Tuesday, 2 October 2018

Councils are facing the biggest cuts to government funding since 2010 despite unprecedented pressure and demand, which could risk “tipping many over the edge”

Councils are finding it very difficult:
Futures Forum: "Councils are Britain’s fundamental unit of local government, but they are struggling to make ends meet."

It's not made easier by the risks coming from Brexit:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and local authorities anticipating "billions in lost funding and soaring poverty"

Or from playing the market:
Futures Forum: UK public finance: councils building a credit bubble >>> In October 2008, UK councils lost heavily from speculative investments. Could this happen again?

Things are going to get even worse, as spotted by the EDW blog:
“English councils brace for biggest government cuts since 2010 despite ‘unprecedented’ budget pressures” | East Devon Watch

Here in full from the Independent:

English councils brace for biggest government cuts since 2010 despite 'unprecedented' budget pressures

Main source of government funding for local authorities set to be slashed by 36 per cent next year, warn councils

May BulmanSocial Affairs Correspondent @maybulman
1 day ago

Local councils will have suffered a 77 per cent decrease in the government funding between 2015/16 and next year, LGA analysis shows ( Getty )

Councils are facing the biggest cuts to government funding since 2010 despite unprecedented pressure and demand, which could risk “tipping many over the edge”, local authorities have warned.

Figures show that the revenue support grant – the main source of government funding for local services – will be cut by 36 per cent next year, marking the largest annual deduction in almost a decade.

It comes despite repeated warnings that continuing cuts to vital local authority provisions mean vulnerable people, such as the elderly, at-risk children and homeless people, are being left to “fend for themselves”.

An analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA) reveals that, overall, councils will have suffered a 77 per cent decrease in the government funding between 2015/16 and next year, dropping from £9,927m in 2015-16 to £2,284m in 2019-20.

Almost half of all councils (168) will receive no support grant next year – marking a threefold rise on this year and a more than tenfold increase on 2017/18, the figures show.

The government claimed its funding settlement gave a real terms increase in resources for local government in 2018-19 and said new “business rate pilots” would mean councils retain £1.8bn.

But council leaders said this would not substitute for adequately funded services, and warned that they were increasingly unable to provide dignified care for the elderly and disabled, protect children and build much-needed homes.

Official figures published last week showed government spending on children at risk of neglect or abuse had been slashed by 26 per cent over the past five years, while spending on children’s centres dropped by 42 per cent.

Separate data shows that the number of older people who are not getting the care and support they need from local authorities has hit a record high, with one in seven now living with some level of unmet need – marking a 19 per cent increase since 2015.

Andrew Gwynne, shadow minister for communities and local government, said: "The Government can no longer ignore this crisis. Unless we see additional investment into local services and local government, councils will be in an impossible position and more will follow Northamptonshire into bankruptcy. Tory austerity clearly isn’t working and has utterly failed local government."

Cllr Richard Watts, chair of the LGA’s resources board, said the “unprecedented” funding pressures and demand for adult and children’s social care and homelessness services was “pushing councils to the limit”.

“As a result less money is being spent on the other services that keep our communities running such as libraries, local roads, early intervention and local welfare support,” he added. “Losing a further £1.3bn of central government funding at this time is going to tip many councils over the edge. Many local authorities will reach the point where they only have the funds to provide statutory responsibilities and it will be our local communities and economies that will suffer the consequences.”

The LGA said funding pressures and rising demand for services, such as adult and children’s social care and homelessness support, would leave local services in England facing a £3.9bn funding black hole next year.

Councils are calling on the chancellor to use the autumn Budget to tackle the immediate funding crisis for local government in 2019/20, and to deliver a sustainable funding settlement for local government in the forthcoming spending review.

It comes after the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in a damming report that budget cuts had left a number of councils under “enormous pressure” and “in a worrying financial position”.

Responding to the latest findings, a government spokesperson said: “Our funding settlement gave a real terms increase in resources for local government in 2018-19. Local authorities are responsible for their own funding decisions, but over the next two years, we are providing councils with £90.7bn to help them meet the needs of their residents. We are giving them the power to retain the growth in business rates income and are working with local government to develop a funding system for the future based on the needs of different areas.”

