6 ms·

What is a Demand Coop

94 points by DeonRob 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
bonsai_spool 5mo ago
Essentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.
- SilverElfin 5mo ago
  I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    The cool thing about a union is that you actually can have a say in what political battles they fight You just can't do that if you only want to be a passive member
    - SilverElfin 5mo ago
      I don’t want to waste time to fight battles within the union. This is exactly what I’m talking about. If it’s just a political nonprofit with forced donations, I’d rather see them banned than join one.
      - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        > I’d rather see them banned than join one. The only group that will benefit from this position is that of the owners.
        TimorousBestie 5mo ago
        GP must be one of those temporarily not-owning owners.
    - modo_mario 5mo ago
      Not really my thing here since i'm belgian and we have multiple cross industry unions competeting. However from what i hear about american unions it starts to sounds like an argument for acting and arguing against a union if it leans against your politics and you don't have enough influence whilst also not doing enough towards your wage/work conditions.
  - nick__m 5mo ago
    It really depends on the union, mine concentrate on less hours for a salary that follow inflation, parental leaves and a gold plated drug insurance. I work 32.5 hours per week in the summer, have 24 days off, 2 personal days and 12 statutory holidays; that's 36 paid days off !
    - wyager 5mo ago
      Every time I've ever seen a tech worker's union, it's always some sort of political experiment rather than legitimately advocating for the interests of the workers it nominally aims to represent. E.g. the Google AWU-CWA union just did a bunch of political stunt stuff, no salary negotiation or anything useful to the modal Google worker.
      - fragmede 5mo ago
        Less open office and more conference rooms.
      - shagie 5mo ago
        Partly because they couldn't because they didn't organize in a way that let them because... well... one could speculate. > Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is an American trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, contractors, and vendors in the United States. It was announced on January 4, 2021, with an initial membership of over 400, after over a year of secret organizing, and the union includes all types of workers at Alphabet, including full-time, temporary, vendors and contractors of all job types. It's trying to cover too many different groups with competing interests (FTE, temp, vendor, and contractor). Hypothetical negotiations that would favor FTEs may disfavor vendor or contractor contracts. That inherent conflict of interest in the negotiations would mean they can't negotiate for any of them on those matters. Also, the less than 1% of the people belonging to the union would mean the union can't represent them in collective salary negotiations either. Of the represented group (say if they only organized for FTE tech workers), they would then have needed 50% + 1 of the employees in that classification to vote to have a union. It is possible - https://kickstarterunited.org https://kickstarterunited.org for example (and yes, they are having trouble - but they are negotiating on working conditions and pay). --- Various "we should have a union" strings typically have been people wishing for one that is cross industry that they don't have to do anything. While industry wide union organization can exist (Kickstarter United is OPEIU - https://www.opeiu.org https://www.opeiu.org ) it is the local part that people forget... Kickstarter United is OPEIU local 153. If people want a union, they need to organize at their company and get that 50% + 1 vote there. When it is easier to switch jobs than it is to spend the several years to organize and negotiate a contract, the power of a union is diminished.
  - vineyardmike 5mo ago
    Everything is political. Politics have been heavily intertwined with work forever. The history of unions is intertwined with literal government violence. Negotiations for compensation is like the least life-impacting thing a union can do. Tech workers are well paid and capable of negotiating. Things like work hours, quality of life, paid leaves, etc are important and can’t really be negotiated by the individual. Every labor victory from yesterday is the status quo but every future one is politics.
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      OK, but that doesn't answer the concern of the person you're responding to. They're just not going to join. It's a common objection!
      - vineyardmike 5mo ago
        Yes I suppose it doesn’t address the concern directly, and yes it’s common. I guess my point is that avoiding “politics” is a bad concern. Why is compensation not included in “politics” when it’s very clearly a political topic? Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”. Unions don’t work unless they get enough members, and getting enough support sometimes means supporting the “political issues” of other members. It’s a team, and everyone has to contribute… but of course everyone will be better off in the long run
        tptacek 5mo ago
        I understand what you're saying and where you're coming from, but you can't persuasively respond to an objection by saying the person is wrong to have the objection. This is a real problem in modern tech organizing: you don't all share the same politics. People are just going to not sign up. It's very much like the problem product marketers have when they come up with a grand vision for how their product is supposed to work and then assume customers are going to be super into it. They are not! They just want a thing that solves their problems! They don't want or need to help you achieve your vision. You have to make your vision work for them, persuasively. I'm not saying the (broad) project is doomed --- though I think you have an uphill climb in this market --- but I do think you're going to have to address this problem to achieve critical mass.
  - well_ackshually 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- hackthemack 5mo ago
  Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Call it an association or guild or something other than a union. Lawyers and doctor have unions but they don't call it that.
    - shagie 5mo ago
      Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession... but not the pay or working conditions for those professionals.
      - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        > Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession... They're not even doing that! In the US, these qualifications are matters of state law.
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      > Lawyers and doctor Doctors definitely have unions! You're thinking of the AMA which is a lobbying organization, totally different thing.
- Hupriene 5mo ago
  My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time. These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
  - esikich 5mo ago
    So, the company was in trouble and the adults understood that. They probably wanted to fight to make sure they didn't lose their 401ks or pension, or be able to hold onto some insurance so the c suite didn't gut the company and leave everyone high and dry. Sounds like you just generally didn't understand the situation, being a kid.
    - Hupriene 5mo ago
      To be clear, those threats of violence were against me and my co-workers if we didn't vote to unionize.
      - esikich 5mo ago
        Ok, well that is different.
  - saghm 5mo ago
    > These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job. What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and actors close to the top (if not literally the first two), both of which famously have powerful unions. The highest paid MLB player in the last year before the union in 1965 was $105,000, which after inflation maps to around $1,110,066.67 in 2026 USD, but the minimum salary for MLB players for the 2026 season is $780,000, and the highest individual salary is $61,875,000. If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union. At absolute best, I feel like you could argue that unions are a mixed bag and some of them do more harm than good, but it's not clear why that wouldn't be an equally compelling argument against pretty much every other type of organization in our economy. There are plenty of corporations that have inflicted absolutely massive amounts of harm to society (many at levels I'd argue no union has ever come anywhere close to), but I've yet to meet anyone who's expressed skepticism at the concept of unions to have similar opinions about the concept of corporations. It's hard not to feel like people just give disproportionate weight to anecdotes about unions than they do for other economic entities because of how effectively they've been painted as the boogeyman by anti-labor propaganda.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo ago
  > the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    > There is no such thing. There really is! I've been in three unions, every place I worked. The first and third one existed beforehand, while I helped start the second. A union is a group of people—and like any group, your influence is what you make it to be.
    - kortilla 5mo ago
      You were in charge of all of the union decisions in all 3? That’s good for you but not representative nor possible for everyone joining a union.
      - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        Not in charge, I didn’t say that. But I voted in all, while I did have a bigger role in the second one
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo ago
        Did the union do exactly what you wished it to do in all cases? I.e. your perspective carried every single vote? That is the claim I was disputing. For the vast majority of union workers, this will not be the case. Even if it was true for you, it's not true for most.
        bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        Well the things I voted for passed because we did a lot of community-building before votes. The better question is whether, when management does something, is that thing always in my interest. Obviously that is not the case. The union helps when management's actions are counter to that of the majority of workers.
- Jensson 5mo ago
  > the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want? The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    > ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do" What? Unless you are Congress, you can't create ICE at your workplace. You can, however, create a union.
    - lstodd 5mo ago
      If stuff you want aligns with what ICE already does, then it does exactly what you wish it to do, no? What is a union? It is another social structure, exactly same as corps are.
      - 7jjjjjjj 5mo ago
        A kingdom and a republic are also both structures, but I think there are some salient differences.
- saghm 5mo ago
  I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades. (I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)
  - zdragnar 5mo ago
    You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts. Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      > Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not? Yes, it is a surprise! Because we're talking about very educated technical workers. It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners.
      - saghm 5mo ago
        > It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners. To me, the question is whether that will continue to remain the case in the absence of unions. It doesn't seem at all implausible to me that 50 years from now, tech programming might much more closely resemble factory work if there's no mechanism for pushing back against it.
- swaits 5mo ago
  That’s not what this is. Nor do we need more of them.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    Arguably, we do - at least the 8k people being fired at Meta and the 7k being told to drop everything and work on AI likely did need one.
- 9rx 5mo ago
  We need to invent new names for these things to disconnect them from the boogeymans. For example, when we change "union" to "party" (as in political party) even those who claim to hate unions latch onto it as if it was the greatest thing ever conceived, despite being the exact same thing. Marketing matters.
- duped 5mo ago
  > the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV Around me the union boogeymen are the police and teachers unions. Ultimately the issue is a professional political class decoupled from reality that extort local government. However there are also the unions for artists (think actors, television writers, theater, etc) which do a very good job stabilizing pay and standards for safety without interfering with the flexibility of businesses to hire who they want or labor to work where they want to. Within reason.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned. Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated. This thin proposal would be more interesting if it could give any discussion about the difficult points and how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. To say I’m skeptical of an organization that wants to choose how to spend my money for me is an understatement.
