Tech workers, long known for having high-paying and high-quality jobs, have experienced massive layoffs. Despite Big Tech firms posting record profits and valuations,[1] tech firms have laid off over 700,000 workers in the last three years [between 2022 until the publishing of this blog post (December 4, 2025)].[2] If tech firms post record profits while still laying off workers, is there an alternative where firms can provide stable and decent employment to workers? If profitable tech firms lay off workers en masse, what does this mean for workers in other more precarious sectors? Can workers run their own profitable tech firms and thus act in their own self-interest (and the interests of the firm) to protect their employment?

The simple answer is yes. The reality is more complicated. In this post, I will share a transcript of an interview with a worker from a cybersecurity cooperative based in Russia, Rad Cop. You can also find the link to the full interview on YouTube or on your favorite podcast app.

Is the Social Responsibility of a Firm Its Profits or Its Workers?  

Milton Friedman (1912-2006), a highly influential American economist and 1976 Nobel Laureate in Economics, argued that a company’s primary social responsibility is to boost profits and returns for its shareholders.[3] This viewpoint has led to profit maximization becoming the prevailing economic and managerial approach. Under this neoliberal framework, companies often resort to layoffs, blaming underperforming, “lazy,” or inadequately skilled workers rather than managers, owners, or shareholders.

While some workers might underperform, it is a mistake to assume that managers, owners, or shareholders always know what is best for the company or are the most skilled at running it. The difference is that managers, owners, and shareholders are in a position to decide how to distribute the revenues and profits the company generates. Workers are mostly left out. During the Great Recession, financial institutions used taxpayer bailout funds to give large bonuses to managers and CEOs.[4]  Some would argue that the same people who were in charge and responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, which triggered the Great Recession, should have resigned and refused the bailout money if they had any sense of responsibility beyond their own self-interest. A system that rewards individuals responsible for a crisis is not meritocratic or just.

Yet, alternatives prove workers can govern their own firms. Take Argentina, for example. There, workers took over failed factories and turned them into successful businesses, saving over 16,000 jobs across 400 companies.[5] These blue-collar workers did this during Argentina’s worst economic crisis.[6] Rather than resorting to individual response, they took collective action.

Individual worker responses, such as upskilling, entrepreneurship, or freelancing, do not work for most workers. They may prove for the exceptionally skilled and savvy, but that leaves the majority out. Individuals do not build great firms and societies. They are the collective effort of the many.

Why are Tech Workers Turning to Collective Action?

Collective action has not been a characteristic of tech workers. Given their perceived high-skill and market demand, they act like the exceptionally skilled and savvy individuals. Once the layoffs rise, and the job quality conditions for tech workers declines,[7] workers turn turning to collective action responses. These responses include forming unions[8] or even worker cooperatives.[9]  

What are worker cooperatives? Worker cooperatives are democratically owned and managed firms where each member has a voice and a vote are the members and owners of the organization.[10]

Why are unions and worker cooperatives important? These are organizational forms that provide worker voice and power. Without a seat at the table and strength in numbers, workers are in a weak position to negotiate with managers, owners, and shareholders.

What about AI?

Given the rise of AI and the possibility of job displacement, it’s crucial for workers to have a stronger voice. Historically, unions, worker councils, and worker cooperatives have served as effective ways to amplify worker voices. These institutions are not perfect. Critics will point out corruption in unions, or fraudulent cooperatives that undermine worker well-being. These organizations are not silver bullets. But they offer workers counterweight and a seat at the negotiating table. What’s more, since the 1970s, workers have not enjoyed the benefits of increased productivity. In the United States, the productivity-pay gap has been steadily rising (Figure 1).[11] This is a result of deliberate policies, and exclusion of workers from firm governance, including firm investments and pay distribution. It is not because workers are less productive or “lazier.” On the contrary, the growth in productivity gains have outpaced compensation by more two times in the last five decades.

To reduce productivity, pay-gap, and protect workers from job loss at profitable firms, workers need a seat at the table. The ways workers can have a seat at the table is through collective action. One story of such collective action is told by Yuliy Lobarev.  

In continuation of this post, read the full transcript of the interview with Yuliy Lobarev, a worker at a Russian cybersecurity worker cooperative.