English councils brace for biggest government cuts since 2010 despite 'unprecedented' budget pressures | The Independent
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Drowning in Plastic @ BBC One > "This documentary is a must-watch, because it’s only if we raise awareness, tell our friends and spread the message that humanity will really have a chance at saving our oceans."

Last night's documentary on plastic pollution had a very clear message:
Futures Forum: Drowning in Plastic @ BBC One > "Single-use plastics should be banned immediately in Britain."

Watch now

Drowning in Plastic

Our blue planet is facing one its biggest threats in human history. Trillions of pieces of plastic are choking the very lifeblood of our earth, and every marine animal, from the smallest plankton to the largestmammals, is being affected. But can we turn back this growing plastic tide before it is too late? In this 90-minute special, wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin visits scientists working at the cutting edge of plastics research. She works with some of the world's leading marine biologists and campaigners to discover the true dangers of plastic in our oceans and what it means for the future of all life on our planet, including us.

BBC One - Drowning in Plastic

It has certainly had an effect:
Drowning In Plastic WATCH as Liz Bonnin holds back tears as BBC viewers outraged by plasti | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV | Express.co.uk
Drowning in Plastic, review: a valuable, harrowing survey on the problem with plastic - Telegraph
Drowning in Plastic review – a rallying cry, but is it too late? | Television & radio | The Guardian

Why You Need To Watch 'Drowning In Plastic' On The BBC

By 2050 there will be more plastic in our planet's oceans than fish.

LIFESTYLE
01/10/2018
By Connor Parker

Problems that are only just coming to light but have potentially devastating consequences for all aspects of marine life. Microplastics, tiny plastic pieces and fibres less than a millimetre big are being found in remote geographies and getting into every part of the food chain, including humans. Coral reefs, already under deadly threat from climate change, are being attacked by deadly coral-killing bacteria which is being carried by plastic, increasing natural levels from four per cent to 89 per cent.

All of this is happening while every single minute a full rubbish lorry worth of plastic is dumped into the ocean.

This is why this documentary is a must-watch, because it’s only if we raise awareness, tell our friends and spread the message that humanity will really have a chance at saving our oceans.

Why You Need To Watch 'Drowning In Plastic' On The BBC

'Drowning In Plastic': Five Things We Learned From The BBC's Shocking Documentary

Watching seals being strangled by discarded plastic was almost too much.

01/10/2018
By Connor Parker

If “Blue Planet” II made us worry about how bad plastic is for our oceans and the animals that live in them, then ‘Drowning in Plastic’ is a vital call to action.

Parts of the documentary are so painful to watch, it’s not just presenter Liz Bonnin who is brought to tears over the suffering of the animals she meets.

Throughout the documentary, we see shocking footage of birds stuffed with plastic, whales caught in fishing lines and seals lacerated by netting. We are shown that every corner of the globe is affected by this crisis. And while some of the findings are tough to believe, here are our five crucial takeaways:

BBC Baby seals often get netting caught round their neck which later strangles them when they grow

1. Plastic is everywhere

And we mean everywhere. A plastic bag has been found seven miles underwater at the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the deepest place on earth.

Wherever Bonnin travels (and the film sees her criss-crossing the globe from the East Coast of the US to Indonesia), she finds plastic that is affecting the local marine wildlife. Even as far afield as the North Pole, on a small and inhospitable island, miles from human habitation, all that awaits the cameras are sand, walrus and plastic.

2. Some baby birds are so full of plastic, they can’t fly
The first segment of the documentary is dedicated to the flesh-footed shearwater, a bird that raises its young on islands in the South Pacific.

The documentary finds young shearwaters with as many as 20 pieces of plastic in their stomach. The only way researchers can rid them of this dangerous rubbish is by forcing the baby birds to be sick.

Worse still, 20 is described as a low amount. According to the heroes helping empty the young shearwaters’ stomachs of plastic every year, the average amount found has risen from 5-10 pieces to 30-40 in the past 12 years. The record number of piece found is 260.

