Anita Gurumurthy

Hello, my name is Anita Gurumurthy, and I’m from IT4Change. This is an NGO from Bangalore. And we have been working on democratizing digital technologies since our inception. And more lately, we’ve been part of conversations around platform cooperatives. One of the raison d’etre of our existence is to really challenge the dominant digital economy. The dominant digital economy that does not really work for anyone. It doesn’t work for consumers, it doesn’t work for workers, it doesn’t work for future generations, and it certainly does not work for society as a whole. So the important question about how cooperative principles influence the digital economy in ways in which we can have transformative futures is very, very significant. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, the most important thing about the Internet Revolution was that the promise that the Internet held for redistributing wealth was seen by certain scholars, scholars who were particularly invested in cooperativism as the revolution. Of course, I mean, we think that the Internet Revolution is all about the social media revolution. What we lost sight of is the fact that a new economics was indeed possible, a new economics was envisioned by people who invested a lot of hope in the Internet Revolution. That didn’t happen because platform technologies, the way in which platform technologies have evolved through these large big tech models, you know, big tech models of Amazon, big tech models of Google, that simply erased the dreams of the early Internet revolutionists. And this was because the platform as an ecosystem, it encloses value. It doesn’t allow value to be shared. What it does is it makes those who are owners of these platform ecosystems the people that can make the maximum wealth. So what is really important is that principles of solidarity, mutuality, and interdependence, which are very critical to the cooperative movement, be brought into the technological sphere today. And this will require a certain orchestration by the government so that a multiplicity of economic actors, you know, small economic actors can come together locally, nationally, and globally in a federated way in order to realize their dreams of a redistributed society, you know, in which there is wealth redistribution and democracy.