Transcript of the Interview with Yuliy Lobarev

Notes

This interview was translated with the help of AI. There may be some mistakes and omissions.

Sociocracy: There was a discission about sociocracy, which is a governance model summarized as “good enough for now, safe enough to try.” You can read more about it here.

Transcript

[00:00:03] Stefan Ivanovski Okay, hello everyone. My name is Stefan Ivanovski from Lifestyle Democracy, your host today. Lifestyle Democracy is a platform or a podcast where we seek to create a community where we learn to live and build democracies one day at a time. Today we have a special guest. It’s Yuliy Lobarev, who is a worker owner of Rad Cop and a cooperative member at Patio. He’s currently based in Russia. So before we jump into the interview, I just wanted to introduce the topic of today, which is gonna be tech worker cooperatives and the impacts of artificial intelligence. And the reason we are bringing this topic to attention is because tech workers who have long been known for having high paying jobs and high quality jobs are being laid off in large numbers in recent years. This is happening even in big tech firms that have been recording record profits and valuations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. And workers, especially tech workers, have been responding in various ways to these massive layoffs through different workplace democracy initiatives. And by workplace democracy, we’re thinking of different forms of horizontal management or initiatives where workers have a greater voice in decision making processes in the companies. And these range from traditionally unions to various forms of employee and worker ownership. And the topic of today’s discussion will be the specifically the Rad Cop worker cooperative based in Russia, as well as the Patio international cooperative network of tech worker cooperatives. So I introduced this topic by saying that we are gonna be demo discussing the democratization of tech work, and by democratization, we understand the process of empowering individuals and communities without harming others. I also opened by saying that we’re talking about building a community where we want to learn and about living and building democracies. So it’s not the emphasis on one type of democracy, but rather democracies. Daily life or daily lifestyle. So this is the topic of today’s discussion, and the tension that we want to understand is whether workplace democracy can respond to some of the challenges that we’re seeing with how tech work, especially in the age of AI is being restructured. And without further ado, I would like to introduce Yuliy Lobarev, who will tell us a little bit more about his experience working as a tech worker cooperative member. So just briefly, Yuliy Robarev is a cooperative governance researcher associated with the Cybersecurity Cooperative Rad Cop and the Patio International Cooperative Network. He’s been transitioning from an IT specialist role where he’s focusing on researching diverse aspects of cooperatives, including their formation, international differences, and the coexistence of their business and cultural models. Yuli, thank you for joining my me on this podcast. Now would like for you to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit. More about what do you do and how you came about to be a worker cooperative member. And before that, I think it’s important to define what does a worker cooperative mean and mean more specifically to you.

[00:04:46] Yuliy Lobarev Thank you Stefan. My name is Yuliy. I work with Rad Cop. It’s a cybersecurity cooperative. So we have started a bit more than three years ago in ninety two. So we are rather young organization and just a small update. I’m not a worker owner just now, just a worker here. We plan to increase the number of worker owners, but we are still discussing how to do it better. So a cooperative for me it can be many things. First of all, it’s an organizational form, because we have legislation which basically defines what the worker cooperative is. But of course we can create a cooperative, then the owners will vote on a board or on a chair, and then these people will just rule this cooperative like in limited liability company or in a shareholders’ company. So it’s also a culture governance model, not just how what kind of legal form it has. So I think we should define a cooperative not only by its legal form, but on but also by its governance structure, governance model, and probably even culture, because we can remember cooperative principles, cooperative follows. Even if not every cooperative follows these principles and values, still there are good guidelines what to do.

[00:07:05] Stefan Ivanovski So just a clarification, so you said Rad Cop, if I understood correctly, has been in operation for three years or

[00:07:14] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, just a bit more three years. But I can also add that people who established this cooperative, they also worked as freelancers with each other, I think for several more years, like three or four years.

[00:07:36] Stefan Ivanovski And how long ago did you join and why did you join?

