We live in an era in which it is remarkably easy, by historical standards, to build a platform like Uber or Airbnb. Yet for all this ease, the big platforms tend to be owned by small cliques of investors like Shervin Pishevar and Chris Sacca, run for their benefit, and given to extracting as much value from workers as they can, at very low prices. If it is so easy to build platforms these days, Scholz wondered, why couldn’t workers and customers create their own platforms?