- vlovich123 5mo ago
  > how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.
  - thrownthatway 5mo ago
    Agreed. The most valuable resource is trust. Follow closely by the trust-structures to deal with the ramifications of the primary trust-relationship being broken. That is to say, the most fundamental rule is contract law.
    - vlovich123 5mo ago
      I think you missed when I said that contract law is for when things have gone completely off the rails or for very expensive decisions. Most day to day operations are managed through societal norms and pressures. Contract law would be a poor fit. And by the way, honoring and enforcing contract law between third parties to yourself itself is a societal norm.
      - 5mo ago
ajb 5mo ago
Interesting, but - it says it's a co-op, but this is a word with a legal definition. Every co-op I know publishes what it's legal entity is, how voting is done, etc. This just has "click to join". If your pitch is that you have more integrity than typical companies then you have to, you know, "walk the walk". Also in some jurisdictions, calling yourself a co-op without actually being one will get you into legal difficulties. Companies that don't quite fulfil all the requirements are careful not to call themselves once. Igalia, for example, are very serious about being worker owned and run, but they made the choice to have a slightly different structure so they don't call themselves a co-op.
aiisahik 5mo ago
Dumbest idea i've ever seen. Complete misunderstanding of how the tech world works. The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending. So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission. Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.
- kaashif 5mo ago
  Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.
  - ceheaaf 5mo ago
    the part of the long run before you starve to death in an empty room with a large number on your bank account
- creamyhorror 5mo ago
  I'm not sure it's so black and white. Directing capital is powerful, and directing spending is powerful (but probably harder; this is marketing or government). I think it's more that directing spending requires influencing a lot more people than directing capital.
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  The idea is that one can drive the other. Because if you direct that capital without consumption the investment is worthless. You can do both. You can direct the consumption in exchange for part of that consumption you get equity in a wealth fund that funds product the coop will gain equity in if they use. I think one the obvious ones would be a replacement for github. We build a replacement for github, the most you personally drive demand to the git replacement and for that demand you gain equity. And for that equity you get a larger say on how the fund is used and increased access to privileges
arjie 5mo ago
There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?
- defrost 5mo ago
  Plus or minus tiny details, the description from the article: A demand co-op is a cooperative that pools and directs the spending power of its members. Demand determines what gets built, who survives, and where wealth flows. Most communities already have enormous spending power, but because that demand is unorganized, the value created from it is captured by outside businesses and investors. A demand co-op coordinates that spending so economic activity can build communal businesses, assets, and long-term ownership instead of constant leakage. covers a multitude. Eg: CBH from the 1930s onwards has pooled the spending power of grain farmers into building out farmer owned transportation networks (rail, ports, shipping, large scale silo storage) as communal assets and source of jobs for relatives and communities. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group
  - arjie 5mo ago
    Thank you for sharing. I'm also familiar with Mondragon in Spain as a cooperative - similarly an agricultural one primarily. When I said "here" in the sentences "...there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here..." I was referring to the US.
    - defrost 5mo ago
      Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia. There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture.
      - arjie 5mo ago
        > Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia. That's true. "Here" doesn't mean anything on its own. I gathered as much from your response. I was clarifying what I was curious about because clearly I'd attached my "in the US" in my original comment to the wrong phrase. > There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture. Right, and this is why I was curious. It seemed to me that while there is nothing preventing this from happening, and while there are many commenters here who are expressing that they'd like one, I haven't really heard of one. In the US, of course.
paultopia 5mo ago
There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family. Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom. [1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  yes exactly this is the exact problem I want to see solved. I think high trust demand co-ops like JCCU(https://jccu.coop/ https://jccu.coop/) have solve this issue. I will definitely read your article.
OutOfHere 5mo ago
This is just asking for the job to be hurriedly outsourced to where this is not a thing, if not eliminated altogether. It makes sense only for jobs that are tightly geographically constrained and are not subject to work visa imports.
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  Thats going to happen anyway but whats keep everyone from building replacement companies that arent just gonna optimize on price then buying from those vendors?
deleted 5mo ago
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ro_bit 5mo ago
What’s the difference between a demand coop and a consumer coop, like REI? (Or are they the same?)