[00:07:41] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I have joined almost in the beginning, so I’m here for almost three years already, and I’ve joined before because our chairman asked me to help him and other cooperators, other workers basically to do something. I’m not a cyber security specialist myself, I’m more like IT specialist engineer and even cyber security specialists they also need an IT infrastructure to care about. So I thought that it’s an interesting opportunity to try to work in a cooperative to see what is what’s it’s about. So I decided why not? Let’s try. We the only cybersecurity cooperative in Russia so far, and probably maybe one of the few in the whole world, considering that there are not many IT cooperatives around.

[00:09:06] Stefan Ivanovski So, why did you decide to join a worker cooperative and did you have any prior knowledge about worker cooperatives?

[00:09:18] Yuliy Lobarev Well actually I hadn’t have my hadn’t have much. Hadn’t had much, yes.

[00:09:33] Stefan Ivanovski Mm-hmm.

[00:09:34] Yuliy Lobarev Because it was a new topic for me, and that was actually one of the reasons why I found Patio because I couldn’t find many local sources or materials or articles in Russian about cooperatives. Well, of course now I know more about this topic and I can find even Russian sources, but three years ago it was a bit difficult, so I started to look English sources, look for English sources, and I found I think the UK Federation, one of the first sources, workers.co and also Patio, because it was also a network of technological cooperatives and it was easy to join, so I started to talk to people and got some useful information.

[00:10:50] Stefan Ivanovski And previously, where did you work? Did you work in another worker cooperative or in what form did you work before joining Rad Cop?

[00:10:59] Yuliy Lobarev Before this I worked in a regular limited liability company.

[00:11:09] Stefan Ivanovski And for how many years did you work before joining Rad Cop?

[00:11:14] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I have rather big experience in this field, I think about fifteen years, something like this.

[00:11:29] Stefan Ivanovski What is the size of Rad Cop? How many members does it have and what’s the structure of Rad Cop?

[00:11:37] Yuliy Lobarev Let’s talk about workers because it’s easier. We have about 40 workers right now, but not of them are full-time workers. I think about 16 or 17 are full-timers, the rest are part-timers or freelancers. We have to arrange it like this because the cybersecurity market here is rather seasonal, and we have a lot of projects in the end of the year, but only a few in the beginning of the year, though we so we have to use freelancers’ work to adapt.

[00:12:28] Stefan Ivanovski So yeah, for those of you for those who may not be familiar in a worker cooperative, typically there are members who are usually worker owners, but sometimes there are cooperatives like the from what you’re describing, Rad Cop seems to have this more of a hybrid model where some workers are member owners and some are freelancers. So can you explain the structure of Rad Cop and what kind of a legal entity does it have?

[00:12:58] Yuliy Lobarev Well the lead legal entity is if I translate into English it’s a production cooperative which is basically the only kind of entity suitable for workers cooperative. So it’s really a cooperative on paper. In the same time we have only six owners right now because we still don’t have a viable solution how to add more worker owners. Basically we are working on our governance and we would like to improve it as much as we can before introducing more worker owners. But in the same time we basically every active person, every worker can con participate in the governance or in decision making.

[00:14:11] Stefan Ivanovski And what are some of those challenges that make it difficult to incorporate other member owners?

[00:14:22] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I think the current idea is that cooperatives are not well known here right now, and people mostly know only hierarchical organizational models. So it’s rather difficult for newcomers to adapt to such horizontal self-management systems. Also, I think another problem is agency because people have to think for themselves and do something only. Well, basically, they should be entrepreneurs. Everyone should be like an entrepreneur to think for themselves, to work for themselves. It’s very active mindset, I think, and people need to learn it for a while. So basically, most of people agree that we don’t have enough people with such a mindset to add them to worker owners list.

[00:15:46] Stefan Ivanovski And what do you think is necessary to cultivate that kind of mindset?

[00:15:53] Yuliy Lobarev Oh well it’s a difficult question. We’re still discussing it because we have a lot of ideas ranging from just watching videos and movies about people with similar mindsets or go into special courses, getting learning, training, whatever. But I think we should investigate it a bit more. For example, I’m learning works of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, and he has a very interesting model of governance and power which is called disciplinary power. I think it can be used to create a good model how to not force but help people in a cooperative to adapt better to cooperative folios and even this interpreter’s mindset. But it’s still a work of a work in progress.

[00:17:27] Stefan Ivanovski Very good. I was curious to know how does how was the idea for Rad Cop born? Did do you have the origin story behind?

