Platform socialism: interview wih James Muldoon

Reimagine how digital platforms could be governed, reclaim our digital future from Big Tech, reinvent the internet. How to look for alternative ways in which we could organize platform ownership and governance? Is it possible to build a platform socialism? These are some questions from James Muldoon’s book Platform Socialism. Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Exeter and Head of Digital Research at Autonomy.

In this interview with Rafael Grohmann, James Muldoon talked about social imagination, prototyping, epistemic resistance, community washing, infrastructure, guild socialism for digital economy, and civic platforms.

DIGILABOUR: It is very difficult to imagine alternative radical futures for issues such as work and technology. What is the role of imagination and imaginary for building another type of society?

JAMES MULDOON:  Platform socialism is about reinventing the internet and reimagining how digital platforms could be governed. It’s about finding alternative ways in which we could organize the ownership and governance of platforms and also thinking about the broader infrastructure and organisations at play.

One of the key concepts of the book is the idea of a social imaginary. I wanted to return to certain aspects of the socialist utopian tradition to design new institutions and think about new principles to break the technological determinism that Big Tech exercises over our social imagination. Many of the reform proposals receiving mainstream attention were related to how we could fix the big platforms in various ways through small regulatory changes. But very few of the proposals were trying to expand our collective imagination in terms of what ownership and governance structures could be possible.

I wanted to draw on the history of technology to find ways to make them speak to our own times in a new way. The main motivation behind platform socialism was about finding an exciting vision of how we could make better use of technology. I didn’t want it to be just about a critique of the platforms and a list of all the things that were wrong. I wanted to really try to give a sense of what would be better, so that we wouldn’t just have this kind of cynical attitude that things would always be terrible. I wanted to try to contribute to those voices and those projects and prototypes that envision new ways in which we could use technology.

I found it fascinating that all of these transformative visions for how tech will operate in the future – I think the biggest ones at the moment are web3, blockchain and the metaverse – all of these are really just related to how capital can continue in much the same way as before, but with a slightly different window dressing. I wanted to think about how we could have an alternative vision for this.

If you look at the most successful leftist projects, political parties that have come to power, bold visionary reforms that have happened, they’ve always done so on the back of an inspiring vision of the future. I think we’ve kind of lost that a little bit on the Left, we’re not putting out our own visions of what things will look like, we’re always on the back foot. I talk about utopia in the sense of an alternative institutional framework. Not in the sense of creating a ‘new people’, or defining minute by minute every aspect a new organization, but really just setting up a new way of thinking about things to try and make a break with some of the practices and the principles of the big tech companies.

DIGILABOUR: What is the role of prototyping in the construction of platform socialism?

MULDOON: Together with the idea of imagination and the notion of experimentation, the concept of a prototype is really important because it denotes this idea that there isn’t going to be a single fully fledged alternative model that will appear to us as a blueprint. For example, when I returned to  Project Cybersyn – which was a brief attempt during the 1970s in Chile to create a democratic organization of the economy through fax machines connected to an early version of the internet, which would transmit data from factories to a central controller in order to understand how the economy operated and how it could be put under democratic control –  when I returned to this idea in the book, I said the important thing about this and other projects is that it begins the process of experimentation with alternative models of organisation. They didn’t get it all right the first time.

If we began to experiment with a Cybersyn 2.0, we wouldn’t need to have every single detail meticulously planned beforehand because so many issues that could occur would only be possible to work out in practice. So I think building these prototypes and starting to experiment with them – which is a big part of the culture of technology – would be the best way in which they could be developed.

Prototyping is also important for another reason. Small scale working alternatives can be powerful examples of other ways we could organise the digital economy. They are threatening to the power of the tech companies because one of the primary arguments they make is that their products are the only way technology could be organized.  Uber claims you can’t have flexibility without reducing workers’ rights and that’s just not true.

We can use technology in different ways – technology can be repurposed. It’s always part of a broader political and cultural system and the way in which it’s deployed is contingent. So having these alternative prototypes is really scary and dangerous for Silicon Valley because it shows us that there are other ways of organizing our digital lives.

DIGILABOUR: In the book, you argue towards an articulation between epistemic resistance and worker resistance. What does that mean?

MULDOON: In order to move towards these alternative futures, we need to start finding new ways to resist the power of Big Tech companies. In the book, I talk about the importance of epistemic resistance. As a first step, I think we need to create new intellectual frameworks for discussing technology and find terms and concepts that aren’t enmeshed in the same logic and principles as Silicon Valley. I think it’s very hard for us to break away from that and that even the most prominent criticisms of tech often come from people in the industry, which often means they are still following the same kind of logic and using the same kind of language as the companies they are criticizing.

