Trebor Scholz
Trebor Scholz (1969, East Berlin) is a German-American writer, educator, activist, artist, and chair of the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture at the New School, New York City. He was raised in a Russian-language school and has since lived in London, Dresden, Weimar, Portland, Buffalo, Tucson, Zurich, and San Francisco. Today, Scholz is Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School. He is an activist in favor of worker rights in the sharing economy and a proponent of platform cooperativism as well as universal basic income. His teaching has focused on themes like global media activism and extra-institutional, self-organized learning. Scholz has convened nine major conferences including the series of three digital labor conferences at The New School. He has presented keynotes and lectures at conferences worldwide. He also founded the platform for online discussions of critical network culture Institute for Distributed Creativity (2004).
Scholz has facilitated large-scale programs such as Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm (2000), Aestheticization of War (co-curated with Nomads in Residency at PS1), Crisis in the Middle East (at The University of Arizona), At Walmart It Still Looks the Same (at Bauhaus-University, Weimar and ACC Gallery in 2001), Politics Is Not Enough (in 2002 at the Santa Fe Art Institute), Right2Fight (with Dominique Malaquais), FreeCooperation (2004, with Geert Lovink), The Internet as Playground and Factory (The New School, 2009), MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit (The New School, 2011), Digital Labor (The New School, 2014), Platform Cooperativism conference (The New School, 2015), ...
He lives in New York City.
Publications[edit]
- Surfacing at a Different Place / Auftauchen an einem anderen Ort, London: Green Press, 1997, 183 pp. (English)/(German)
- FreeCooperation (editor, with Geert Lovink), Buffalo: SUNY, 2004, 30 pp.
- The Art of Free Cooperation (editor, with Geert Lovink), New York: Autonomedia, 2007, 192 pp. [1] [2]
- From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (with Laura Y. Liu), New York: Architectural League of New York, 2010, 77 pp.
- Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, New York: Institute for Distributed Creativity, 2011, 338 pp.
- Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (editor), Routledge, 2012, 258 pp.
- Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy, New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016, 27 pp.
- "Plattform-Kooperativismus. Wie wir uns die Sharing Economy zurückholen können", Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Jun 2016. (German)
- Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, Polity, 2016, 242 pp. [3]
- Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (editor, with Nathan Schneider), New York: O/R Books, 2017, 251 pp.
- Own This! How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet, London: Verso, 2023, 240 pp. Publisher. Review: Brittain (LSE blogs), Hadfield (Coop News).
Links[edit]
- Profile at New School
- Academia.edu
- Website (archived)