The problem is so bad that the young shearwaters are too weighed down to fly, and are left behind on the beach as the rest of the flock leave.

BBC Birds that can't take off because they're weighed down by plastic

3. We’re only just waking up to the scale of the problem

The documentary wants us to know... well, just how little we know. The impact of climate change on our oceans has been well documented but the issue of ‘microplastics’ is only now beginning to be understood, and has potentially huge consequences.

The researchers we’re watching discover microplastics have made it into the diet of walrus who live in the North Pole – by inspecting their poo.

Microplastics aren’t just plastic items that have been broken into tiny pieces; they could be micro-fibres from clothing that get pulled out in the wash, or tiny specks of a car-tyre thrown off on when going down a bumpy road. In fact, they are so prevalent in the food chain, microplastics are being found in humans, too.

However, of all the recent discoveries explored in the documentary, the most worrying is the potential for plastic to carry “pathogens” that are lethal to ocean life. The problem is especially bad when these plastics come into contact with coral reefs, already under severe threat from warming oceans.

Research explored in the film shows how the presence of plastic increases the amount of certain kinds of lethal bacteria from normal levels of 4 per cent to 89 per cent.

4. The stats are terrifying

Every minute around the globe, we buy a million plastic bottles, a million disposable cups and two million plastic bags, while every minute we dump a rubbish lorry’s worth of plastic into the ocean. This means every year 300,000 marine mammals and 400,000 seabirds are being killed by plastic pollution.

If nothing changes, by 2050 there will 500 times the amount of plastic in our ocean than there is now. In other words, there will be more plastic down there than fish.

5. But there is a fight back

Currently just 11 per cent of plastic globally is recycled, but as the world wakes up to the crisis, various inventors are coming up with unique ideas to tackle it.

The ‘Ocean’s Cleanup System 01’ – a giant barrier designed to collect plastic waste in our seas – made headlines earlier this year and Bonnin has the chance to interview its brainchild, 23-year-old Dutch inventor, Boyan Slat, in the film.

She also meets engineers working with American lobster fishermen to create plastic free lobster pots that don’t entangle whales. And on the opposite side of the world, in Indonesia, she talks to people making biodegradable – and edible – alternatives to plastic wrapping out of seaweed.

With a third of all plastic used for food packaging, imagine what we could achieve if we explored these alternatives? Every single animal that relies on the ocean to survive, from tiny fish on coral reefs to birds that migrate across entire oceans, are not just under threat from plastic, they’re suffering right now. Much of the damage is already irreversible. It’s up to us to make sure some isn’t.

‘Drowning In Plastic’ airs at 8.30pm Monday October 1 on BBC1 and is viewable on iPlayer here.

'Drowning In Plastic': Five Things We Learned From The BBC's Shocking Documentary
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Monday, 1 October 2018

Sidmouth Science Festival >>> Sid Valley Bat Research Project >>> Saturdays 6th and 13th October

There will be bats at the Science Festival this coming weekend, as this message from the Sid Valley Bat Research Project reminds us:

Its Science Festival time of year again this time running from this weekend through to Oct 14th. If you haven't seen all the amazing events, mostly free please take a look at the website. This is great for kids over the 13th/14th Oct weekend too.

There will be bat trapping on Saturdays 6th and 13th of October, in the Byes, Sidmouth. It was oversubscribed by over twice as many people from the festival last year so please let me know if you would like to come so that I can put you on the list. Those people who are skilled at putting up nets or are handling bats it would be especially great to have your support.

We will meet at 5:30 at the Toll House at the entrance to the Byes. The link to both are here...…….

https://goo.gl/maps/eXEAuRVF6QJ2

Byes Toll House & Gate

Sidmouth Science Festival: Thursday 27 September to Sunday ...

www.sidmouthsciencefestival.org

Visit Sidmouth Science Festival for hours of entertaining and thought-provoking events including talks and workshops. Learn about fossils, dinosaurs, stars, energy, light, weather, brains, rockets and much more.

