EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE

Co-ops are helping us rediscover our capacity for creative, powerful, and fair democracy. From taxi cooperatives keeping Uber at bay to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin.

While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative is hiding in plain sight: Cooperatives, jointly owned, democratically controlled, advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, healthcare, and utilities they depend on.

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has written for publications including Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, the New York Times, and The Catholic Worker.