What Cooperatives and Blockchain Can Learn From Each Other feat. Morshed Mannan

This week I spoke with Morshed Mannan (@MannanMorshed), a PhD candidate at Leiden Law School in The Netherlands and  Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. His research interest in cooperatives and digital technologies eventually led him to blockchain and he's produced some really interesting research and seminars on its intersection.

During the interview we discuss his previously published research about the differences between trust and confidence on the blockchain and link that to his work about cooperatives, we revisit two projects that were on the podcast previously (Eva Coop and Colony), and discuss how blockchain and coops have similar properties while also having a lot to learn from one another. At some point we also agree that cooperatives may be a good way to take entrepreneurship away from the right wing.

Sources:

•  Blockchain as a confidence machine: The problem of trust & challenges of governance
• Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project
• Everything Old is New Again: Evaluating the Legal and Governance Structures of Shared-Services Platform Cooperatives (Unpublished but will be published here soon)
• TBS Interview with Colony
• TBS Interview with Eva Coop

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ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.

The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.