So I think epistemic resistance involves returning to older ways of talking about technology and also rethinking the underlying worldview of Big Tech. One of the things that Silicon Valley loves to do is reinvent things that already exist and give it a new name. But sometimes these new frames of reference are just misleading. This talk about freedom and flexibility in the gig economy, is this really an honest way of describing what’s going on? Is it actually clear that people are genuinely empowered and more free? I think there is ample evidence that points to the opposite conclusion.

But obviously, it’s not just a matter of changing how we think about things, we need to build real world power between groups of workers and civil society organizations. This involves workers’ unionizing, it involves coordinating with political parties, with activist groups, with developers and workers, and also with marginalized communities who are often hit hardest by some of the negative aspects of how this technology is deployed. Resistance is important both with how we think and also with how we act and organize.

DIGILABOUR: We have seen a very high risk of community washing and also fair washing by platforms, which try to co-opt discourses through PR strategies and lobbying. How to face these platform actions?

MULDOON: There’s an interesting overlap between some of my research on the idea of community in tech discourse and work you’ve been doing at the Fairwork Foundation. In the book, I talk about the idea of ‘community washing’ as a PR marketing strategy that some of the tech companies employ to make out like their businesses are little more than community organizations trying to pursue a social mission. I think this language of community is deployed in a very cynical and strategic way to help cover over the extractive nature of their business model. It helps promote the idea that as members of the community they’re doing the best they can to address issues. It also positions them in the role of community leaders. So that if there are ever issues or problems that people have, we can rest assured that the community leaders will be there to try to sort them out.

I think this language comes, or is adopted from certain aspects of community organizing. In the 2008 Obama campaign, you saw some of that language of community organizing dispersed more widely in the social change and social impact world. From there, it moves through Airbnb to a few other organizations and gets disseminated through the tech world. And, of course, the Obama administration had a very cozy relationship with many of the tech executives. Tech companies were hiring a lot of Obama’s former staff, so there is a big crossover there.

Today, you see it all happening again. When we look at web3 and some of its big venture capitalist advocates, this language of ‘community ownership’ and communities retaining value from their activities, it’s all coming back again. It’s ironic now that in the web3 discourse, ‘the community’ is positioned in opposition to the big platforms like Facebook and Google. They’re now the baddies and the new venture capitalists are the good ones that are on the side of the community. So I think you see this language of community coming back but just reconfigured to serve capital in a slightly different way.

It’s really interesting to for me to think about the work of the Fairwork Foundation because as soon as you establish that kind of rating system the risk is it’s going to be another way in which people will engage in a box ticking exercise. But I think there are obviously ways you can avoid that. I’ve seen the Fairwork Foundation’s work and they have very robust criteria in which the most exploitative companies always earn very low ratings and I think it’s very hard for them to get around that. But there are overlaps regarding the way in which corporations are always trying to position themselves to present as well as ethical and community-minded to the public.

DIGILABOUR: And maybe we are in an infinite loop of co-opting these discourses, Web 2.0, now Web3. But in terms of alternatives, what is your view on the infrastructures we depend on, from data centers to undersea cables? And what are the challenges of building other infrastructure, including public infrastructure?

MULDOON: When terms like platform capitalism started to gain wider currency, one of the mistakes we made was to focus too closely on the concept of data. By talking mainly about data it often felt like it was all this immaterial information floating around in cyberspace. In the early days, you often heard people talking about a digital economy as something that was in opposition to the ‘real’ economy and that was somehow less legitimate.

But I think what we’ve seen in the past few years is a much greater recognition that the internet isn’t up in the clouds, it’s transferred through undersea cables and stored in data centers. But we’re also seeing a turn by the tech companies towards a greater investment in infrastructure. One of the selling points of the early tech companies was that they were lean platforms that outsourced everything: we don’t own any houses, we don’t own any cars, we don’t employ any workers it’s all just software, and we can create billions of dollars of value just through setting ourselves up as intermediaries. But now what you’re seeing is some of the big companies investing much more heavily in data centers and various forms of assets.

This infrastructure is absolutely crucial if we are ever to take control of the ways in which these platforms organize our lives. It has to start from the ground floor. We have to think of ways in which we can have public and commons-based forms of ownership over digital infrastructure. Some of the infrastructure you need is so expensive to run that you can’t have it owned and operated by a local workers’ cooperative. We need to think about how public infrastructure can support commons-based economies. We could have municipal centers in which local cooperatives can use office space and have their own digital services there. These could be funded by government to develop new forms of coordination between the public and workers’ cooperatives and other commons-based alternatives. And I think you’re absolutely right that this has to happen not just at the level of the software, but at the level of some of the hardware and infrastructure as well.

DIGILABOUR: What does a guild socialism for digital economy mean?

