This talk analyzes real-world models of doing things differently—from a driver-owned ride-hailing platform in New York City, to a community telecoms co-op in Mzamba, South Africa, a care worker co-op in Sydney, an artist-owned stock photography platform based in Canada, and a food delivery system shared by 80 cooperatives across Europe. These are practical alternatives that challenge business-as-usual approaches in mobility, connectivity, creative production, care, and food systems. They respond to widespread concerns—excessive workplace monitoring, loss of individual privacy, unaccountable algorithms, and the growing instability of gig work—while also addressing deeper systemic issues like concentrated ownership, weakened labor protections, and the outsized political influence of tech oligarchs.

But this isn’t just another take on platform cooperatives. It doesn’t shy away from the hard questions: What happens when the energy fades? When scale becomes a trap? When democracy cuts into your evenings? One case explored in greater depth is Groupmuse, a US-American platform co-op owned by its workers and musicians. It connects communities through intimate house concerts—over 10,000 to date. With 3,000 artists and 65,000 audience members nationwide, each performance guarantees musicians a minimum of $125, plus direct audience contributions.

In this presentation, Scholz outlines a methodology that defies the usual academic playbook—combining research, organizing, education, and advocacy to shift conditions on the ground. He traces a lineage from 28 weavers in mid-19th century England—whose cooperative experiment inspired hard-won principles of mutual ownership and democratic governance—to today’s efforts to reclaim agency and worker power in over 60 countries. Platform co-ops. Data cooperatives. DAOs. Community-owned data centers. This approach, alongside broader efforts by platform cooperatives and adjacent solidarity enterprises, has contributed to improved conditions for over a million workers, helped establish the emerging academic subfield of SolidarityTech, and sparked conversations about cooperative alternatives in more than 60 countries—all without falling into the trap of solutionism that promises quick fixes to deeply structural problems.

Yet the path is fraught with barriers: platform worker cooperatives grapple with financial constraints, legal exclusion, and the gravitational pull of entrenched corporate norms. Ultimately, Scholz argues that capital’s domination of the tech sector is not complete—leaving room for real utopias grounded in the solidarity economy, built not to scale like empires, but to last like communities.