Peoples' Capitalism
Unlocking Economic Possibilities with Sovereign E-Markets
Your National Economy has Disruptive New Arteries
Since the 2010's, traditional markets - for labor, finance, goods and services - have been displaced by online platforms. Uber's sidelining of taxi firms around the world is a visible tip of this iceberg. Economic activity is intermediated by gig work apps, workforce scheduling systems, supply chain servers, retail websites, and Wall Street's modernized exchanges.
This new economic plumbing is convenient; but not fair, or efficient at allocating resources. It comprises thousands of sophisticated, opaque, platforms, mainly multinational. Each is structured around the owners' needs. They typically prioritize slashing labor costs, edging up prices, locking in users, maximizing valuations or financial speculation.
It's easy to overlook what economic platforms are doing to us. Official data misses the impact. The higher-paid can still largely find regular employment. Wrongdoing by social media platforms seems more tangible. AI generates headlines. But for fungible lower earners, platforms are now a ubiquitous membrane between each person and their economy.
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Coverage of our work
Cogs in Their Machines
Lower-skilled breadwinners earn through an array of channels:
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Workforce Scheduling Systems: Tools like Workforce Central 8 run a monopsony market for each corporate customer. They can call staff in and send them home in line with day-to-day needs of the business.
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Gig Work Apps: Uber's valuations make it a pathfinder. They mislead workers and invest to overturn worker rights. For this service, they retain 30% of your earnings, or more.
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Rental Forums: Countless apps aim to monetize storage, rental of toys/clothes/cars and other assets. Most fail.
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"Maker" Platforms: Maybe start a home business? More profitable large sellers are favored on platforms like eBay and Etsy. The giant Amazon Marketplace can use your data to launch its own products competing against you.
Meanwhile, Wall Street has used platform technologies to shape a new era of broad, deep, ultra-low overhead, data rich, enabling exchanges. AI is turbocharging both financial markets, and extractive, controlling, apps that workers now have to use.
Capitalism in Crisis
As platforms proliferated, most peoples' chances of a traditional job collapsed. This helps explain polling in 2025, across 30 countries, finding 56% of voters believe "my economy is rigged". Separate 2025 research established 40% of adults now regard violence to change their economic system as justifiable.
Multiple factors contribute to hatred of the world's dominant economic system; bank bail outs, flatlining wages, public service cuts, outsourcing, globalization, waning unions. But today's economic platforms are an enabling architecture for all of them. Every day they suck resources into destabilizing speculation while attracting businesses to pools of commoditized, cheapened, labor.
Campaigners strive to tame the excesses of platforms. But "fair work week" acts, platform governance rules, data brokering, and other measures can be subtly subverted by secretive algorithms. In digitized capitalism, whoever controls the infrastructure sets the rules. Right now, that's Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
A New Public Utility
Our work focuses on initiating alternative economic infrastructure. Any country could incentivize corporates to fund and operate a comprehensive system of regulated e-markets across the base of its economy. This would unlock the potency of platforms for economic growth and inclusion while costing taxpayers nothing and widening everyone's choices.
Imagine a sophisticated market platform packed with new functionality to maximize any user's income, opportunity, and choices. Within their rules, it can seamlessly (a) trade hours they want to work across their entire range of abilities, with full protections and benefits (b) rent out possessions (c) construct job opportunities and other possibilities (d) lend/borrow cash to/from peers (e) interact directly with official facilities. Crucially, this is a horizontal system of regional markets, not the global verticals of today.
Imagine this platform provides constant, localized, actionable, data about demand, supply, and earnings across thousands of microeconomic sectors. It can use those insights to incentivize market-aligning investment in upskilling, or trigger interventions for a struggler. Operating at huge scale with ultra-low charges, the joined-up markets it offers are open, decentralized, transparent, neutral and relentlessly focused on maximizing economic potential for any individual or business wanting to use it.
Extending Digital Public Infrastructure
Companies like Uber have no need, remit, or unique leverage to initiate all-sectors, genuinely empowering, market infrastructure. Governments have all those things and are already half-way there with initiatives like India's Aadhaar identity checking system and Brazil's Pix payments platform. Both are widely adopted and hugely successful electorally. Multiple countries are launching a Central Bank Digital Currency for residents wanting modernized money that is backed by the state rather than a startup.
How does a government go the next step; initiating - but not funding or running - an end-to-end system of e-markets? An official concession, like the ones that get corporates competing to launch national or state lotteries for a small cut of sales. It should mandate a focus on small transaction sizes. This fosters market access, precision and fine-grained data. Atomized activity opens newly granular financial services and social safety nets while boosting resilience, greening, precision government, and competitiveness.
Competing providers offering AI on this architecture should lead to income maximization tools and the rise of human capital as an asset class attracting investors with data, risk mitigation, and market solidity to equal Wall Street's exchanges. For activists, policymakers or business leaders ready to take back control of market economies from international opportunists, there are exciting options.
Thirty Years' Development
An officially initiated markets platform could become monolithic, anticompetitive, sclerotic or undemocratic. Our apolitical nonprofit works with technologists, academics, campaign groups, policymakers, governance experts, and others to identify these pitfalls. We then research how they can be prevented in technology and a broad framework of legislation that establishes updated national economic infrastructure as part of the checks and balances of a healthy democracy. The first full implementations of this work may be in transition nations.
We emerged from a project at the UK Demos thinktank during the 1990's. Now we are best known as initiators of government programs that launched a radical new labor market platform in both Britain and the US. Our wider work has produced books, countless articles, and policy papers for organizations on both the anti-poverty left and the free market right. We see our efforts within a lineage of historical campaigns that controversially turned a then emerging technology into a genuine public utility.
Supportive-but-competitive, "Peoples' Capitalism" has been a grail for thinkers on right and left over decades. Today, powerful new market technologies make it newly viable. And churning uncertainty makes it essential to re-align market economies with individuals' aspirations.
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