MULDOON: One of the chapters of the book is called guild socialism for the digital economy. It’s a way of trying to revive interest in a pluralist socialist tradition of writers like G. D. H. Cole and think about how we can use some of their ideas and proposals to rethink the digital economy today. So guild socialism was a tradition within British socialism in the early 20th century and one of its most famous writers was G. D. H. Cole. Guild socialists are critical of an overly centralized approach to how socialism could be practiced. Cole thought that we needed forms of workplace democracy and local decision making to create a more participatory society. In the UK, the dominant approach to thinking about these questions when he was writing was put forward by the Fabian Society. Now this was an organization that helped found the British Labour Party in the early 20th century, and they were criticized by Cole for having an overly bureaucratic and overly top down approach to socialization.

What Cole really wanted to show was that it was possible to reduce the role of the State, and to really emphasize the possibility of regional and local associations in organizing social life. He thought about how local producer cooperatives and consumer cooperatives could start take a leading role in how economic production was managed. Some people see guild socialism as arguing for workers’ self government in industry. That was a big part of it. But, really, it is a much more expansive program of expanding the principle of democracy much further into society, so that you wouldn’t just elect your member of parliament – in every organization you were a part of you should have a say in how it operates.

This pertains to the most important organizations, things like businesses, universities, cultural institutions, and all of these associations that play a really fundamental role in how our daily lives are organised. The guild socialist vision was of various overlapping associations that were themselves internally democratic playing a major role in organizing both the economy and broader society. It’s really about how to imagine a much more participatory democratic society.

This vision of the guild socialist gets overtaken by a much more centralized vision of the British Labour Party and the British Left more broadly. We don’t really hear much about it but you do see a resurgence of this much more decentralized and federalist way of thinking about democratic politics. Today you see it with the Corbyn movement, you see it in organizations like Momentum and some other parts of the British Left today.

DIGILABOUR: I found it very interesting how you point out platform cooperativism as an alternative, but you go beyond platform co-ops toward civic platforms, and a broader context. What do civic platforms mean?

MULDOON: Platform cooperativism is this really fascinating program that you can trace back to people like Trebor Scholz and others in the early to mid 2010s as a way of recreating some of the structures and ideas of the workers cooperative movement in the digital economy. This is a point at which I think guild socialism can be really relevant to thinking about the digital economy today because one of Cole’s ideas was that workers’ cooperatives on their own are not enough. You need to think about ways in which you can scale them. And also, not just involving groups of workers, but various public and municipal institutions as well.

So I think if you were thinking through a guild socialist framework today, you would look to the function the different platforms performed, and on the basis of that think about what scale it would be best to operate them at. Now for some platforms, they could function at a very local level, you can think of local domestic cleaning services, courier services, things that would work fine without much infrastructure that you could organize democratically at a very small scale.

But as we’ve discussed there are so many examples of digital platforms that would be very difficult for a simple platform cooperative to own and operate, projects that require huge capital investment and also ones that should for democratic and political reasons, be operated by a much broader public. We don’t want, for example, Google or Facebook to be run as a platform cooperative because it only gives decision making power to a small collection of workers inside that cooperative. One of the interesting points of guild socialism is that it attempts to find ways to balance the interests of workers with the interests of the broader public. We don’t want political decision making power attached solely to your role as a full time worker because what about those who don’t work for various reasons. What about those who are volunteering who are undertaking care work, who are doing various forms of unpaid work. And it’s very dangerous to attach so much power, specifically to workplaces, without a sense of broader democratic structures to think about how they might operate at a larger social level.

That’s why when you look back over discussions of social ownership, particularly those when it was a very real and immediate problem, such as in the 1917 to 1921 period, you can see many proposals that involve these broader federal structures in which there are coordinating agencies between different groups. I think from that perspective what’s really fascinating about platform cooperativism is the places in which advocates of platform cooperativism start to discuss these partnerships and forms of coordination with municipal and regional governments. I find it really interesting when you start thinking about various forms of civic platforms.

One mentioned in my book is the DECODE project that was run in Barcelona and Amsterdam, around 2017 to 2019. And you can see here that there’s this desire to democratize how this technology operates, not simply to allow another kind of venture capitalist to control it, but to think about how various forms of civic groups could be involved in the governance and control of technology. I think platform cooperativism is a great starting point for many of these discussions, and that it has really wonderful and interesting principles and examples, but that it needs to be incorporated into a broader framework.

DIGILABOUR: Thank you so much for the interview, James. Do you have final remarks, perhaps about your next research?

MULDOON: I’ll give a brief plug to a think tank that I work for because I just think we do amazing work there. It’s called Autonomy. I work there, in addition to my role as a lecturer at the University of Exeter. I work there in the digital autonomy unit. We have published some work on platform cooperatives and we’ve also published some other policy work on the digital economy. We’re working on a project on microwork at the moment. So we’re going to have a study released shortly. I just think you should check out the work of the think tank it’s doing some really great stuff.