[00:17:45] Yuliy Lobarev You mean the name?

[00:17:48] Stefan Ivanovski N not just the name but the idea itself. Why was it formed as a worker cooperative? It’s not as you said, it’s not typical that tech workers in Russia or more broadly would decide to form a worker cooperative.

[00:18:07] Yuliy Lobarev Well, as far as I know, it was kind of discussion among future worker owners, basically freelancers at this time because they needed some kind of enterprise. The reason is simple. In Russia, several kinds of cybersecurity services require licenses, and some types of these licenses can be obtained only for enterprises, not for private people. So they had to create an enterprise and they thought about it for a while. Our chairmen have studied cooperatives at this time, and they decided they can try it because it was an interesting maybe a novel form of enterprise for that moment, considering we don’t have many IT cooperatives in Russia, and as far as I know, in other countries there are mostly agricultural cooperatives or consumer cooperatives, but not IT cooperatives. So they thought about it for a while, it decided just to try because. This kind of enterprise can be transformed into limited liability company or shareholders company if needed, but so far it works for us.

[00:19:53] Stefan Ivanovski And what do you think makes Rad Cop successful to date? It’s been on operation for three years, and according to some statistics, usually businesses, especially startups, have a failure rate within the first five years of over ninety percent. So I hope that you remain successful. I just was curious what do you think makes Rad Cop successful to date? And what are the challenges ahead that you foresee?

[00:20:29] Yuliy Lobarev I think that of course it’s a bit of chance so we have enough clients so we can even grow and find more people to work together. But it’s difficult to say. Maybe we have enough of people with good expertise. For example, some of our specialists have more than ten years experience in cyber security, and we have people with good communication skills, good accountants, good project managers, of course, good auditors, and it helps that these people have worked together before forming the cooperative, so they got some contacts and managed to transform these contacts into clients. And about as for challenges, I think in the same time it is one of the challenges, our rapid growth. We have to create a lot of processes, documentation, rules, how to work together because as you can imagine if there are three or five people in a cooperative, they can just gather together and discuss everything. But we have already more than forty people and even getting everyone together it’s a difficult task. Not just discuss and agree on something. So we have to build more or less horizontal structure with a lot of roles, responsibilities and so on. I hope it will work in future. Yeah.

[00:22:48] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah. And who are your clients and where are they based?

[00:22:55] Yuliy Lobarev Right now they are mostly based in Russia because it’s easier to find local clients and we mostly work with finance institutions right now like banks or payment systems because our legislation for finance institutions is very rapidly changing. So they need a penetration tests quite often, they need audits like compliance audits and sometimes application secure application development. But we are also looking for international clients. For example, recently we finished a project for this UK Federation. I mentioned already workers dot cooperative workers dot co op, sorry.

[00:23:56] Stefan Ivanovski Okay, yeah, yes, I’m familiar with workers.co op Great. So mentioning now the international clans, I think that’s a good segue to talk about Patio. Can you tell us a little bit more about what is Patio? When was it founded?

[00:24:16] Yuliy Lobarev Sure. Basically, Patio is kind of informal network of technological cooperative. I mean informal because we don’t have an enterprise yet or an office. We have channels to discuss things and worker working groups which we call circles using sociocratic models. But in general, we are just a group of volunteers who gather together from members cooperative cooperatives around the world, and we are looking for ways how to improve cooperation between the members, how to find new clients and probably help a number of cooperatives work with a client. And it was created I think in ninety eighteen when the first discourse forum was created by the very first Patio members, and we started to grow from here. People visited the UK. Met with cooperators and after a while we got our own landing page. We’ve met more like minded people on different events and we even helped organized some events like the Kutin event in Barcelona if I’m not mistaken a couple of years ago. So right now we have I think about sixty cooperative members and probably more than six hundred people from these cooperatives in total.

[00:26:35] Stefan Ivanovski Very nice, yeah. So I just wanted to make clarification. I think probably you meant two thousand and eighteen. You mentioned nineteen eighteen as the founding year, but I think it’s probably two thousand and eighteen, yeah. Yes, yeah.

[00:26:51] Yuliy Lobarev That’s correct, sorry. Yeah.

