Nathan Schneider is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on cooperatives, digital economies, and democratic alternatives to platform capitalism. He approaches these concerns less as abstract problems than as ongoing experiments in governance and collective life. Drawing on his engagement with cooperative movements and community-based initiatives, he emphasizes small-scale practices that model different ways of organizing ownership, labor, and participation. Rather than presenting a single solution, he highlights the importance of iteration, failure, and adaptation. His perspective situates technology within broader questions of democracy, asking how infrastructures might be designed to support shared control rather than extraction. The conversation underscores process as much as outcome, treating experimentation itself as a meaningful political practice.
