When I trained as a lawyer, I learned to read a contract for the one clause that quietly hands all the power to a single party. When I started working around artefacts built by computer scientist, I found the same clause hiding somewhere else. Not in the fine print this time, but in the architecture. It was easy to see a payment API that only settles through one processor or a platform that decides, overnight, who gets paid and who gets shut out. For a lawyer who worked largely as an activist, the inequality of power was quite jarring.

The solidarity stack is a concept from Trebor Scholz, who founded the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. My question is the practical one that comes next. What would it actually take to build one for African digital creators, and what stands in the way?

A quick word on method, and an honest constraint

Let me be upfront about how this project works, because it shapes everything else. I do not have ethics approval to run formal interviews, and I have decided not to pursue them for this phase. That is a real constraint. However, it has pushed the work somewhere more useful than I first expected.

Instead of extracting testimony from creators, who are already over-surveyed and under-paid for their time, I am working from desk research, public technical documentation, and the kind of casual conversations that happen when you are simply part of a community instead of studying it from above. I am also not focusing on what is wrong (we have quite enough of that), I am using the evidence I find to propose concrete, buildable, sometimes deliberately speculative designs for what a creator-owned alternative could look like.

Who I am

I am a lawyer turned computer science researcher with training in statistics. It is an unusual mix, and that is the whole point. My 2023 paper, “The Glamorisation of Unpaid Labour”, argued that digital platforms have become extraordinarily good at extracting value from workers while making that work invisible, repackaging labour as passion, hustle, or “exposure.” That idea now sits at the centre of my PhD, which focuses on EU AI-related policies and looks at digital enclosures and consent mechanisms through lenses which I am still exploring. Some of this thinking started in conversation with Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa, when we began investigating the dynamics of the creator economy in the majority world, specifically across Africa and Central America, to argue for more equitable treatment of creators outside the Global North. That question of who counts, and who gets paid fairly, still drives the work.

Mapping the solidarity stack

Here is the question I applied to the ICDE fellowship to pursue. What technical infrastructure would African digital creators need to achieve genuine cooperative autonomy, and where do current dependencies on platform systems create chokepoints that undermine collective ownership?

First, a word on who I mean by “creators,” because I mean it broadly. A conversation a while ago with Irene Mwendwa helped me see things very clearly. A content creator on TikTok, a driver on Bolt, and a host on Airbnb are all doing the same thing. They produce value on infrastructure they do not own, and get paid through rails they do not control. What they sell differs: attention, labour, or access to an asset. But the payment layer underneath them is remarkably similar, and that shared layer is where my project lives. My main focus here is on social media content creators, since that is where the “creator economy” label usually points, but the chokepoint map I am building is designed to travel across all of them. 

Trebor Scholz talks about a ‘solidarity stack ‘, which is the full set of shared, cooperatively owned technologies that a fairer digital economy would run on. I find the idea compelling, and I want to know what really building it would look like. So I am working the problem from the other end. Before you can build a cooperative stack, you have to understand the extractive one it has to replace. Every creator sits on top of a stack they did not design. The platform that hosts their content. The algorithm that decides who sees it. The API that governs which tools they can plug in. And, most importantly, the payment rails that decide whether and how they actually get paid. At each layer there are chokepoints: places where control is concentrated, where leaving is expensive, and where a single company’s decision can end a livelihood. Map those chokepoints and you have a blueprint, in negative, of what a solidarity stack would need to hold in common.

The chokepoint I find most overlooked is money. There is a rich and growing body of work on the creator economy as a site of aspirational and precarious labour, on algorithmic control in the gig economy, and on the gendered and racialised exploitation that platform work reproduces. There is an equally rich literature, much of it centred on Kenya, on mobile money and the economics of M-PESA as engines of financial inclusion. And there is a lively conversation about platform cooperativism and the feasibility of building cooperative alternatives to extractive platforms.

After reading multiple studies for this project, I have found that there are three conversations that seldom meet. The first is about how labour scholars treat the platform as an employer, then there are the mobile-money scholars treat payment rails as a development success story, and finally, the cooperativism scholars proposing new ownership models but stay mostly quiet on the plumbing of payments. The interesting part is that almost all of them are writing about the Global North. Nobody has systematically mapped the payment layer as a site of dependency for African creators. Which platforms pay creators in which countries, through which intermediaries, with what fees, what delays, and what are the minimum thresholds?