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  Mostly its what you get equity from. A consumer coop you may pay a one time fee for voting rights. A demand coop gives you equity everytime you shop or buy from a coop business that you coop either owns or gets benefits from. In this case your demand coop might buy REI using the funds your contribute to its wealth fund, while REI you might only just be able to get items for cheap from being a member and the ability to vote on new products.
deleted 5mo ago
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notarobot123 5mo ago
You used to get a dividend from the profits based on your share of purchases from "the Store" back in the day where I'm from. That was a consumer coop driven by the demand of its members. This sounds like a re-branding of a cryptocurrency/DAO scheme. It's too abstract for conventional consumers to understand and too game-able for serious participants to not be wary of. Who is this for?
abujazar 5mo ago
The post is written like as if consumer coops is a radically new idea (spoiler: they're everywhere in Europe). Unfortunately they have long since succumbed to the same mechanisms as their competitors and have a tremendous power concentration in top leadership, with directors making ridiculous salaries. On paper though, e.g. Coop with a 25 % market share in Norway is owned and controlled by about 1 million of its customers.
- lstodd 5mo ago
  Hah, so this. USSR had it formalized in form of PotrebCoop, literally consumer cooperative in 1921.
  - rainingmonkey 5mo ago
    Consumer cooperatives go back to at least 1844 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_Pioneers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_...
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  This idea is model after those consumer coops from JCCU to mondragoon to some other smaller american consumer coops. Our proposition is that the openly displayed set of the CO-OPs goals along side AI moderation may help with alleviating these issues
alecco 5mo ago
I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies. This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit. I hope some day someone figures a better way.
- thatcat 5mo ago
  do you think neutral ai moderation and time limits on discussion would have the desired effect?
  - DeonRob 5mo ago
    I believe this is the right solution and the one cahootz is proposing. The Coop AI moderator can be fed goals in the json and a unstructured charter that anyone in or out of the coop can see. Then before decision are made you would be required submit a proposal. This would allow the most and least significant member access to the funds on a more equal basis.
  - alecco 5mo ago
    The drama would move to how to make the prompts "fair". Spoiler: "fair" is code word for we are all the same.
- yourapostasy 5mo ago
  > They never address the long-tail nature of productivity... Mondragon tries to address this through accepting bounded inequality. 9:1 pay ratio from highest-paid to lowest-paid is allowed (still far below US median corporation 192:1 ratio). They decouple democratic ownership from operational management. They funnel profits into individual internal capital accounts in proportion to the worker's pay, payable upon retirement or dissociation from the cooperative. They heavily subsidize continuing education to lift the long tail baseline skillsets. However, I suspect none of the above is effective without the right cultural context. The Basque region where Mondragon's cultural center of gravity still heavily draws upon and resides within, laid the fertile cultural cues the cooperative leverages. High competence individuals are rewarded within this Basque-centric cultural context with high social status, reasonable job security, and the psychological reward of building up their own community. If that supposition is true, then the uncomfortable reality is the dominant, hyper-individualistic American cultural context will always be a poor fit to co-ops. That might be made irrelevant through demographic replacement: everywhere the hyper-individualistic culture dominates, it is currently eliminating families with no demographic end in sight. We shall see.
tantalor 5mo ago
Fix the title: coop -> co-op The abbreviation for "cooperative" is always spelled with a hyphen.
- CarVac 5mo ago
  Or coöp if you want to be fancy.
  - phillc73 5mo ago
    It's generally inconsistent. The first sentence is written, "A co-op is an economic system built on the simple idea that coordinating the economic activity..." Co-op is correct here, but not in the title (Coop). Probably personal taste, but I'd also like to see hyphentation for "co-ordinating", "co-operate" and "co-ordinator" as well. Then I noticed the em-dashes, so perhaps I'm reading the machine's work anyway.
- 9rx 5mo ago
  "co-op" may be more common, but we can easily find many examples of "coop" use out in the wild. The title is fine. The surrounding context makes it clear what "coop" is intended to mean.
dzink 5mo ago
You’ve described a corporation. Think of YC companies - equity owned by early employees. Controlled by “someone senior”. And if things are going good more friends are invited to join in, multiple companies start owning equity within each other and you back new incomers by directing demand towards their products. The difference between that and a coop is that in a corporation there is some legal standing to enforce the rules and control abuse. In eastern europe where coops had more of a presence the people in power would just abuse the coops - theft, misdirection of resources towards “friends”, pyramid schemes benefiting “older members”… but you couldn’t go and sue as a shareholder because via political connections the entrenched leader and his buddies could use their power to pay off someone and hurt you. The real prof in concepts like this are enforceable contracts.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Eh, I think this is where it's important to distinguish between different types of corporation. The very point of going through YC is to trade ownership and control for external capital: the capital ends up in control of the business. Other types of corp other than "limited liability with shares" are possible. However the article describes something even looser. It's more like the opposite of a boycott, a loose buyer's group focusing on directing spending towards something positive rather than away from something negative. > the people in power would just abuse the coops - theft, misdirection of resources towards “friends” The US has recently seen a sharp uptick of this kind of thing, under the cover of law.
vitally3643 5mo ago
"Coop" is an entirely different word from "co-op" and they are really not in any way interchangeable.