Louise Woolley BSc (Hons) MCIEEM

louise@devonecologyandwildlife.co.uk

www.devonecologyandwildlife.co.uk

22 Arcot Park, Sidmouth, Devon, EX10 9HP

07905 418460

Home - Sid Valley Bat Research Project

And more info on the events here:
Futures Forum: Sid Valley Bat Research Project > events for September
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Drowning in Plastic @ BBC One > "Single-use plastics should be banned immediately in Britain."

We are drowning in plastic:
Drowning in plastic? - BBC News
BBC - Plastics Watch - Plastics Action

Drowning in Plastic: Trailer - BBC - YouTube

With the full programme here:
BBC One - Drowning in Plastic

And a review from the Telegraph:

Single-use plastics should be banned immediately in Britain says BBC presenter Liz Bonnin

Sarah Knapton, science editor

1 OCTOBER 2018

Liz Bonnin, the BBC television presenter, has called for an immediate ban of single-use plastics in Britain and accused industries and politicians of not doing enough to tackle pollution.

Ahead of a new documentary Drowning in Plastic, Bonnin said that the problem of plastic in the world's oceans would not be fixed by consumers simply saying no to straws.

Drowning In Plastic comes a year after Sir David Attenborough's Blue Planet II, and investigates the effect plastic material is having on marine animals.

"When it comes to all single-use products, I just think if we can live without them, we should live without them," said Bonnin in an interview with the Radio Times. "There is no kind of middle ground any more. So can we live without plastic bottles? Yes, we can."

The documentary will look at the dangers and struggles of wildlife in the ocean and the extent of the problem of our polluted seas.

Citing Costa Rica's ban on all single-use plastic by 2021, wildlife biologist Bonnin said the UK's slower action on plastic pollution was not good enough.

"I have to ask, why isn't the UK doing that?" she said. "Some of our plastic is absolutely a valuable part of our society. The question there is, do we make up that plastic with less toxic chemicals? Also, can we make that plastic realistically recyclable?

"Forty percent of the plastic that's prevalent in our society is single-use stuff that we can absolutely live without. If Costa Rica can do it, why can't we do it immediately? This phasing-out conversation makes me angry after everything I've seen. There is no more time to phase anything out."

Blue Planet II highlighted the problem of plastic in the ocean CREDIT: BBC

The presenter said attempts by the general public to limit their use of single-use plastics such as straws and coffee cups "hugely laudable", but the impetus for change needs to be on governments.

"I do feel that the onus has been placed a lot on the consumer and that's only part of the problem," she said. "So, for example, if you're going to increase the plastic bag charge to 10p from 5p, again, the onus is on the consumer. Why is the industry still making plastic bags? Why is America investing 180 billion dollars in new plastic factories?

"I don't think it's going to be fixed just from consumers saying no to straws."

Figures released in July revealed that plastic bag sales have fallen by 86% since the introduction of the 5p levy in 2015.

Drowning In Plastic will air on BBC One on October 1.

Single-use plastics should be banned immediately in Britain says BBC presenter Liz Bonnin
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What will it take to remake Facebook and Twitter in the public’s interest?

The John Lewis model is under serious strain - whilst the Silicon Valley behemoths are doing rather nicely:
“Business rates: one John Lewis store will pay four times the tax of Amazon” | East Devon Watch

This innovative model of organisation, finance and ownership is being unduly undermined:
The John Lewis model and what others could learn from it | Business | The Guardian
Employee share ownership: John Lewis Partnership "not what it purports to be"

And there needs to be serious consideration of how businesses are organised, financed and indeed owned - with some very good alternatives out there:
Futures Forum: Inclusive Ownership Funds > from the New Economics Foundation
Futures Forum: "The grand promise of a share-owning democracy power has crumbled." >>> The growth of cooperatives as "a vector for democratic change in the economy."
Futures Forum: Rojava: an experiment in democracy - in Syria
Futures Forum: Transitioning to a new economy
Futures Forum: Transition to the knowledge commons
Futures Forum: Community energy cooperatives: "bootstrapping the alternative economy"
Futures Forum: Small-scale, locally-controlled power generation

Meanwhile, there are some business models out there parading as something they are not:
Futures Forum: The sharing economy: Uber, hubris and getting too big
Futures Forum: Is Uber really part of the 'sharing economy'? >>> "The whole point of a genuine p2p and sharing economy is empowerment for those directly participating in it."
Futures Forum: The 'sharing economy', 'resilience' and 'nudging'...

