1. From Platforms We Use to Platforms We Own

In the early decades of the internet, digital platforms promised empowerment. They connected creators and consumers, freelancers and clients, drivers and passengers. But over time, that promise turned into a paradox. The same networks that enable participation now concentrate control. The so-called platform economy extracts value from its users while locking them out of ownership and decision-making.

What if that same network logic could serve the many, not the few? What if the platforms we rely on every day — for communication, creativity, and livelihood — were owned and governed by their communities? In this post, we explore how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) could provide the infrastructure for building platform cooperatives: digital systems that embed the ethics of Mutualism into code.

This essay builds on the foundations laid in Solarpunk Governance and continues our exploration of Post-Labor Mutualism — a vision where cooperation, not wage dependency, structures abundance.

2. The Problem with Platform Capitalism

Today’s dominant platforms — Uber, YouTube, Amazon, Airbnb — illustrate a recurring pattern: the community creates the value, but the platform captures it. Users produce data, content, and trust, yet they have no voice in governance or share in the wealth generated by their collective activity.

As David Shapiro’s Post-Labor Economics argues, automation and AI are severing the link between labor and income. In this context, platform capitalism risks becoming digital feudalism — a world where a few corporations own the algorithms that mediate all exchange.

If automation dissolves traditional jobs, and platforms replace employers, the next question becomes: who owns the platforms? Without intervention, we could end up in a world where abundance is automated but inequality is permanent.

3. What Is a Platform Cooperative?

A platform cooperative is a digital platform owned and governed by its users, workers, or community. Instead of extracting data or profit, it redistributes value according to contribution and participation. The concept was popularized by Trebor Scholz, who argued that we can reclaim the digital economy through cooperative ownership models.

Examples already exist:

• Resonate: a music streaming platform owned by artists and listeners.
• Stocksy: a photographer-owned stock image marketplace.
• CoopCycle: a federation of courier cooperatives sharing open-source tools.

These initiatives embody the mutualist principles explored in Introduction to Mutualism: self-organization, reciprocity, and shared governance. Yet many remain limited by traditional legal frameworks and national boundaries. To scale cooperation globally, we need programmable infrastructures for trust. This is where DAOs enter the picture.

4. DAO Infrastructure: Scaling Cooperation

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a community managed through transparent code rather than centralized management. Smart contracts enforce agreements on a blockchain: who can propose, vote, or spend resources. In essence, DAOs transform human trust into verifiable logic.

DAOs offer new possibilities for cooperatives:

• Transparent governance: decisions recorded immutably and visible to all.
• Programmable ownership: membership and voting rules encoded in smart contracts.
• Community treasuries: collective funds governed by shared rules, not private shareholders.

Yet, unlike traditional cooperatives, DAOs are not confined to one-member-one-vote systems. Governance can vary widely — from reputation-weighted models to delegated voting or even quadratic systems. Without Proof-of-Personhood mechanisms, DAOs cannot always ensure equal voting rights. This flexibility is both a challenge and an opportunity: the architecture of cooperation becomes a design space.

DAOs don’t automatically guarantee democracy; they provide the tools to design it. The question becomes: what values do we encode into our governance logic?

5. Anatomy of a DAO-Powered Platform Cooperative

Imagine a global creative cooperative running on DAO infrastructure. Let’s imagine its structure across four interdependent layers:

• Governance Layer: Artists, developers, and supporters vote on funding proposals or platform updates using transparent smart contracts.
• Value Layer: Tokens represent participation or contribution — not speculative assets but instruments for accountability and recognition.
• Treasury Layer: Revenue from subscriptions or sales flows into a shared treasury, automatically distributed to contributors.
• AI Coordination: Machine learning systems help balance efficiency and fairness — curating content or allocating resources based on collectively defined values rather than corporate profit motives.

A platform where listeners and artists co-own the network, AI curates ethically, and royalties flow instantly and fairly — no intermediaries, no opaque algorithms.

This is the architecture of Post-Labor Mutualism in action: participation replaces employment, and cooperation replaces extraction.

6. Design Goals: Mutualism and Beyond

Building such systems is not only a technical challenge but a moral and architectural one. Mutualist systems should embody six key design goals:

1. Self-Organization – Systems are governed by their participants; decisions arise from those directly affected.
2. Reciprocity – Contributions are rewarded proportionally and transparently; no one extracts without giving back.
3. Shared Governance – Ownership and control are distributed; participants steward, not dominate.
4. Lower Inequalities – Economic and informational power should not concentrate; governance mechanisms must counter accumulation.
5. Fairness and Efficiency – Systems must balance justice with practical function; fairness should not mean stagnation.
6. Long-Term Sustainability – Growth must regenerate, not exploit; cooperative systems should evolve like ecosystems, not empires.

These goals combine ethical design with technical implementation. Smart contracts and AI can help measure contribution, mediate disputes, and maintain transparency. But they cannot replace human judgment or empathy.

Technology alone cannot guarantee fairness — but it can help us enforce it together.

7. Toward a Cooperative Internet

The future of the internet will be shaped by who owns it. Will it remain a corporate enclosure, or will we reclaim it as a digital commons? The path forward may lie in hybrid forms — platform cooperatives powered by DAOs, blending the cooperative movement’s ethics with blockchain’s transparency and automation.

From platforms of extraction to platforms of participation. From data as property to data as commons. From work as survival to contribution as belonging.

The architecture of cooperation is already here; what remains is to build it at scale. As we enter the Solarpunk age, Mutualism in code may be the bridge between technology and solidarity.

If the platforms we use every day became commons, how might our digital lives — and our societies — begin to change?