Tag: shareable

A few months ago, I reconnected with a friend who I had worked with in initiative on ‘the sharing economy’. At the time, we were both ‘Young Global Leaders’ (YGLs) with the World Economic Forum. It was 2013, and we had volunteered our time to bring attention to how new technologies could be used to help everyone have a good life with less ecological impact. Personally, we were imagining a future of peer-to-peer resource sharing, community-based production, and cooperative ownership. Meeting up after years, we laughed that our work had oddly contributed to the World Economic Forum publishing the line that became infamous as a globalist’s dystopian injunction: “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Although we laughed, it was with a sense of ‘doomer humour’. My friend’s tone had shifted from a decade ago. She felt disappointment and defeat. “All we did,” she told me, “was write a love letter to the next wave of monopolists.” Her disillusionment was not unique. Many working in alternative economics—whether cooperatives, commons networks, or solidarity enterprises—feel similarly deflated. Despite huge efforts to get governments around the world to adopt policies to promote the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy’, the tide has been in the opposite direction. Monopoly capitalism has grown stronger, tightening its grip through unrestrained mergers and acquisitions, extractive digital platforms, and ‘techbro’ political interference. Now the big tech companies don’t compete in a free market, as they own the markets and can operate similarly to feudal lords. It’s why the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis labels this era ‘technofeudalism’.

It’s easy to feel like we failed. But that pain—of giving so much for so little change—is not a reflection of personal failure. It’s a sign of deeper structural shifts….

You can read more of this article that I wrote for Shareable, on the new, yet old, agenda for the Social and Solidarity Economy, or join myself and like minds discussing this during a ‘metacrisis meeting.‘