote this.

Has the Time Come for Universal Basic Income?

Across the political spectrum, the idea of a no-questions-asked payout for everyone is gaining momentum. I’ve written about how Silicon Valley is getting behind the concept as an antidote for what automation is doing to the job market. Libertarians want it as a replacement for means-tested welfare programs, while socialists see it as a step toward abolishing the wage system. It seems like a crazy, impossible idea, but it may not be for long.

On May 26 at Civic Hall in New York City, I’m going to be part of a discussion about the prospects of universal basic income with progressive entrepreneur and activist Peter Barnes. Barnes’ proposal for a “citizen’s dividend” based on carbon emissions is an ingenious way of both mitigating climate change and strengthening the economy. We’ll be joined by scholar and basic-income advocate Michael Lewis, as well as Institute for the Future fellow Natalie Foster. RSVP on Facebook and Eventbrite here.

To learn more about universal basic income, listen to recent podcasts on the subject from my friends at Belabored and Disorderly Conduct.

If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like?

Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just represent the future of work altogether. Now, still in hiding because of his heist, Duran is orchestrating his next utopia, a cryptocurrency-infused global financial system. In this month’s issue of VICE magazine, I go face-to-face with Duran and on a tour of his remarkable undertakings.

Read the article VICE‘s website or look through the print version. While you’re at it, retweet this.

In other news

I had a great time speaking about God in Proof at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada. I talked about cooperativism on Majority Report with Sam Seder and at Civic Hall with a panel of sagely organizers and thinkers. I upset some white people and prayed the Angelus.

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist?Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.

More at Al Jazeera America.

One is an introduction to a new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings on Anarchism, straightforwardly titled On Anarchism, which comes out this month from the New Press.

The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip.

“I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted.

Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”

Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing.

If you’re in the Boston area on November 18, come hear me introduce Chomsky (and you can stay to hear him speak if you want…) at MIT at 5:30.

The other bit is a retrospective review in Commonweal (the online version is behind a paywall) of Paul Goodman’s 1960 sort-of classic Growing Up Absurd:

Goodman’s prose sets out to dazzle us with its iconoclastic attitude and the striking phrases that clothe the author’s not-always-consistent arguments. He quotes from his previous books at length. Throughout he attempts to reconcile his claim to be an anarchist with his conservative instincts, a tension borne out in his life as well as on the page; he was a married family man who was promiscuously bisexual, a Jew who opposed World War II.

Among the other “mansplainers” of Goodman’s time—to borrow a neologism from the feminist blogosphere—one could be forgiven for preferring Ivan Illich, who presented his similarly adventuresome anarcho-conservative proposals with considerably more rigor and coherence; or James Baldwin, who as a black man in exile came by his prophetic tone more honestly. “Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were niggers,” Goodman recalled in a memoir-ish essay, referring to a 1967 BBC broadcast, “but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our disposition and pass.” Carmichael was right.

For more: stop by a fine newsstand or bookstore near you.