In 2014, a year before Ethereum launched, Trebor Scholz, a scholar-activist and professor at the New School in New York, coined a new term: “platform cooperativism.” In a blog post, Scholz outlined a bold alternative to the extractive Web 2.0 sharing economy: platforms that operated as cooperatives, collectively owned and controlled by their workers and users. The goal was to find ways to usher in a future where ride-sharing apps would be owned by drivers, grocery delivery platforms would be owned by personal shoppers, and sites like Patreon would be owned by creators.