[00:26:53] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah, no, it’s okay, yeah. Yeah, so that’s so you say there are about sixty cooperatives from how many countries are there cooperatives represented at Patia? I think.

[00:27:06] Yuliy Lobarev I think about twenty twenty five countries.

[00:27:12] Stefan Ivanovski And what are the channels of communications that you said? Is there a particular set of tools that are used? Because in my previous discussions with worker cooperative members, they emphasize open source software. So I was curious if this is something that Patio also embraces.

[00:27:31] Yuliy Lobarev That’s true. Many people from cooperatives I know they embrace open source software and in Patio we also use Materrmost chat to daily communications, let’s say, and we also have an NextCloud instance to share files, keep them and so on, to do some work on documents together.

[00:28:00] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah. What is the rationale or the connection between cooperatives and open source software?

[00:28:09] Yuliy Lobarev I think it’s kind of similar I think they have similar idea because cooperatives they are horizontally managed and they are a bit independent from big tech corporation if we talk about IT cooperatives. In the same time open source software is also a bit independent from software products from Google, Microsoft and companies like this. So it’s I think open source is more or less aligned with cooperatives’ values. That’s why probably many cooperatives use it.

[00:29:08] Stefan Ivanovski And are there any particular challenges to using open source software as opposed to more widespread collaboration tools like Google Cloud or or any of the other common chat communication channels like WhatsApp, Signal, perhaps Telegram?

[00:29:33] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I can say that Mattermost is very good chat software. It has a lot of functions we can use and even some of them which we don’t use, so it’s very good comparing from my opinion to WhatsApp, Telegram and all this commercial software. It’s also good in a sense that it’s basically made for organizations, so it’s self-contained instance just for people in one organization. And as for other products like NextCloud, it probably has its own issues because it may be not as compatible as products from Microsoft, for example, but people s are still using mostly Microsoft document formats. So but in the same time I think it’s working alternative, and if people can leave with couple of quirks, it’s really working product.

[00:31:06] Stefan Ivanovski Great. So Patio, you said it’s an informal organization of worker cooperatives in the tech sector representing over twenty countries, about six hundred workers. I was curious what types of collaborations do Patio members engage in? Are there any particular projects that members of the Patio network have worked on for a commercial client, for example, or any other type of client?

[00:31:37] Yuliy Lobarev Well, we mostly work with commercial clients, I believe. Mostly there are collaborations between two or three cooperatives. When, for example, one cooperative need an expertise in another field, they ask another cooperative to help them. Or sometimes it’s just one cooperative need an expertise of a particular person, so they can invite a worker from another cooperative just as a freelancer. As far as I know, we’ve got number of projects, probably more than ten of them so far. Unfortunately not a big number, but we hope that we can get more projects in the future because it’s actually kind of our superpower. I mean we have people all around the globe with different expertise, so we can quickly assemble a team to work on almost everything. We still need to solve some of our internal problems and arrange our own processes, but At least that’s what we would like to do.

[00:33:13] Stefan Ivanovski How did you personally get involved in Patio?

[00:33:20] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I just registered in the Mattermost chat and became involved.

[00:33:28] Stefan Ivanovski And how did you learn about Patio?

[00:33:33] Yuliy Lobarev Well, that’s difficult to say. Maybe it was a workers.coop forum or a source close to them. Then I found I think the website. I looked for contacts and found a GitHub page which helped me to find one of the landing page maintainer, a nice person from the Japanese cooperative who invited me in the Mattermost chat. The rest is history.

[00:34:18] Stefan Ivanovski What are the prerequisites or the conditions to joining Patio?

[00:34:25] Yuliy Lobarev There are not many. Basically a person should represent workers cooperative and their members should be agreeable or they can vote somehow or decide in another way that they want to be a part of Patio, then the representative should join the chat to stay in touch. And we also we usually ask for representatives to be more active, not just to stay in the chat and read what’s happening, but participate in circles and help us to build this network together.

[00:35:23] Stefan Ivanovski Can you explain a little bit more about the this idea of circles and how it works and where it comes from?

