September 15, 2008, the day the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in the U.S., marked not just the climax of the last financial crisis but also the beginning of a comprehensive financialisation of the world—where everything, from everyday objects to housing to interpersonal relationships, becomes commodity.
The banking crash that followed the financial crisis was so profound and shaken trust in traditional financial institutions so severely that rescuing and re-socializing these institutions necessitated a new narrative: “we” as an identification factor and reference point for collective economic action.
As millions lost their jobs, savings, and homes in the economic collapse, the public outrage over risky banking practices and financial power coalesced into the collective protest movement Occupy Wall Street, uniting people calling for an “economy by the people, for the people.”
The demands drawn up in the occupied public spaces and subsequently spread around the world inadvertently provided the perfect catalyst for embattled financial capitalism to reinvent itself. At a time when many believed Wall Street was defeated, the seed was sown for a new, even more powerful strategy—one in which the collective, human connection, and the strength of the global community played a central role… at least in the narrative.
The “economy by the people, for the people” indeed emerged—but in a form very different from what Occupy Wall Street activists had intended.
Thanks to low barriers to entry, the global community poured onto digital platforms and became a single, homogeneous audience. This new We placed social relationships and hyper-targeted preferences at the center of the emerging digital economy. Online communities became the engine driving a globally networked behemoth of content and user data. The We became the central element of platform capitalism.
But do these often-invoked collective structures really exist in the age of the platform economy? Or is it all just a marketing narrative designed to cast the unprecedented power and wealth concentration of Big Tech in a benign light?
Below, I trace the principal stages of economic development over the seventeen years following the 2008 financial crisis - years, in which the feeling of We became the driving force of a new capitalism: one built on platforms, data, and a global collective.
From Capitalism Protest to Platform Capitalism
While Occupy Wall Street occupied public squares to demand alternatives to the financial system, platforms like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon began their global ascent. Initially hailed as pioneers of a “smart,” community-based economy, it soon became clear that the new “we” was not democratically organized—it was market-structured.
Digital platforms acted as intermediaries between individual needs and global supply. This was made possible by technological drivers, particularly cloud computing and big data. Services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud made scalable computing power a reality, while social-media platforms harvested user behavior, using it for targeted advertising and algorithmic matchmaking.
The digital collective - us - gradually became a resource: our posts, clicks, chats, and likes fed recommendation engines, turning platforms into the most accurate advertising machines in history. The We ceased to be a political subject and became a consumer demographic.
The best part: we willingly uploaded our pictures, videos, opinions, and preferences, without getting paid for it, and relinquished rights to our creations. We consented to our personal data being shared with advertisers. In doing so, we helped build the most powerful tech companies ever - without having a share in them.
Sharing Economy: Sharing So Others Profit
From around 2010, the Sharing Economy emerged as a powerful narrative. It promised social, sustainable resource use by sharing cars, homes, tools, and cargo bikes instead of owning them.
But this sharing quickly ended in profit. Providers of services made some euros, while platforms monopolized profits and data. What began as community-oriented quickly led to unprecedented monopolies, tax avoidance, and detached corporate responsibility.
In 2014, author Sascha Lobo put it aptly: We live in platform capitalism - a system that commercialises social relations and daily activities, without democratic participation or ownership.
Bitcoin, Blockchain & Web3
In 2009 - one year after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Bitcoin launched a movement, offering many a way out of capitalism: a trustless, decentralised economy without banks, states, or platform owners.
Yet here too, the idea of collective, “coded” trust was subverted. The 2016 DAO hack, where millions were drained from a shared capital pool, was an early example. The so-called alternative digital currency had become a speculative global asset class. Web3, the “Internet of Ownership”, promotes total commercialisation: everything can have a price, everything can be traded - even digital images (NFTs) or social tokens.
The economic enclosure of bits and bytes took place in new social markets. And here too, the We was essential—shored up through storytelling, design, and social rituals, creating the basis for trade in these new assets.
From Data Economy to the Economy of “We”
Over the last two decades, platforms have become the dominant model of the digital economy: social networks, delivery services, streaming platforms, e-commerce portals permeate everyday life. The promise: more efficiency, better connectivity, smarter solutions.
But the more we outsourced communication, work, and leisure to digital platforms, the more pressing the question: who do these platforms actually belong to and who should they belong to?
“Let’s Buy Twitter!”
In 2016, media scholar & activist Nathan Schneider proposed reversing that dynamic when Twitter (now X) was in crisis. In The Guardian, he suggested: Let’s buy Twitter! Let’s let the users own it. The people of Purpose Foundation further refined the idea: implement a corporate structure where investors own dividends but not voting power, and control is distributed based on tiered engagement. Other proposals included crowdfunding ownership, based on the assumption that many users would pay a membership fee rather than giveaway their data.
The idea wasn’t realised - but it opened new thinking: platforms don’t only belong to their founders, they belong to those who bring them to life each day.
Six years later, in 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and relabeled it X. The rest is history.
Platform Cooperativism: A New Digital Economy
Termed Platform Cooperativism by Trebor Scholz in 2015, this model envisions digital platforms owned by their users. Drawing on cooperative principles, it seeks to rebuild platform structures from the ground up. Shared ownership, democratic governance, and collective protection of labor are at its core.
From this, local, self-managed ride services emerged to rival Uber. Bicycle couriers united to create alternatives to large delivery chains. Airbnb-inspired co-ops like Fairbnb arose, organized jointly with cities. The Resonate Music Streaming Collective launched in 2017 as a musician-and-fan-owned cooperative with fair streaming economics. In New York, Up & Go became a blueprint for worker-owned cleaning cooperatives.
In this emerging cooperative digital economy, the We began organising through cooperative frameworks. They cannot compare in scale to Big Tech, but steadily more such ventures appear annually. The Platform Cooperativism Consortium spearheads research, community building, and funding for cooperatively-run platforms worldwide.
Accelerator programs like Start.Coop (USA) and Unfound Accelerator (UK) are forming. In Germany, Platform Coops eG, which I co-founded in 2019, received support from the Federal Ministry of Economics. Activists under #GenoDigital are advocating a digital reform agenda to make cooperatives more accessible for innovative ventures.
Collective Capital
The 2008 financial crisis was not just a watershed for global finance. It was also the turning point in the We narrative. Initially a source of hope for collective empowerment and participation, We was absorbed and commodified by capitalism.
The giant digital platforms of this new era - social networks, sharing economies, blockchain infrastructures - took up the promise of communal action and wove it into their business models. We became both resource and myth, used to generate trust while cloaking centralised control.
Yet within this dialectic lies a new opportunity: collective capital is not only generated by clicks and data. It also resides in the social, political, and creative potential of a networked society, one that increasingly understands and builds its own infrastructures.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, many users left for decentralised alternatives like Mastodon, part of the Fediverse: a digital ecosystem sustained not by a single company but by many independent servers. This migration exemplifies a growing yearning for digital self-sovereignty and shows that the We still exists as an active collective.
The rise of platform cooperatives, the work of many initiatives such as the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, Platform Coops eG or #GenoDigital shows that an alternative digital economy is possible—one based on democratic participation, shared responsibility, and co-creation.
So, We hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it is currently building a new momentum: as collective identity, product, and political practice. The question is not whether collective capital exists, but who owns it, how it is organised, and what it is used for.
In this sense, the economic history of the last seventeen years is not only a story of growing financialisation but also the start of a new conversation over how we want to live together in the future.
Author's Note: This article is a summary of the essay Kollektives Kapital, which was published in 2023 by the Bern Historical Museum in cooperation with the Swiss National Bank as part of the publication series €$$@¥ V.