94 points by DeonRob 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Essentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.

SilverElfin 5mo ago
I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  The cool thing about a union is that you actually can have a say in what political battles they fight You just can't do that if you only want to be a passive member
  - SilverElfin 5mo ago
    I don’t want to waste time to fight battles within the union. This is exactly what I’m talking about. If it’s just a political nonprofit with forced donations, I’d rather see them banned than join one.
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      > I’d rather see them banned than join one. The only group that will benefit from this position is that of the owners.
      - TimorousBestie 5mo ago
        GP must be one of those temporarily not-owning owners.
  - modo_mario 5mo ago
    Not really my thing here since i'm belgian and we have multiple cross industry unions competeting. However from what i hear about american unions it starts to sounds like an argument for acting and arguing against a union if it leans against your politics and you don't have enough influence whilst also not doing enough towards your wage/work conditions.
- nick__m 5mo ago
  It really depends on the union, mine concentrate on less hours for a salary that follow inflation, parental leaves and a gold plated drug insurance. I work 32.5 hours per week in the summer, have 24 days off, 2 personal days and 12 statutory holidays; that's 36 paid days off !
  - wyager 5mo ago
    Every time I've ever seen a tech worker's union, it's always some sort of political experiment rather than legitimately advocating for the interests of the workers it nominally aims to represent. E.g. the Google AWU-CWA union just did a bunch of political stunt stuff, no salary negotiation or anything useful to the modal Google worker.
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      Less open office and more conference rooms.
    - shagie 5mo ago
      Partly because they couldn't because they didn't organize in a way that let them because... well... one could speculate. > Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is an American trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, contractors, and vendors in the United States. It was announced on January 4, 2021, with an initial membership of over 400, after over a year of secret organizing, and the union includes all types of workers at Alphabet, including full-time, temporary, vendors and contractors of all job types. It's trying to cover too many different groups with competing interests (FTE, temp, vendor, and contractor). Hypothetical negotiations that would favor FTEs may disfavor vendor or contractor contracts. That inherent conflict of interest in the negotiations would mean they can't negotiate for any of them on those matters. Also, the less than 1% of the people belonging to the union would mean the union can't represent them in collective salary negotiations either. Of the represented group (say if they only organized for FTE tech workers), they would then have needed 50% + 1 of the employees in that classification to vote to have a union. It is possible - https://kickstarterunited.org https://kickstarterunited.org for example (and yes, they are having trouble - but they are negotiating on working conditions and pay). --- Various "we should have a union" strings typically have been people wishing for one that is cross industry that they don't have to do anything. While industry wide union organization can exist (Kickstarter United is OPEIU - https://www.opeiu.org https://www.opeiu.org ) it is the local part that people forget... Kickstarter United is OPEIU local 153. If people want a union, they need to organize at their company and get that 50% + 1 vote there. When it is easier to switch jobs than it is to spend the several years to organize and negotiate a contract, the power of a union is diminished.
- vineyardmike 5mo ago
  Everything is political. Politics have been heavily intertwined with work forever. The history of unions is intertwined with literal government violence. Negotiations for compensation is like the least life-impacting thing a union can do. Tech workers are well paid and capable of negotiating. Things like work hours, quality of life, paid leaves, etc are important and can’t really be negotiated by the individual. Every labor victory from yesterday is the status quo but every future one is politics.
  - tptacek 5mo ago
    OK, but that doesn't answer the concern of the person you're responding to. They're just not going to join. It's a common objection!
    - vineyardmike 5mo ago
      Yes I suppose it doesn’t address the concern directly, and yes it’s common. I guess my point is that avoiding “politics” is a bad concern. Why is compensation not included in “politics” when it’s very clearly a political topic? Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”. Unions don’t work unless they get enough members, and getting enough support sometimes means supporting the “political issues” of other members. It’s a team, and everyone has to contribute… but of course everyone will be better off in the long run
      - tptacek 5mo ago
        I understand what you're saying and where you're coming from, but you can't persuasively respond to an objection by saying the person is wrong to have the objection. This is a real problem in modern tech organizing: you don't all share the same politics. People are just going to not sign up. It's very much like the problem product marketers have when they come up with a grand vision for how their product is supposed to work and then assume customers are going to be super into it. They are not! They just want a thing that solves their problems! They don't want or need to help you achieve your vision. You have to make your vision work for them, persuasively. I'm not saying the (broad) project is doomed --- though I think you have an uphill climb in this market --- but I do think you're going to have to address this problem to achieve critical mass.
- well_ackshually 5mo ago
  [flagged]
hackthemack 5mo ago
Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Call it an association or guild or something other than a union. Lawyers and doctor have unions but they don't call it that.
  - shagie 5mo ago
    Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession... but not the pay or working conditions for those professionals.
