Digital Labor

Rachel O'Dwyer

person  

Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer and researcher in the School of Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin. She is the leader of the Dublin Art and Technology Association and curator of Openhere, a festival and conference on the digital commons. Rachel is an active contributor to the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and core member of the P2P Foundation where she coordinates the P2P academic research network and 100 women in peer-to-peer. She publishes, speaks, and organizes events on topics such as the political economy of communications, disruptive technologies and the digital commons. She is a regular contributor to Neural magazine.

There’s Something About Scale…
Much of the literature on platform cooperativism explores the problem of ‘scalability’. There’s a generally held belief that co-operative initiatives don’t scale or federate well and so remain fixed at a local or kin-communal level. This in turn is thought to limit their ability to present as meaningful alternatives to the interstices of the state or the market.

Recently, there have been various attempts to try and make these organizations more scalable. These often take the form of rules or regulatory blueprints, such as applying principles or developing formal agreements and licenses to develop extralegal expectations about how a platform should operate. Examples of this are things like Elinor Ostrom’s principles for governing common-pool resources or various licensing and peering agreements. They also take the form of technical architectures, where protocols such as the blockchain or a particular topology or platform are developed to try and scale and organize cooperation.

In some of these cases, scalability gets reduced to a technical problem rather than a popular mobilization in which citizens, governments and corporations could work together. But where does the drive to scale come from and what are some of the issues with scale? And when is scaling up neither desirable nor sensible?

 
Unconference
Sun, November 13
12:00 PM - 04:00 PM

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