That map does not currently exist. Building it is the foundational contribution of my fellowship. It sounds mundane, a simple table of platforms, countries, intermediaries, and fees, but mundane infrastructure is exactly where enclosure likes to hide. You cannot see a chokepoint until you have drawn the pipe.

There is a second reason the payment layer deserves top billing. It is where deplatforming becomes destitution. Losing access to a social account means losing access to the account that holds your earnings and your curated work. Payment rails are also the layer that gets the least data governance scrutiny. We argue about content moderation endlessly and about settlement infrastructure almost never, even though the latter is where the money is.

A Nigerian creator cannot receive PayPal payments the way a creator in London can, so their money routes through a patchwork of local processors like Paystack and Flutterwave, each with its own cut and its own coverage gaps. YouTube’s ad revenue requires clearing eligibility thresholds and passing through an intermediary bank. Mobile money, the genuine infrastructural triumph of East Africa, is often walled off from the platforms creators actually earn on, so money has to be moved from one system to another, losing value at every hop. Each of these is a small tax on autonomy. 

Why cooperatives, and why now

The cooperative idea is as old as history. The Rochdale Pioneers who opened their store in 1844 were textile workers responding to the poverty, wage suppression, and adulterated goods that industrial capitalism had dumped on them. The cooperative was infrastructure as an alternative. It was built in direct response to the English enclosure and grew straight out of dispossession.

I think we are living through a comparable moment of dispossession, digital this time and I have explored this idea here. The answer for African creators cannot only be better regulation or kinder platforms. It has to include owning the stack. Building systems where creators hold the infrastructure collectively, rather than renting it from firms whose interests run against theirs.

So what might that look like in practice? Not, I think, one grand cooperative platform built to rival YouTube. That path is littered with well-meaning failures. The more promising route is federated and interoperable. Imagine the idea of small, creator-owned components that speak common standards and can be adopted one at a time. A shared payment cooperative that negotiates fees collectively, instead of leaving each creator to accept whatever a processor offers. An interoperability layer that lets a creator carry their audience and earnings history between services, which lowers the cost of exit that locks them in place today. A digital commons of tooling that no single firm can enclose. None of this asks creators to walk away from the platforms they are on tomorrow. To speak the language of fashion creators, I’m asking that we take a chokepoint piece and style it into a solution that fits the problem. It is how the Rochdale store started too.

Now, at the root of the solutions is transparency. The type of transparency we seek is currently a black box that requires technical auditing to uncover. Technical auditing is the bridge between diagnosis and design. If we can pin down exactly where the chokepoints are, right down to the API call, the fee schedule, and the settlement delay, then we can design systems that route around them. A map of dependencies is also, read the other way, a map of where solidarity could be built. That is the argument I will develop across the fellowship, and the one I will start to share in my presentation and in the fuller ICDE report to come.

Where I would welcome support

This is early work, and it gets better when it is not done alone. A few specific things would help:

• Providing some feedback on the framing. Does the chokepoint model add anything useful to how we picture a solidarity stack, or does it oversimplify? I would especially value pushback from people who have actually built payment or platform infrastructure and know where my neat abstractions break against messy reality.
• If you know of a creator collective, a cooperative platform, a federated tool, or even a failed experiment, especially in Nigeria, Kenya, or elsewhere in the Global South, I want to hear about it. Failures teach as much as successes.
• A lot of the payment-rail detail I need does not live in journals. It lives in platform help-centre pages, processor documentation, and industry reports. Pointers to primary sources, or to people who understand a specific rail from the inside, are gold.
• If you work in cooperative studies, in African fintech, in platform-labour research, or in interoperability standards, you are sitting on one of the three islands I am trying to connect. I would love to build a bridge.

The bigger ambition is simple to say and hard to do. To help move African digital creators from being the raw material of someone else’s platform to being the owners of their own. Mapping the solidarity stack is the first step. Drawing the pipes is how we figure out where to build.

So let me leave you with the question I keep coming back to. If you owned the stack, if the payment rails and the tools and the standards were yours to hold in common, what would you build first? That is the conversation I am hoping to start.

I am an ICDE Fellow researching cooperative infrastructure for African digital creators. You can find more about my work at nananwachukwu.com (my website is still in progress)