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      > Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession... They're not even doing that! In the US, these qualifications are matters of state law.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    > Lawyers and doctor Doctors definitely have unions! You're thinking of the AMA which is a lobbying organization, totally different thing.
Hupriene 5mo ago
My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time. These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
- esikich 5mo ago
  So, the company was in trouble and the adults understood that. They probably wanted to fight to make sure they didn't lose their 401ks or pension, or be able to hold onto some insurance so the c suite didn't gut the company and leave everyone high and dry. Sounds like you just generally didn't understand the situation, being a kid.
  - Hupriene 5mo ago
    To be clear, those threats of violence were against me and my co-workers if we didn't vote to unionize.
    - esikich 5mo ago
      Ok, well that is different.
- saghm 5mo ago
  > These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job. What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and actors close to the top (if not literally the first two), both of which famously have powerful unions. The highest paid MLB player in the last year before the union in 1965 was $105,000, which after inflation maps to around $1,110,066.67 in 2026 USD, but the minimum salary for MLB players for the 2026 season is $780,000, and the highest individual salary is $61,875,000. If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union. At absolute best, I feel like you could argue that unions are a mixed bag and some of them do more harm than good, but it's not clear why that wouldn't be an equally compelling argument against pretty much every other type of organization in our economy. There are plenty of corporations that have inflicted absolutely massive amounts of harm to society (many at levels I'd argue no union has ever come anywhere close to), but I've yet to meet anyone who's expressed skepticism at the concept of unions to have similar opinions about the concept of corporations. It's hard not to feel like people just give disproportionate weight to anecdotes about unions than they do for other economic entities because of how effectively they've been painted as the boogeyman by anti-labor propaganda.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo ago
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  > There is no such thing. There really is! I've been in three unions, every place I worked. The first and third one existed beforehand, while I helped start the second. A union is a group of people—and like any group, your influence is what you make it to be.
  - kortilla 5mo ago
    You were in charge of all of the union decisions in all 3? That’s good for you but not representative nor possible for everyone joining a union.
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      Not in charge, I didn’t say that. But I voted in all, while I did have a bigger role in the second one
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo ago
        Did the union do exactly what you wished it to do in all cases? I.e. your perspective carried every single vote? That is the claim I was disputing. For the vast majority of union workers, this will not be the case. Even if it was true for you, it's not true for most.
        bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        Well the things I voted for passed because we did a lot of community-building before votes. The better question is whether, when management does something, is that thing always in my interest. Obviously that is not the case. The union helps when management's actions are counter to that of the majority of workers.
Jensson 5mo ago
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do. ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want? The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  > ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do" What? Unless you are Congress, you can't create ICE at your workplace. You can, however, create a union.
  - lstodd 5mo ago
    If stuff you want aligns with what ICE already does, then it does exactly what you wish it to do, no? What is a union? It is another social structure, exactly same as corps are.
    - 7jjjjjjj 5mo ago
      A kingdom and a republic are also both structures, but I think there are some salient differences.
saghm 5mo ago
I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades. (I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)
- zdragnar 5mo ago
  You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts. Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    > Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not? Yes, it is a surprise! Because we're talking about very educated technical workers. It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners.
    - saghm 5mo ago
      > It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners. To me, the question is whether that will continue to remain the case in the absence of unions. It doesn't seem at all implausible to me that 50 years from now, tech programming might much more closely resemble factory work if there's no mechanism for pushing back against it.
swaits 5mo ago
That’s not what this is. Nor do we need more of them.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  Arguably, we do - at least the 8k people being fired at Meta and the 7k being told to drop everything and work on AI likely did need one.
9rx 5mo ago
We need to invent new names for these things to disconnect them from the boogeymans. For example, when we change "union" to "party" (as in political party) even those who claim to hate unions latch onto it as if it was the greatest thing ever conceived, despite being the exact same thing. Marketing matters.
duped 5mo ago
> the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV Around me the union boogeymen are the police and teachers unions. Ultimately the issue is a professional political class decoupled from reality that extort local government. However there are also the unions for artists (think actors, television writers, theater, etc) which do a very good job stabilizing pay and standards for safety without interfering with the flexibility of businesses to hire who they want or labor to work where they want to. Within reason.