What about some alternative models to that ultimate money-making machine, Facebook?
Futures Forum: The village social app as an alternative model >>> "Facebook is designed for advertisers, not communities."

Because the Silicon Valley behemoths are not really interested in anything else:
Futures Forum: Silicon Valley Values @ Radio 4's Analysis
Futures Forum: The promises of information technology >>> or, spinning fables of info-liberation
Futures Forum: The promises of technological innovation >>> "The rise of the techno-libertarians: the five most socially-destructive aspects of Silicon Valley"

Futures Forum: The promises of technological innovation >>> "So, if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take?"

And unbridled, unaccountable use of power is something they are clearly interested in:

Futures Forum: Algorithms and Big Brother
Futures Forum: Reforming the data economy
Futures Forum: Brexit: and Exeter's MP once 'regarded as a crank' >>> but now questions are multiplying over the roles of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories
Futures Forum: Brexit: and botsFutures Forum: A simple guide to algorithms

The question, though, is what to do about this concentration of power and lack of accountability: some would say that all natural monopolies should be nationalized:
Why not nationalize Facebook? - The Conversation
Facebook and Google Could Be Nationalized in 5-10 Years | Tech Buzz | TechNewsWorld
Steve Bannon Wants to Nationalize Facebook and Google’s Data | Vanity Fair
Should We Nationalize Facebook? - INFOWAR

And others think it a rather bad idea:
10 Reasons Why Nationalizing Facebook Would Be Ridiculous - Forbes
So You Want to Nationalize Facebook? - Foundation for Economic Education

Although wider ownership does not have to be state ownership...
5 reasons why Facebook should be in (global, cooperative) public ownership | We Own It
Twitter shareholders voice benefits of a co-operative | Financial Times
Twitter shareholders to vote on plan to turn social network into user-owned cooperative - Business Insider Deutschland

Here is the latest from the Baffler magazine:

Socialized Media

What will it take to remake Facebook and Twitter in the public’s interest?

Evan Malmgren, September 19

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg testifies before Congress. | PBS NewsHour

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and an absent Google representative found themselves before the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), where they endured an uncomfortable grilling on topics ranging from the manipulation and value of user data to how one might police the “truth.” These lines of questioning inevitably generated vague speculation about regulation, though it’s difficult to imagine the scope of federal action that would be required in a serious effort to confront the crisis unfolding on the backs of privatized platforms.

It’s popular to refer to digital platforms as town squares, but the shopping mall is a more apt metaphor: they are built to approximate the participatory feel of an open market, while their corridors are ruthlessly designed for the purposes of encouraging consumption and maximizing profit. Depression, anxiety, hate-mongering, fear, and conspiratorial untruths are all acceptable outcomes so long as they are expressed, consciously or otherwise, in the service of growth.

These platform structures are, more and more, the dominant modes of abstract social organization: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have a combined market capitalization larger than the French GDP, and in an earlier hearing, Mark Zuckerberg struggled to name a single serious competitor when pressed on his company’s monopoly status. It’s clear that platform capitalism thrives at the expense of public discourse, and that its monarchs are more entrenched than ever. Still, its horizons remain murky.

The loudest, most frequent response to the crisis of platform consolidation has arguably been an appeal to better markets, such as the progressive coalition Freedom from Facebook’s effort to push the Federal Trade Commission to spin Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger into competing services. Law professor and New York Times contributor Tim Wu has similarly advanced this line, advocating for an aggressive antitrust campaign against the likes of Google and Amazon—including in his forthcoming book, The Curse of Bigness. If we break up the giants, the thinking goes, their progeny will improve each other in a rush to pan for attention. “We live in America,” he recently told The Vergecast, “which has a strong and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big for inefficient reasons.”

