It’s technically sort of advertisement for a musician-owned online music cooperative, but this Yancey Strickler post has some interesting arguments about coops and an “economy that strives for self-sufficiency rather than growth”.
That’s the crazy thing: if the value set expands to include equitable ownership, the existing players can’t compete. They’re locked into the old paradigm the same way they’ve locked us into their services. If a new social network launched with collective ownership core to its offer, Facebook’s ownership structure would prevent them from copying it. Because Facebook, Patreon, and others are wedded to the previous paradigm, their structures are fundamentally incompatible with a world where the values of ownership have changed, as Ampled cleverly lays out in this blog post.
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By the end of the decade, every category will have a co-op player. Some of these will fail. Others will replace the existing “do-gooder” players in their category with a “do-better” offer. Many more will break up larger markets into smaller, more directly owned ones. After globalization is Balkanization.