Trebor Scholz: From Vibe to Vitality

Part of the MS CDP Conversations with Practitioners Lecture Series.

From Vibe to Viability

When care workers in Manhattan co-own the app that books their shifts, when artists in Vancouver take back control of their images, when Uber drivers in Denver stop renting the tools of their trade and start owning them, when Indigenous communities in South Africa launch their own WiFi cooperative—these are not isolated acts. They’re part of a global movement to rebuild the digital economy from the ground up.

In this talk, Prof. Trebor Scholz, a leading voice in the global push for democratic digital infrastructure, explores how communities are building alternatives to extractive tech through cooperative experiments across 60+ countries. From AI cooperatives to community-run data centers and food delivery systems powered by 50 worker co-ops, these are functioning systems, not simply conjectures.

Scholz draws a line from 28 weavers in 1840s England to present-day builders reclaiming digital agency. His methodology—combining analysis, organizing, education, and institution-building—has improved the lives of over a million workers, launched the SolidarityTech subfield, and provided practical, real-world alternatives. But failure is part of the story: What happens when democracy cuts into your evenings? When scaling solidarity sparks friction? When burnout hits? When people can’t agree—and you’re still hustling to make the dream real? This talk challenges you to rethink what’s possible—and help build a future that doesn’t scale like empires but lasts like communities.

Bio

R. Trebor Scholz is a professor at The New School in New York City, a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, and a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Plymouth and focuses on cooperative entrepreneurship in the digital economy. Scholz is widely known for developing the concept of “platform cooperatives,” worker-owned digital platforms that promote economic, social, labor, and environmental justice. Today, there are more than one million workers around the world employed in platform cooperatives—reflecting the growing scale and impact of this alternative model.

A global keynote speaker, he has delivered hundreds of talks, sharing his research with diverse audiences. His work has earned support from institutions like the European Commission, the Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, and others. His books, Own This!—which won the Joyce Rothschild Book Award—and Uberworked and Underpaid, have been translated into multiple languages, helping establish a new academic subfield of Solidarity Tech.

In 2018, Scholz founded the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) at The New School, followed by the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) in 2019. The PCC has driven discussions on digital transformation within the cooperative movement through 10 major global conferences in cities such as Hong Kong, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Thiruvananthapuram, and Mombasa, while influencing policy and legislation in numerous countries. The ICDE fellowship program supports 58 emerging scholars in the digital solidarity economy. Scholz has collaborated with partners across 60 countries, fostering innovations worldwide.