"Digital" cooperatives using (optionally) open source platforms is an idea that should be much more explored imho.
The concept applies to so many verticals involving small companies or individual operators (from taxis, to hotels, to restaurants, to real estate agents, local bookstores, cinemas, to game developers etc. etc.)
The inability of large numbers of small entities to coordinate and cooperate in the digital era means they create the conditions for third parties to completely take over the intermediation with clients and use that leverage to extract unreasonably large rents.
In fact the extreme "taxes" small businesses and individuals have to pay to shrewd digital platform owners are multiples of the cost of development of the platforms themselves.
In other words, if a collection of independent entities cannot get they act together to codevelop digital infastructure (that will benefit all of them) somebody else will do it for them and will be eating their lunch.
This reclaiming of their market / ownership of digital tools might be challenging in conditions of rapid technical innovation. The autocracy of a top-down corporate structure is more effective than a democratic collective. Yet despite incessant marketing noise currently we are in a rather stagnating phase so there is a window of opportunity to reclaim some agency.
If there's a 3rd party aggregator (for taxis, restaurants or whatever), the final price that the customer pays would include both the aggregator's profits + the individual service provider's profits.
If the individual service providers all came together and made an app themselves, the aggregator-profits can be eliminated, resulting in potentially reduced prices for the customers.
I think (probably wrongly) one of the reasons they don't usually come together is because by making such an app they would effectively be helping their competitor(s), which they may not necessarily want to (because they don't see the bigger picture?).
In my city (in Asia) a subset of taxi drivers realized this and even made an app, but it didn't really work well due to poor marketing and because visitors to the city didn't want to set-up a new app just for 2 days etc.
On the other hand, if all the service-providers do co-operatively make an app for their services, what prevents a cartel from developing? The government?
I guess there should be a high baseline level of trust to make it work.
> Maybe it would work better if the local government runs the app (contracted out obvs) and bans all the others.
I like the idea of that but the issue is software that people have to use with no alternative end up having no real motivation to be user friendly or stable or anything like that. They own the market and nobody can ever leave it
If every city has an app, you also lower the trust of the drivers because you don't have a way to know if the passengers are behaving well (good reviews) or not.
So much "this!". The hotel/booking is the most blatant example, because the bar for "good enough" wouldn't really be that far up.
The only moat they have is worldwide discoverability (a regional cooperative just won't reach people who visit once, cooperatives would have to start global, or at least be really, really good at federating) and that the threshold for critical mass in that market is winner takes all: at least when you are not looking for that one spot for a two-weeks getaway (you might even enjoy trawling multiple platforms) but going through serial booking for a road trip (doesn't even matter wether it's bulk ahead or on the go),
Depends on the vertical. I would not be real comfortable booking lodging on some random portal, especially if we're talking more of an AirBnB thing vs hotels.
Yeah, that's one of the moats some have but booking.com has not: you don't just pop up a hotel from nothing, and the hypothetical failure mode of complete fakes appearing out of thin air is not only solved by payment on site but also by the local hotel owner community having a financial interest in policing their turf.
Or not, could be a fun plot for some speculative fiction: on a cooperative post-booking.com platform, hotel owners in a remote valley discover that they can earn quite nicely by offering "rescue nights" to guest who fell for a series of fake listings they keep up, untraceably because the fakes lack a payment channel to follow. Add some Bates vibes to the one hotelier who refuses to take part in the scheme for multi-layered tension.
A cooperative booking organization would have strong incentive to keep their members in the straight & narrow. It is a cooperation problem and institutional enforcement is a proven recipe for ensuring that.
If there were/are lots of small portals for each region/group of hotels, how would you know which portal is the (a?) genuine portal?
People on the other end of genuine transactions want/need some kind of payment from the people booking (to prevent at a minimum people booking lots of rooms with no intention of staying), but that's an attractive target for scammers. Especially as people often book things a significant length of time in advance.
> The autocracy of a top-down corporate structure is more effective than a democratic collective.
If that was the case then Soviet Union's central planning would be more efficient than Liberal democracy's market capitalism. The efficiency of corporations stems from unfair advantages states gives them like intellectual property rights or from socialising their losses and privatising their gains from public budget.
Elaborate on this please, after all even in "autocratic" corporations we have internal power struggles etc. So are they democratic too? Suddenly everything is like democracy?
USSR, with the exception of the elections, wasn't much different from what we recognize as democracies.
i.e. a local bureaucrat notices something, he contacts his bureaucrat supervisor, let's call him the city manager, who then decide to command the bureaucrat to investigate further or ignore the issue.
Once it is established that the issue actually exists, the local bureaucrat supervisor contacts his bureaucrat supervisor, let's call him the area manager who once again analyzes the report, or more probably gives it to his subordinates to analyze it, because he has a lot of more important work to do, he's a manager!, and then decides what to do next.
