Cooperative Futures: Technologies of the Common in the Collaborative Economy

The creation of ambient media architectures brings machinic multiplicities into existence whose autonomy cannot be folded back easily into a politics of representation. In and of itself, this is nothing new - the autonomy of pollution particles or radiation waves has challenged attempts to regulate the consequences of their actions for a long time, giving rise to multiple bodies of thought, policy, and strategy in political ecology, systems design, and complexity governance. The interest in new forms of cooperation is driven largely by similar concerns, searching for ways of collaboration that allow a much higher degree of individual and collective self-determination to pursue shared concerns. Current debates on cooperativism take seriously the role of peer-to-peer logics in the shift from shared use to shared ownership, the power of computational infrastructures to scale local efforts beyond the boundaries of micropolitical solutions, and the need to affirm broader genealogies of the technological condition. Cooperativism research outlines a large horizon for action and analysis, exploring economic, social, and political strategies for an economy of shared ownership and collective self-organization. These social technologies of the common design the scene for cooperation.