/reader

Hamilton Nolan/How Things Work: Interview with Erik Forman, labor activist, and creator of The Drivers Cooperative (via Tracy Durnell). Three points I found interesting were Erik’s comments about (1) businesses could be capitalized (started) for $200K-$300K in loans, (2) “… could we just start companies that are owned by workers from the start, and are therefore run by workers in their own interests, and return wealth to the community instead of extracting it?”, and (3) “The main barrier is access to capital. We can build businesses that generate profit, but because the business is worker-owned, it doesn’t fit in the normative forms that venture capital prefers, and there really isn’t a large supply of risk capital for initiatives that serve a social purpose. It’s kind of the entire problem of capitalism, right? Workers don’t have capital. Definitionally. Otherwise we would not be workers.”. I enjoyed the article, and thought about myself as a career worker. I think that most people want a job, not a business, that starting and running a business is too much work, they would rather be paid for their labor and not deal with the other aspects of business ownership. For people working in the tech industry (computers, aviation, whatever tech you want to look at), it seems to me that there may be opportunities at the low end (small businesses), but few examples of cooperative business with a large number of employees. Certainly something to think about….

Elle Griffin writes about recent BigPub merger settlement (merger did not go through), and how few new copies of most books are sold, and lots of other interesting financial details. I mostly buy used books, so I can believe this story (via Simon Willison). Killer quote:

I have been looking into what protest songs/chants have been used in the past five to ten years. Researcher Noriko Manabe from Indiana University has a recent journal article and a set of posts on Medium collecting songs and chants from US protests since 2017:

I entered the title of this post as a search phrase in Google, and here are some of the top results:

Indivisible.org: Defeat Trump Toolkit – This resource was created in January 2023, has suggestions for organizing events, recruiting group members, and links to other content at Indivisible.org.