Aurornis 5mo ago

> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned. Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated. This thin proposal would be more interesting if it could give any discussion about the difficult points and how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. To say I’m skeptical of an organization that wants to choose how to spend my money for me is an understatement.

vlovich123 5mo ago
> how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.
- thrownthatway 5mo ago
  Agreed. The most valuable resource is trust. Follow closely by the trust-structures to deal with the ramifications of the primary trust-relationship being broken. That is to say, the most fundamental rule is contract law.
  - vlovich123 5mo ago
    I think you missed when I said that contract law is for when things have gone completely off the rails or for very expensive decisions. Most day to day operations are managed through societal norms and pressures. Contract law would be a poor fit. And by the way, honoring and enforcing contract law between third parties to yourself itself is a societal norm.
    - 5mo ago

ajb 5mo ago

Interesting, but - it says it's a co-op, but this is a word with a legal definition. Every co-op I know publishes what it's legal entity is, how voting is done, etc. This just has "click to join". If your pitch is that you have more integrity than typical companies then you have to, you know, "walk the walk". Also in some jurisdictions, calling yourself a co-op without actually being one will get you into legal difficulties. Companies that don't quite fulfil all the requirements are careful not to call themselves once. Igalia, for example, are very serious about being worker owned and run, but they made the choice to have a slightly different structure so they don't call themselves a co-op.

aiisahik 5mo ago

Dumbest idea i've ever seen. Complete misunderstanding of how the tech world works. The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending. So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission. Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.

kaashif 5mo ago
Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.
- ceheaaf 5mo ago
  the part of the long run before you starve to death in an empty room with a large number on your bank account
creamyhorror 5mo ago
I'm not sure it's so black and white. Directing capital is powerful, and directing spending is powerful (but probably harder; this is marketing or government). I think it's more that directing spending requires influencing a lot more people than directing capital.
DeonRob 5mo ago
The idea is that one can drive the other. Because if you direct that capital without consumption the investment is worthless. You can do both. You can direct the consumption in exchange for part of that consumption you get equity in a wealth fund that funds product the coop will gain equity in if they use. I think one the obvious ones would be a replacement for github. We build a replacement for github, the most you personally drive demand to the git replacement and for that demand you gain equity. And for that equity you get a larger say on how the fund is used and increased access to privileges

arjie 5mo ago

There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?

defrost 5mo ago
Plus or minus tiny details, the description from the article: A demand co-op is a cooperative that pools and directs the spending power of its members. Demand determines what gets built, who survives, and where wealth flows. Most communities already have enormous spending power, but because that demand is unorganized, the value created from it is captured by outside businesses and investors. A demand co-op coordinates that spending so economic activity can build communal businesses, assets, and long-term ownership instead of constant leakage. covers a multitude. Eg: CBH from the 1930s onwards has pooled the spending power of grain farmers into building out farmer owned transportation networks (rail, ports, shipping, large scale silo storage) as communal assets and source of jobs for relatives and communities. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group
- arjie 5mo ago
  Thank you for sharing. I'm also familiar with Mondragon in Spain as a cooperative - similarly an agricultural one primarily. When I said "here" in the sentences "...there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here..." I was referring to the US.
  - defrost 5mo ago
    Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia. There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture.
    - arjie 5mo ago
      > Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia. That's true. "Here" doesn't mean anything on its own. I gathered as much from your response. I was clarifying what I was curious about because clearly I'd attached my "in the US" in my original comment to the wrong phrase. > There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture. Right, and this is why I was curious. It seemed to me that while there is nothing preventing this from happening, and while there are many commenters here who are expressing that they'd like one, I haven't really heard of one. In the US, of course.

paultopia 5mo ago

There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family. Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom. [1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall

DeonRob 5mo ago
yes exactly this is the exact problem I want to see solved. I think high trust demand co-ops like JCCU(https://jccu.coop/ https://jccu.coop/) have solve this issue. I will definitely read your article.

OutOfHere 5mo ago

This is just asking for the job to be hurriedly outsourced to where this is not a thing, if not eliminated altogether. It makes sense only for jobs that are tightly geographically constrained and are not subject to work visa imports.

DeonRob 5mo ago
Thats going to happen anyway but whats keep everyone from building replacement companies that arent just gonna optimize on price then buying from those vendors?

deleted 5mo ago

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ro_bit 5mo ago

What’s the difference between a demand coop and a consumer coop, like REI? (Or are they the same?)