[00:35:33] Yuliy Lobarev Basically, it came from sociocracy model. So people are working in circle instead in circles instead of regular departments in hierarchical organizations. So for example, if we have a cooperative of developers, the group of developers who develop in Go, for example, or Python, they will form a circle. Then usually a sociocracy suggests to form another bigger circle from the representatives of smaller circles. We have something similar in Patio, we have general assembly, and usually not just everyone from every cooperative joins this assembly, but mostly circle representatives. And we have I think four circles right now who do different sort of work. For example, we have an international, sorry, internal organization circle. And we have strategic alliance circle and Well groups like this.

[00:37:11] Stefan Ivanovski And what is the difference between a circle and a department? From what you’re describing, it seems like according to sociocracy, which is a governance type of model, it seems that a circle is a synonym for a department in a hierarchical organization. How is a circle under the sociocratic governance model different from a department in a hierarchical

[00:37:40] Yuliy Lobarev Fair. Mostly it’s different that a circle doesn’t have a manager or any kind of boss in the circle. So people just work together, and if they want to decide on something, they you can use sociocratic consent decision making process, or if they decide on another decision making process, they can use something else. They can vote, they can use consensus or whatever they like. And when they decide on something, well this decision goes live.

[00:38:33] Stefan Ivanovski Okay, so the difference is that there is collective decision making and the power to decide is not vested or held by a figure of authority like a manager or an owner, but rather it’s decided by the members within that circle in a democratic fashion.

[00:38:55] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, that’s true. They just need to stay inside the domain of responsibility, basically to not to go in other circles domain and decide something for them, but they can always ask and collaborate.

[00:39:20] Stefan Ivanovski So how are circles delimited? Who decides how many circles there are going to be and what each circle will do?

[00:39:32] Yuliy Lobarev Well I think people just find the specific fields or areas they need to do some sort of work. For example, in Patio someone has to do internal organizing, like invite new people talk to them, answer incoming emails or other sorts of communication, contact representatives from different cooperatives and so on. All of these can be included into the domain of internal organization. So people who wanted to work on this domain, they just formed this circle and voila.

[00:40:35] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah, very nice. And how are workers compensated if at all for their work that they’re doing at pat at Patio or is this voluntary type of engagement?

[00:40:54] Yuliy Lobarev Right now it’s a voluntary type because we don’t have any kind of fees or donors, a small announcement. If you want to sponsor us, f feel free to find Patio.coop.

[00:41:14] Stefan Ivanovski So how would the potential sponsors or donors be able to contribute given that it’s an informal network, is there some kind of a structure that would enable to receive payments and to disburse because there are operations and well there are members in twenty countries with probably twenty different jurisdictions and and rules. So how would that work potentially in the future? Is this something that’s part of the discussions at Patio?

[00:41:50] Yuliy Lobarev We are still investigating it. We want to establish an office somewhere, mostly to help cooperatives to collaborate, maybe transfer money, sign contracts and whatever. And if we have an office, it would be easier to find donors who can sponsor us if they want, or just distribute money for workers, because right now everyone is a volunteer in Patio basically. And as we don’t have any fees right now, we couldn’t afford to pay for any work. But if we get some fees one day, we can probably find people who will just focus on this work, and I think it will help us to be more organized.

[00:42:58] Stefan Ivanovski And how are collaborations between different worker cooperatives that are members of of Patio established and how are they carried out? Because in my previous work in consulting, whenever we would form these consortia or these groups where we would collaborate together, there would have to be some kind of an agreement, whether it’s written or more of an informal type of agreement or an arrangement to collaborate together. So what kinds of arrangements are made when you have worked on some of those ten or so projects that you’ve mentioned and do individuals become part of the Patio network or sometimes cooperatives themselves join together and then they go and bid on a project together? How does it how does the collaboration among different worker members and worker cooperatives within Patio work?

[00:44:12] Yuliy Lobarev I think as for collaborations between cooperatives, they can just sign an agreement between particular entities or enterprises and work together. And if one cooperative needs only one or two workers from another cooperative, they can just hire such people as freelancers. Probably in some cases they had only informal agreement. But in for bigger projects I believe we had a formal contract between entities.

