In the Spring 2020 semester the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School presented “Who Owns the World? Cooperative Alternatives to Surveillance Capitalism Now!” to introduce students at The New School, and members of the public, to the cooperative digital economy as a global movement that is building a concrete and near-term alternative to crony capitalism and the burning problem of economic inequality.

Students engaged with a range of guest speakers working on varying aspects of an alternative digital economy, from resistance against data colonialism, to cooperative ownership, democratic governance of digital platforms, to cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers like Blockchain, and a slew of other topics. These guest lectures were livestreamed via a partnership with the Internet Society New York Chapter. The series was cut short after 8 sessions, due to COVID-19.

Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data.

A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.