For many labor activists, ​“tech” has become a dirty word. While Sil­i­con Val­ley extols the virtues of the ​“shar­ing econ­o­my,” crit­ics argue that plat­forms like Uber and Airbnb allow investors to reap prof­its by cir­cum­vent­ing labor law and rip­ping off workers.

A new movement called “platform cooperativism” hopes to harness the power of tech to democratize the economy and advance labor rights.

But what if work­ers owned the apps? A new move­ment called ​“plat­form coop­er­a­tivism” hopes to har­ness the pow­er of tech to democ­ra­tize the econ­o­my and advance labor rights.

In response to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of app-based ser­vices, some unions have begun try­ing to make inroads with Uber dri­vers and oth­er gig work­ers. Plat­form coop­er­a­tivism embraces a dif­fer­ent prin­ci­ple, artic­u­lat­ed by move­ment advo­cate and New School pro­fes­sor Tre­bor Scholz: ​“It’s too hard to fix what you do not own.”

Instead, Scholz explained in a Jan­u­ary overview of plat­form coop­er­a­tivism, work­ers can embrace the kinds of tech­nolo­gies that have emerged from Sil­i­con Val­ley and put them to use ​“with a dif­fer­ent own­er­ship mod­el, adher­ing to demo­c­ra­t­ic values.”

Plat­form coop­er­a­tivism com­pris­es a vari­ety of busi­ness­es, rang­ing from media plat­forms like Stocksy (a coop­er­a­tive that pro­vides stock pho­tog­ra­phy) to online mar­ket­places that hope to offer alter­na­tives to tech-giant Ama­zon and its ilk. Though many of the busi­ness­es emerged inde­pen­dent­ly of one anoth­er, they are unit­ed by com­mon prin­ci­ples root­ed in equal­i­ty and transparency.

Some plat­forms are already prov­ing that they can give tra­di­tion­al Inter­net com­pa­nies a run for their mon­ey. Stocksy is a par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful exam­ple: Start­ed in 2013, it has a col­lec­tion of 500,000 pho­tos and has paid out over $4 mil­lion to its 900 artist-members.

Here’s how it works: Pub­li­ca­tions that want to use an image from Stocksy pay a fee rag­ing from $10 –$500. Fifty per­cent of that goes direct­ly to the pho­tog­ra­ph­er. That’s a much fair­er com­mis­sion than the 20 per­cent paid out by the cor­po­rate ser­vice Get­ty Images, accord­ing to pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Stocksy mem­ber Thomas Hawk. That’s not the only rea­son Hawk left Get­ty for Stocksy in 2013. ​“The excit­ing part,” he writes on his per­son­al blog, is that ​“the mem­bers of Stocksy actu­al­ly own the agency.” Stocksy reflects this by dis­trib­ut­ing 90 per­cent of its prof­its — which are han­dled sep­a­rate­ly from com­mis­sions — direct­ly to artists.

Mem­ber­ship is auto­mat­ic for all Stocksy pho­tog­ra­phers, and addi­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers are care­ful­ly select­ed on the basis of what their work will add to the com­pa­ny. A staff of 25 is respon­si­ble for day-to-day busi­ness oper­a­tions, and founders and advis­ers help make impor­tant busi­ness deci­sions rang­ing from pric­ing to com­mu­ni­ty growth strategies.

All these groups par­tic­i­pate in elec­tions for Stocksy’s board, and can sub­mit and vote on res­o­lu­tions. Democ­ra­cy also works in the oth­er direc­tion: As Stocksy pho­tog­ra­ph­er Kara Riley puts it, ​“before they make any deci­sions high up, they pose ques­tions and let all of us mem­bers give our input … the ideas of the mem­bers end up being what hap­pens in the company.”

While all plat­form co-ops adopt some form of mem­ber own­er­ship, their mod­els for demo­c­ra­t­ic deci­sion-mak­ing dif­fer. Take, for instance, Berlin based co-op Fair­mon­do, which aims to emu­late dig­i­tal mar­ket­places such as Ama­zon and eBay while pro­mot­ing sus­tain­able and fair-trade prod­ucts. Mem­ber­ship is open to any­one who buys a €10 share in the com­pa­ny, and indi­vid­u­als can con­trol mul­ti­ple shares. But founder Felix Weth says that the max­i­mum num­ber of shares per per­son is capped at 2,500 and there is a strict ​“one mem­ber, one vote” rule to main­tain inter­nal democracy.

That delib­er­ate­ly pre­vents any­one from get­ting rich from Fair­mon­do. ​“We need to find a way to address the prob­lem of inequal­i­ty on our plan­et,” says Weth, ​“I don’t think it helps if we have busi­ness­es that are designed to make cer­tain peo­ple very rich.”

Fairmondo’s vision of a more equi­table soci­ety has attract­ed more than 10,000 users since 2013, who have flocked to the site to buy and sell goods rang­ing from eth­i­cal­ly pro­duced smart­phones to fair-trade cof­fee. The com­pa­ny got there with the help of some of the largest crowd­fund­ing dri­ves Ger­many has seen, rais­ing rough­ly €350,000 over the course of two cam­paigns in 2013 and 2014. Weth hopes that one day the com­pa­ny will be able to sup­plant tra­di­tion­al dig­i­tal mar­ket­places, which he sees as cor­rupt and social­ly destructive.

But Weth acknowl­edges that growth is still a chal­lenge for Fair­mon­do, which has had to make some tough per­son­nel cuts in order to shore up finances. Crowd­fund­ing has been a remark­ably effec­tive way of attract­ing mem­bers and cap­i­tal, but Fair­mon­do will need to scale its busi­ness up dra­mat­i­cal­ly if it is to cov­er costs, let alone com­pete with Amazon.

This points to a larg­er dif­fi­cul­ty for plat­form coop­er­a­tives: They reject ven­ture cap­i­tal and typ­i­cal pri­vate investors, and with­out tra­di­tion­al sources of start­up mon­ey these busi­ness­es must cre­ate and adopt new mod­els of financ­ing. The music-stream­ing ser­vice Res­onate (which is cur­rent­ly in devel­op­ment), for instance, may begin issu­ing a type of non-vot­ing share to investors that the co-op can lat­er buy back.

To tru­ly trans­form the tech land­scape, plat­form coop­er­a­tives will also have to expand into the low-wage ser­vice sec­tor. The Tran­sUnion Car Ser­vice is a good exam­ple: Launched last year in Newark, New Jer­sey, the com­pa­ny offers rid­ers an Uber-like app but is owned by union­ized dri­vers. San Fran­cis­co-based Loco­nom­ics, mean­while, hopes to cre­ate an alter­na­tive to TaskRab­bit, a shar­ing-econ­o­my giant that allows users to out­source mis­cel­la­neous tasks such as assem­bling IKEA fur­ni­ture or doing the dish­es. While ​“Rab­bits” often lack job secu­ri­ty and ben­e­fits, Loco­nom­ics will be owned by the ser­vice pro­fes­sion­als who work on it and offer access to ben­e­fits and career development.

Advo­cates hope that the old plat­forms will be ​“delet­ed” as users embrace new, more equi­table ones. Janelle Orsi, direc­tor of the Sus­tain­able Economies Law Cen­ter, has a name for the end-goal of this process. Dis­lodg­ing the cor­po­rate giants that con­trol the tech indus­try at present would be ​“the oppo­site of an apoc­a­lypse,” she said at a Novem­ber 2015 con­fer­ence billed as a ​“com­ing out par­ty for the coop­er­a­tive Inter­net. It would be a ​“co-opa­lypse.”