[00:45:02] Stefan Ivanovski And who holds the contract? Is there usually one cooperative or it’s

[00:45:12] Yuliy Lobarev considering that two or three cooperatives are collaborating together, I believe that each side holds their own copy of a contract. So they just negotiate on something they would like to do together.

[00:45:33] Stefan Ivanovski And where are these clients based, the clients that Patio has worked with?

[00:45:39] Yuliy Lobarev I think we’ve got some clients from Europe, I’m not sure which country, and probably even some clients from the US.

[00:45:53] Stefan Ivanovski And which circles are you part of at Patio?

[00:45:58] Yuliy Lobarev Right now I’m mostly active in the strategic alliance circle. We mostly contact external world, we look for opportunities, contacts and think how can we improve Patio in longer time frame.

[00:46:29] Stefan Ivanovski Given that you’ve mentioned that you’ve talked a little bit about your engagement with Patio and also your engagement as a as a worker at Rad Cop, I was curious how much time do you dedicate to the activities with Patio and how much time do you dedicate to the specialized worker cooperative type of governance activities within Rad Cop?

[00:46:58] Yuliy Lobarev Well I can say that I dedicate probably not as much time as I should because I still have another work like my main work in the cooperative but that’s probably couple of times each week sorry couple of hours each week for Patio and several hours for Rad Cop to investigate what kind of governance we can build, how and so on.

[00:47:42] Stefan Ivanovski Okay. And now that you’ve talked a little bit about Patio, I would be curious to know how do other potential tech worker cooperatives and individuals, especially workers of cooperatives who would be interested in working with Patio, how would they be able to learn more about their work and how can they become members?

[00:48:11] Yuliy Lobarev If they are from IT cooperative, they can just fill our contact form at the landing page, Patio.coop. So after some negotiation, when we describe in details what we are doing, how we are doing it, they can decide for themselves. As for non-IT cooperative and private persons, I think even they probably couldn’t join Patio, we can still connect to them and become like partners or find other opportunities to do something together.

[00:49:07] Stefan Ivanovski And how long does the onboarding process take once it’s established that there is a tech worker member of a co cooperative or a worker cooperative reaching out to Patio, how long would it take for the onboarding plus process to take?

[00:49:26] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I think it can be a rather quick process like a week or two. It depends on how quickly they can decide after we provide them all the information. So if we’ve can send them an answer in a day and they can decide in a couple of days, then maybe we can introduce them to the rest of Patio in a week.

[00:50:06] Stefan Ivanovski And what is the expectation?

[00:50:09] Yuliy Lobarev Sorry. The expectation is basically to understand how they how we work, what kind of governance structure we have and if they can participate as volunteers well that would be great but it’s not like a mandatory condition at least for right now.

[00:50:49] Stefan Ivanovski Excellent. So they can learn more about Patio on Patio.co op, right? That’s P A T I O dot C O O P

[00:51:01] Yuliy Lobarev Yeah.

[00:51:03] Stefan Ivanovski Excellent. It’s a fun looking website, so people who are interested in learning about tech worker cooperatives should definitely visit it. Now that we’ve talked a little bit about international worker cooperative organizing, but also before worker cooperative organizing, this largely falls under the umbrella of collective action and governance. I would be curious to hear from you what do you understand by collective action?

[00:51:43] Yuliy Lobarev Tough question because well maybe not very tough. For me it’s rather simple. People can assemble together, make a collective decision and then act on it. Something like this, I believe. Of course they can consider maybe cooperativism, cooperative principles, democracy or something related if we and then we can add some meaning to this action. So it wouldn’t be just an action of a group, but for example an action to make something good for others.

[00:52:41] Stefan Ivanovski And for those who may not be familiar with the cooperative principles, they are seven. And the first one is voluntary and open membership. The second one is democratic member control, third one is member economic participation, fourth is autonomy and independence, fifth is education, training and information, sixth is cooperation among cooperatives, and seventh is concern for community, which is something that you just mentioned, the importance of not just doing something for the members, which is what worker cooperatives have a mandate to serve the members in a worker cooperative, the members being the workers, in a consumer cooperative, the members being consumers and so forth. But the idea of the cooperative principles is that the impact should also extend to the broader community. So mentioning this particular principle, what are some of the initiatives at Patio and Rad Cop that you engage in that seek to serve and address this concern for community, the seventh principle of cooperatives.