It’s hard to justify Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as anything short of stabs at monopoly, but there are hard limits to antitrust—namely, that large platforms appeal to users precisely because of the network effects of intense consolidation. Smaller services routinely compete for attention-time, but typically do so by differentiating themselves and courting niche audiences rather than taking the behemoths head-on. Nobody thinks of Etsy as a replacement for Amazon, and not even Google+ could effectively compete as a direct replacement for Facebook. Unless it’s billed a subcultural phenomenon, people don’t see the point in adapting to a new platform until it reaches a critical mass—even though they’re the exact people it would need to get there.

Mastodon is a perfect example of the limits of platform competition. Optimistically billed as a community-focused Twitter-killer, the fledgling social network rode last month’s controversies into a gauntlet of fawning coverage that dared users to climb out of the Nazi-infested swamp. Mastodon is relatively free of hate speech and malicious bots, but few people made the leap: an unofficial bot currently reports around 230,000 users. This is partially due to individual preference for the familiar, but structural inertia presents a much stronger obstacle. Like any newcomer, Mastodon necessarily lacks the abundance of celebrities, journalists, and unhinged presidential proclamations that give Twitter the feel of a micro-celebritized commons. In a piece hailing the platform’s design strength, Wired editor Brendan Nystedt acknowledged its central deficiency in a bold understatement: “The only thing I truly miss from the old birdsite? My friends!” This isn’t a bug; it’s the exact reason we can’t look to a Mastodon, or an Ello, or a Gab for salvation—any more than libertarian seasteads can expect to cure traffic or gentrification. We need to make our platforms better, not wait for better platforms.

Given that these services often take the form of natural monopolies, others have suggested that, rather than break up the big platforms, we should subject them to stringent federal regulation as public utilities—or, as Platform Capitalism author Nick Srnicek has suggested, outright nationalization. But most digital platforms are transnational entities, meaning that regulatory efforts are narrowly limited to individual protections on the basis of citizenship (as we have seen with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation). Otherwise, there are devastating implications for nationalization beyond our borders. Would a situation where the United States unilaterally dictates the policies of a platform shaping Paraguayan political discourse be any better than one in which Russian oligarchs are free to transmute capital into American speech?

If we’re to imagine a meaningful path for Congress to take, it’s worth considering the context of the recent SIC hearing. The previous month, conspiracy news site Infowars was systematically cut from Apple, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other platforms (Twitter followed suit after Alex Jones went on a Periscope rampage and berated its CEO at the hearing itself). The ensuing conversation was predictably frustrating, but enlightening insofar as it revealed how people conceptualize digital platforms. Ostensibly right-wing Infowars journalist Millie Weaver, for example, argued that Facebook has no right to ban private individuals, on the grounds that it is “public” rather than “privately owned.”

She was roundly mocked for appearing not to realize that shareholders privately own publicly traded companies, but her ignorance betrayed a disconnect between this reality and a popular—if subconscious—understanding of digital platforms as public commons for speech and association.

One solution that would align with this idea of social media as a public commons: handing collective power over digital platforms to the people they connect. We usually associate cooperative models with local, small-scale apps for “gig” economy laborers that more closely resemble traditional workers, but the idea of converting mass platforms into user cooperatives has been floated before— including at last year’s Twitter shareholder meeting. Calling for a report on the feasibility of selling Twitter to its users and speculating that such a governance structure could “set more transparent accountable rules for handling abuse” and “re-open the platform’s data to spur innovation,” it’s no surprise the proposal only received 5 percent of the shareholder vote. But what if financial interests weren’t given a choice?

Those who advocate for cooperativizing platforms on the scale of Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon often gesture toward the success of consumer coops like Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), a retailer of outdoor equipment and the nation’s largest such coop. But the strongest foundation of the cooperativized platform would be a recognition that voluntary human participation—rather than capital, design, or code—is the source of all value generated within their architecture, meaning their structures would more closely resemble worker coops than boutique grocers. We are drawn to platforms because of the qualitative forms that mutual participation takes—memes, news, opportunities for intellectual community and even material benefit—but they are designed with an extractive focus on data, the quantitative exchange-value produced through collectively disavowed digital labor—or playbor (play/labor), to borrow a phrase from New School professor Trebor Scholz.

