Solidarity

The institutions that made the industrial revolution survivable were membership institutions: trade unions, cooperatives, friendly societies, consumer associations. Those societies with healthy institutions benefited from more trust in business and communities in general. Those that missed the layer sitting between the state and capital fell to whichever pole was strongest.

A healthy society keeps the middle layer intact. It needs organisations that sit between the political class and the owning class and answer to neither. That goes as much for the age of mass surveillance as it did mass production, as much for data as it did labour. However, it only holds if the members, and ultimately the organisations themselves, mutually support one another.

While most traditional business models have been transformed for the information age, those institutions that traditionally guard solidarity have not yet updated their models for information economics. The result is a world where outrage, division, and exploitation are increasingly permitted as design choices in the platforms we all rely on for participation in digital life.