DeonRob 5mo ago
Mostly its what you get equity from. A consumer coop you may pay a one time fee for voting rights. A demand coop gives you equity everytime you shop or buy from a coop business that you coop either owns or gets benefits from. In this case your demand coop might buy REI using the funds your contribute to its wealth fund, while REI you might only just be able to get items for cheap from being a member and the ability to vote on new products.

deleted 5mo ago

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notarobot123 5mo ago

You used to get a dividend from the profits based on your share of purchases from "the Store" back in the day where I'm from. That was a consumer coop driven by the demand of its members. This sounds like a re-branding of a cryptocurrency/DAO scheme. It's too abstract for conventional consumers to understand and too game-able for serious participants to not be wary of. Who is this for?

abujazar 5mo ago

The post is written like as if consumer coops is a radically new idea (spoiler: they're everywhere in Europe). Unfortunately they have long since succumbed to the same mechanisms as their competitors and have a tremendous power concentration in top leadership, with directors making ridiculous salaries. On paper though, e.g. Coop with a 25 % market share in Norway is owned and controlled by about 1 million of its customers.

lstodd 5mo ago
Hah, so this. USSR had it formalized in form of PotrebCoop, literally consumer cooperative in 1921.
- rainingmonkey 5mo ago
  Consumer cooperatives go back to at least 1844 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_Pioneers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_...
DeonRob 5mo ago
This idea is model after those consumer coops from JCCU to mondragoon to some other smaller american consumer coops. Our proposition is that the openly displayed set of the CO-OPs goals along side AI moderation may help with alleviating these issues

alecco 5mo ago

I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies. This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit. I hope some day someone figures a better way.

thatcat 5mo ago
do you think neutral ai moderation and time limits on discussion would have the desired effect?
- DeonRob 5mo ago
  I believe this is the right solution and the one cahootz is proposing. The Coop AI moderator can be fed goals in the json and a unstructured charter that anyone in or out of the coop can see. Then before decision are made you would be required submit a proposal. This would allow the most and least significant member access to the funds on a more equal basis.
- alecco 5mo ago
  The drama would move to how to make the prompts "fair". Spoiler: "fair" is code word for we are all the same.
yourapostasy 5mo ago
> They never address the long-tail nature of productivity... Mondragon tries to address this through accepting bounded inequality. 9:1 pay ratio from highest-paid to lowest-paid is allowed (still far below US median corporation 192:1 ratio). They decouple democratic ownership from operational management. They funnel profits into individual internal capital accounts in proportion to the worker's pay, payable upon retirement or dissociation from the cooperative. They heavily subsidize continuing education to lift the long tail baseline skillsets. However, I suspect none of the above is effective without the right cultural context. The Basque region where Mondragon's cultural center of gravity still heavily draws upon and resides within, laid the fertile cultural cues the cooperative leverages. High competence individuals are rewarded within this Basque-centric cultural context with high social status, reasonable job security, and the psychological reward of building up their own community. If that supposition is true, then the uncomfortable reality is the dominant, hyper-individualistic American cultural context will always be a poor fit to co-ops. That might be made irrelevant through demographic replacement: everywhere the hyper-individualistic culture dominates, it is currently eliminating families with no demographic end in sight. We shall see.

tantalor 5mo ago

Fix the title: coop -> co-op The abbreviation for "cooperative" is always spelled with a hyphen.

CarVac 5mo ago
Or coöp if you want to be fancy.
- phillc73 5mo ago
  It's generally inconsistent. The first sentence is written, "A co-op is an economic system built on the simple idea that coordinating the economic activity..." Co-op is correct here, but not in the title (Coop). Probably personal taste, but I'd also like to see hyphentation for "co-ordinating", "co-operate" and "co-ordinator" as well. Then I noticed the em-dashes, so perhaps I'm reading the machine's work anyway.
9rx 5mo ago
"co-op" may be more common, but we can easily find many examples of "coop" use out in the wild. The title is fine. The surrounding context makes it clear what "coop" is intended to mean.

dzink 5mo ago

You’ve described a corporation. Think of YC companies - equity owned by early employees. Controlled by “someone senior”. And if things are going good more friends are invited to join in, multiple companies start owning equity within each other and you back new incomers by directing demand towards their products. The difference between that and a coop is that in a corporation there is some legal standing to enforce the rules and control abuse. In eastern europe where coops had more of a presence the people in power would just abuse the coops - theft, misdirection of resources towards “friends”, pyramid schemes benefiting “older members”… but you couldn’t go and sue as a shareholder because via political connections the entrenched leader and his buddies could use their power to pay off someone and hurt you. The real prof in concepts like this are enforceable contracts.

pjc50 5mo ago
Eh, I think this is where it's important to distinguish between different types of corporation. The very point of going through YC is to trade ownership and control for external capital: the capital ends up in control of the business. Other types of corp other than "limited liability with shares" are possible. However the article describes something even looser. It's more like the opposite of a boycott, a loose buyer's group focusing on directing spending towards something positive rather than away from something negative. > the people in power would just abuse the coops - theft, misdirection of resources towards “friends” The US has recently seen a sharp uptick of this kind of thing, under the cover of law.

vitally3643 5mo ago

"Coop" is an entirely different word from "co-op" and they are really not in any way interchangeable.