The fact that generative speech organizes around the drive for accumulation underlies many of the ways mass platforms continue to undermine democratic participation and empathetic connection. Some have theorized a demand for remuneration for the production of valuable data—Laurel Ptak’s Wages For Facebook project famously opened with the lines: “THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK.”—but a reconceived notion of ownership provides a more meaningful avenue for unmooring social structures from the profit motive. It’s one thing to demand a $15 shitpost stipend, but what if we elected Facebook’s board of directors?

Earlier this year, Logic magazine editor Ben Tarnoff suggested nationalizing collective data reserves, contracting private companies to refine them into profitable forms (presumably the same platforms that do this today) through production sharing agreements, and depositing revenue into a sovereign wealth fund—similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund—which would pay annual dividends on the basis of citizenship. While I agree that the private capture of user data represents an enclosure of the commons and that a reconfiguration of ownership should underlie any effort to make platforms more democratic, I would argue that the state’s role in this transition should be as an intermediary and not a final custodian.

Instead, consider a structure in which—once a digital platform is determined to possess monopolistic characteristics and to play a sufficiently fundamental role in public discourse and free association—the state delegates eminent domain to a newly established independent trust that seizes control of all data generated by its users. The government could also initiate a forced buyout and transfer a portion of voting shares into the trust, funding the acquisition by taxing tech companies for indirect subsidies through something like the Stop-ZUCK Act.

In turn, the trust would initiate a voluntary process to issue voting shares to every verifiable individual who generates value on the platform within a given period. These shares couldn’t be resold and would not appreciate in value; instead they would represent ownership in the trust and could be used to elect leadership and vote on substantive issues. The elected leadership could enter into negotiations over data use with the company managing the platform, as well as vote as shareholder proxies on behalf of the trust, all the while advocating on behalf of users. They could enter into a profit sharing agreement with regard to the use of personal data, as Tarnoff had suggested, but such an approach would also invite a broad host of other possibilities. Users could demand forms of algorithmic transparency, for example, or play an active hand in the regulation of speech. Rather than monetary compensation, they could require the company to pay out in the form of a stock ownership plan, gradually transferring voting shares to an entity under their collective control. Basically, it would give platform users—the international population whose attention generates all value associated with the digital commons—a seat at the table and a powerful bargaining chip.

This is just one possible route for establishing democratic control over mass platforms, but the fact remains that unbridled platform capitalism is eroding our freedoms of speech and association. Under these conditions, it should be acknowledged that platform users themselves represent the ideal polity for a democratic model of governance; the legitimation of digital labor presents a strong foundation for establishing collective control over digital platforms and the data that fuels them; and the U.S. government is arguably the only institution with the power and jurisdiction to peacefully force a platform on the scale of Facebook to restructure its ownership model.

It might seem unlikely that the government would intervene in platform ownership structures without claiming a stake of its own, but cities like Cleveland and New York have already found success with experimental programs to provide public resources and funding for independent worker coops. Noting that worker-owned companies help ensure the economic viability of local communities and outperform competitors in economic downturns, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review also promoted worker buyouts and argued for hybrid ownership models, “especially those that build more-democratic forms of ownership from the ground up.”

To transform a mass digital platform into a worker coop hybrid through a recognition of digital labor would require vast political will—certainly more than appears to exist at present—but it’s not unthinkable that populists on both sides of the aisle could find common ground on the issue. After all, Republicans have voiced even more concern about Facebook’s power than Democrats, and it was Ronald Reagan who once mused, during a 1987 speech, “that in the future we will see in the United States, and throughout the western world, an increasing trend toward the next logical step: employee ownership.” If Congress is serious about confronting the platform monopolists, the idea of contorting their services into worker cooperatives should become a serious part of the conversation.

Socialized Media | Evan Malmgren
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