Everything for Everyone Quotes

“When tech people talk about “democratizing” something, like driving directions or online banking, what they really mean is access. Access is fine, but it’s just access. It’s a drive-through window, not a door. Access is only part of what democracy has always entailed—alongside real ownership, governance, and accountability. Democracy is a process, not a product.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“These traces of commonwealth have begun to seem like a secret society, an inverted reality lurking inside what claims to be reality, economies that reject the rules by which the economy supposedly plays. In these traces, even tucked within competitive markets, cooperative advantage holds its ground. Each example pokes a hole in the usual story about how the world came to be as it is, challenging tall tales about progress made from competition and the pursuit of profit. No, there have been other principles at work.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“Serious businesspeople nowadays tend to regard any alternative to the investor-owned corporation as aberrant or impossible. But the alternatives actually preceded the models that prevail today. In Britain, the first legislation for co-ops passed four years before joint-stock companies got their own law in 1856. Legal scholar Henry Hansmann has suggested that we regard investor-owned companies as a distorted kind of cooperative, bent in service of investor interests over anyone else’s.8 The kind of business that now seems normal was once strange; someday it might seem strange again.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“Co-ops tend to take hold when the order of things is in flux, when people have to figure out how to do what no one will do for them. Farmers had to get their own electricity when investors wouldn’t bring it; small hardware stores organized co-ops to compete with big boxes before buying local was in fashion. Before employers and governments offered insurance, people set it up for themselves. Co-ops have served as test runs for the social contracts that may later be taken for granted, and they’re doing so again.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“It wasn’t investigating my family history that put me on the lookout for cooperatives. I started looking because of stirrings I noticed as a reporter among veterans of the protests that began in 2011, such as Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s 15M movement. Once their uprisings simmered, the protesters had to figure out how to make a living in the economy they hadn’t yet transformed, and they started creating co-ops. Some were doing it with software—cooperative social media, cloud data, music streaming, digital currencies, gig markets, and more. But this generation was not all lost to the digital; others used cooperation to live by dirt and soil. The young radicals turned to the same kind of business that my buttoned-up, old-world, conservative grandfather did. Following them, I began following in my grandfather’s footsteps before I even knew it. Both”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy