Here’s my contribution to the Fair, Feminist, Futuristic – Platform Models for a Digital New Deal panel held at the 2024 International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference in Rome. The panel was moderated by my colleague Ranjitha Kumar of IT for Change.
Here’s the abstract:
The dominant Big Tech paradigm has produced an all-round social crisis, exacerbating intersectional inequalities and condemning many parts of the world to a dismal future of precarity, exploitation, and exclusion from the gains of digitalisation. It is evident that Big Tech derives its structural power from platform infrastructures they unilaterally control, enabling them to mine data from everyday socio-behavioural interactions in order to re-engineer the foundations of market ecosystems, while privatising the public institution of the marketplace.
Mounting a successful challenge to the extractivist economics of platform capitalism requires a whole-of-economy approach. Feminist research and worker initiatives on the platform economy emphasise the need to reinvent dominant business models of the platform firm in order to re-appropriate the gains of digitalisation. Born-digital initiatives such as platform cooperatives as well as traditional cooperatives in the Global South have attempted to carve out such alternative platform models grounded in the principles of collective ownership, sustainable production, data governance based on community data rights frameworks, distributive justice and institutional arrangements for data stewardship.
These alternative platform models in different sectors – agriculture, services, community care – take us closer to the realisation of a systemic restructuring of the digital economy and society for gender transformation. But there’s a real danger of such experiments becoming “flashes in the pan” unless macroeconomic policy ensures insulation against the real threat of their co-option and capture by Big Tech, or their slow death due to lack of access to financing and institutional support. This is an area that is often bypassed in debates on alternative platforms, creating a lacunae of multi-scalar policy responses needed to establish regenerative digital economies.
This in-person roundtable seeks to fill this gap in the discourse by bringing together perspectives from the ground about the micro, local and meso level challenges of sustaining alternative platform enterprises and the macroeconomic questions of creating an enabling environment for the realisation of a non-extractivist digital economy.
The roundtable will kick-off with presentations from seven speakers on developing feminist platform models and necessary macroeconomic frameworks for a decolonial digital economy (participation will be supported by IT for Change). Our panel consists of research-practitioners working towards building collectivist platform models, with the goal to widen the benefits of the digital economy. Following these input presentations, participants will be asked to reflect on a “Fair, Feminist and Futuristic Digital Economy” through a moderated discussion.
The other panelists were Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur from the SEWA Cooperative Federation, Prerak Shah from Catalyst Management Services, Emma Back from Equal Care Co-op, Laura Mann from the London School of Economics and Ritse Erumi from the Ford Foundation.
Stacco Troncoso 