Once it is established that the issue actually exists, the area manager contacts his supervisor, let's call him the regional manager, who once again analyzes the report, or more probably give it to his subordinates to analyze it, because he has a lot of more important work to do, he's a manager of managers for god's sake!, and then decides what to do next.
Rinse and repeat a dozen times in a system deeply nested (full employment was a primary goal in USSR, meaning that the machine was slow and inefficient but provided job security to almost everybody) and it is clear that what Stalin said or commanded was the result of an information gathering process that wasn't so swift and to deploy the solutions that the central committee deliberated they had to face some slowdown and a lot of friction.
To understand how fragile the system was, imagine that the fall of the Berlin wall was caused by a trivial communication mistake made by Guenter Schabowski during a momentary inability to contact the bureaucrat who knew the correct answer to the journalists questions.
Democracy simply means that we vote and have many different parties to chose from (not so many in the US, for example), a parliament made by one, two or more "houses" where elected representatives discuss matters, etc. etc., but what we call "the machinery of government" it's not very different from system to system.
Take China for example, yes, they have only one party, but the CCP ha almost 100 million members, with many different political currents, that constantly discuss different point of views and try to find a compromise, making it one of the largest, if not the largest, political institution in the World and in human history.
We do not call it a democracy, but it is still humans discussing politics that have real life impact on over a billion people that form their community.
Not sure this a good counterexample. In fact we have plenty of proof that loose collectives dont perform well under rapid change conditions.
There is no reason why the ubers and bookings etc should not have been actually platforms developed and owned by the respective sectors using more or less the same technologies. In fact there are some examples.
The lag in responding to a risk of opportunity is intrinsic to a consensus system. The long term fitness is an entirely different matter.
Problem is that web3 tries to tie everything to a cryptocurrency token, not willing to accept the fact that as soon as something happens off-chain and in the real world, most/all advantages of using cryptocurrencies and blockchains go away.
It really is a shame that all blockchains (AFAIK) are tied to cryptocurrency as reward for participating in their consensus mechanism when it is not necessary the only way to do things.
In fact, I believe blockchain will never be decentralized as long as there is a means of accumulation of power over the blockchain, in many cases the accumulation of PoW computing power, or in PoS the accumulation of the cryptocurrency itself.
I also believe (without any basis other than the spirit of the correspondence from Satoshi) that Satoshi released Bitcoin in 2008 as a proof of concept, not as a project meant to be adopted by every institution. Bitcoin was created to address the Byzantine Generals problem, and AFAIK it was the first to truly do so. It was not created to be the blueprint to every other blockchain ever.
The whole concept of decentralized trust-less environments requires some way to prevent malicious attackers from taking over the network. Proof of work, while extremely wasteful, does that job.
The main problem is that trust-lessness and decentralization isn't actually necessary, especially for most things that exist in the real world and are at the mercy of the legal systems they operate within (this applies to cryptocurrencies as well - the government doesn't need to break crypto, it can just make interacting/transacting with it illegal).
For a lot of real-world projects, the legal system is an adequate protection. Centralization doesn't require a profit motive - the central party could be set up as a non-profit and then have all the advantages of a centralized system while avoiding a lot of the drawbacks we see in for-profit operations.
> Proof of work, while extremely wasteful, does the job.
True, yet you could even have Proof of Work without cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is used to incentivize PoW which attracts more people to the blockchain and strengthens the network and so on.
However, one could have Proof of Work without cryptocurrency, for example, one could reward the PoW with participation in the blockchain, or in this case, have drivers PoW to be able to take rides.
> Centralization doesn't require a profit motive
Yes, I also agree that centralization doesn't require a profit motive, and a centralized solution is deal for 99% of the cases.
The concept applies to so many verticals involving small companies or individual operators (from taxis, to hotels, to restaurants, to real estate agents, local bookstores, cinemas, to game developers etc. etc.)
The inability of large numbers of small entities to coordinate and cooperate in the digital era means they create the conditions for third parties to completely take over the intermediation with clients and use that leverage to extract unreasonably large rents.
In fact the extreme "taxes" small businesses and individuals have to pay to shrewd digital platform owners are multiples of the cost of development of the platforms themselves.
In other words, if a collection of independent entities cannot get they act together to codevelop digital infastructure (that will benefit all of them) somebody else will do it for them and will be eating their lunch.
This reclaiming of their market / ownership of digital tools might be challenging in conditions of rapid technical innovation. The autocracy of a top-down corporate structure is more effective than a democratic collective. Yet despite incessant marketing noise currently we are in a rather stagnating phase so there is a window of opportunity to reclaim some agency.