Economic Possibilities with Sovereign E-Markets
Your National Economy has Disruptive New Plumbing
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 upheaval. Economic activity now flows through gig work apps, workforce scheduling systems, supply chain servers, retailing websites and Wall Street's modernized exchanges.
This remodeled economic infrastructure is convenient; but not fair, inclusive or efficient at utilizing resources. It comprises thousands of sophisticated, opaque, platforms, mainly multinational. Each is structured around its owners' needs. Priorities include cutting labor costs, edging up prices, locking in users, maximizing valuations and 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 companies is more relatable. AI generates headlines. But for fungible lower earners, economic platforms form a ubiquitous membrane between each person and their economy.
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Coverage of our work
Cogs in Their Machines
Instead of regular employment, lower-skilled adults increasingly earn through an array of bad markets:
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Workforce Scheduling Systems: Tools like Workforce Central 8 run a monopsony labor 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 home storage, rental of toys/clothes/cars or other assets. Most fail.
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"Maker" Platforms: Maybe start a home business? Corporate sellers are favored on platforms including eBay and Etsy. The giant Amazon Marketplace can use your data to launch its own products competing against you.
In contrast, Wall Street has used platform technologies to shape a new era of broad, deep, ultra-low overhead, data rich, neutral exchanges. AI is turbocharging both financial markets and the extractive, controlling, apps that work-seekers now have to use.
Capitalism in Crisis
Injustice embedded in today's economic plumbing remains hard to dissect, but easy to intuit for those on the receiving end. It helps explain 2025 findings, across 30 countries, that 68% of voters believe "My economy is rigged". Separate research established 40% see violence against the economic system as justifiable.
Multiple reasons are cited for hatred of today's capitalism; precariousness, inequality, bank bail outs, flatlining wages, globalization, inflation, austerity, outsourcing. Today's economic platforms are an enabling architecture for all of them. Every day they extract wealth, undermine stability and drive businesses towards pools of commoditized, cheapened, controllable labor.
Campaigners strive to tame the excesses of platforms. But "fair work week" acts, platform governance rules, minimum wage hikes, and other steps can be subverted by secretive algorithms. In digitized capitalism, whoever controls the arteries sets the rules. Right now, that's Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
A New Economic Engine
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 unleash 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 options. 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.
This platform can provide 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. They are already on the way 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 their 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 turnover. It should mandate a focus on low-value transactions. This fosters market access, precision matching and fine-grained data. Atomized activity opens granular financial services and social safety nets while boosting resilience, greening, government efficiency 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 possibilities.
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 think tanks 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, "People's 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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