The cooperative model and the digital ecosystem: an alternative to platform capitalism?

The digital transition has introduced new dimensions in our everyday life, creating complex hybrid realities where digital and physical spheres blend. Platforms, initially seen as participatory spaces promoting community engagement and free information exchange, have become intermediaries in personal data collection and analysis outlining new instances of capitalism within which users are crucial actors as both producers and consumers of data (Degli Esposti, 2015). The understanding of the current hybrid society thus calls for the observation of those principles and values embedded in platform infrastructures, the engagement paths and the mechanisms of data collection that constitute their primary economic asset. The investigation of the processes of platformization (Van Dijck, 2018), endusers’ exploitation and their enclosure into digital walled gardens allow to critically envision the effect of platform capitalism and its implications in the diverse domain of contemporary society. To this extent, the present contribution aims to provide an overview on the complex scenario of digital platforms ruling the hybrid ecosystem, exploring its key actors as well as the proposed alternative of a decentralized infrastructure to ensure an open, ethical and user-centric digital environment thanks to a cooperative design (Scholz, 2016). Eventually, the case study of an electronic identity service in the Netherlands and the cooperative model within the public sphere as paths towards a fairer digital society are discussed.