Flying the Coop: EMMA Technology Cooperative "When you take infinite growth off the table, this entire world of possibilities opens up." — Ramsey Nassar, EMMA Technology Cooperative We make this show to learn things, ask good questions, and let really cool people shine (and maybe occasionally get a little clever ourselves). This conversation did something different: it reminded us that what we're building isn't just a business model. It can be radical. And maybe it should be. 📖👀 Prefer reading? Full transcript and show notes live on our site.​ ​ Listen to the episode

Here's something rather strange (this coming from a company with the word in their name!):

We are a worker-owned co-op, and we don't often talk about why.

The structural fact, sure. It's not a secret, it's on the website. We signed the bylaws, we share decisions, we pay each other equally, we say "co-op" in nearly every episode intro.

But the politics underneath the structure — the actual reason we built it this way — we keep that part piano piano.

This is partly because, uh, we want clients. Real ones, with budgets, including folks who don't necessarily 100000% share our politics but are doing work we big time believe in.

We can absolutely do meaningful work with people whose worldview doesn't match ours one-to-one. We've done it and we'll keep doing it.

But our actual stance on capitalism is closer to: burn it down.

And also: we're all trapped in this shitshow together, so how do we build things that support each other inside it?

Which is a slightly harder sell than "we'll help you make the big bucks."

This week's episode features Ramsey, Gwen, and Andy from EMMA Technology Cooperative. It stoked the radical fires already burning in our little hearts.

EMMA is a worker-owned co-op in New York that builds software and hardware for theme parks, theaters, video games, public installations. They are five years in, thriving, and completely unsentimental about why they organize this way.

Capitalism collapses all activity into a single verb: profit.​
Money turned into more money.
If you're breaking even, you're not doing the thing.

That's the system's only operation.

Not "people who do the work get paid."

Not "the organization keeps existing."

Not "we made something we love."

Just: money grew. 📈

If you can encode whatever you actually care about as profitable activity, the system will support it. Everything else is invisible to it.

​

There's a small Venn diagram overlap between useful, interesting work and profitable work. Most of what we care deeply about lives in that little slice.

Being a co-op is one of the ways we get to intentionally operate in those coordinates. We can defer, delay, take a hit, choose quality over speed, and choose each other over growth.

In short, there are more verbs.

That's what EMMA has, that's what we have, that's what I want to be bolder about talking about.

(an aside that's very present for me as I write this: living in Spain has truly scrambled my American cultural upbringing. The US is weirdly insistent on politics and money as taboo topics. Spain is much more relaxed about all of it. People ask what you paid for your house. People talk about politics at dinner. It was unnerving for me as a recent transplant but I've grown to embrace it. It's good for the collective to share where we're at freely!)

​

Ramsey, Gwen, and Andy are warm and geeky and brave. They make me want to be a little more of all three.

The episode is live now wherever you listen (except Spotify, and here’s why that’s intentional). It's one of my favorites we've made.

• ​Here's the link to its home on the web, where you can either listen to it or read the full transcript.
• ​Here's the link to where it hangs out on YouTube, in case you'd like more of our goofy faces.

💡 What have you trained yourself not to say in a professional context? What's it costing you?

💡 If your work only had access to one verb — one way to measure whether it's working — what would you want it to be? And how far is is from the verb the system is actually using?

Hit reply. We read everything, always.

Petons!

Janel (she/they)

🏳️‍⚧️✊🏳️‍🌈✊🇵🇸

P.S. We don't have an About page.