[00:54:03] Yuliy Lobarev I think both in Patio and in Rad Cop we believe that cooperative as a form of governance, form of enterprise can be beneficial for community because it promotes or it helps to promote agency, helps to promote more human work conditions. So we think that if we do some advocacy, promotion, education, it will help community in general, like as people around us. Maybe they may not start cooperatives right away, but at least they can start thinking about it. They can change the governance model into more horizontal and so on.

[00:55:13] Stefan Ivanovski So basically it’s so the impact would be through the act of showing that democratic governance in tech firms can can work in sharing that experience with others.

[00:55:26] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, that’s true.

[00:55:27] Stefan Ivanovski So One of the so now that we’ve that we are talking about collective action and governance, one of the challenges in the literature on cooperatives and worker-owned and worker-managed firms or self-managed firms, is the level of participation and engagements. So what is the current level of participation and engagement at Rad Cop specifically and Patio?

[00:56:02] Yuliy Lobarev I can say that unfortunately the level of engagement is not very high because in Patio people have to do their own work in the cooperatives. They can understand that we are doing some strategic work which may help in future, but at the same time well they have to earn same money right now, and I can understand this. It’s something similar in Rad Cop because we are working in project in projects. We are earning money doing this kind of job, and we understand that we also have to do some strategic work. At least we need to tune our governance to make it more aligned with our values, principles, with our ideas, how a cooperative should work, but because we have a stage of the rapid growth. For example, I believe more than one year ago, maybe one year and a half, we have about twenty people. Right now we have twice more.

[00:57:29] Yuliy Lobarev So we can work if everything goes fine, we can easily grow up to sixty people or even eighty people and it can be a nightmare to govern it using our current governance model. So we have to rapidly improve it, bring it to life, teach people how to use it, but at the same time people have to work on the daily projects.

[00:58:09] Stefan Ivanovski Speaking about the rapid growth, are there any examples of cooperatives that are larger? And before that, can you just say what is the size typically of worker cooperatives, the tech or IT worker cooperatives within Patio? What’s the smallest IT cooperative that you know of versus the the largest one? And have you had any kind of knowledge exchange within the Patio network about how have other cooperatives dealt with what you’re anticipating this rapid growth?

[00:58:47] Yuliy Lobarev As far as I know, the most of our cooperatives are rather small, less than ten people, probably close to five. There are smaller amount of medium-sized cooperatives like Rad Cop, so twenty, thirty, forty members or workers. I’m not sure. And I think only one cooperative is as big as more than one hundred people. So it’s probably rather difficult to

[00:59:28] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah.

[01:00:00] Yuliy Lobarev For them to gather in one place and do something meaningful. So it means that the governments the governance model should be something else, probably multi-level model with smaller units working as a smaller cooperatives and the big cooperative itself probably working as a the second level cooperative. But Them.

[01:00:36] Stefan Ivanovski Can you explain what you mean by multi-level and second order cooperative for those who may not be familiar? Sure.

[01:00:46] Yuliy Lobarev Sure, basically It’s similar to how cooperative federation work because at least some of the cooperative federations are cooperatives and they invite members like regular cooperatives. So the federation is a cooperative which is formed from cooperative member. Maybe if we create a similar structure for a big cooperative, probably not without splitting into separate enterprises, but with created with creating this layered or kind of hierarchical communication model so people can govern themselves. In a smaller unit and they have some sort of governance bodies on a higher level of fr which is which can be formed from representatives from lower level units.

[01:02:05] Stefan Ivanovski So you’re just describing now a way of structuring hierarchies as cooperative scale. What do you think is the connection or the relationship between hierarchies, worker ownership, worker management, or worker cooperatives? Can hierarchies exist in worker cooperatives?

[01:02:31] Yuliy Lobarev I think they can, and even if you look into sociocracy, it describes circles which send representatives to other circles, and this can happen on several layers, but in the same time it’s a description of a hierarchy, even if they are not saying it’s a hierarchy. So I think some sort of hierarchy will exist in every cooperative, maybe even in a smaller cooperative of three people, because they may have a totally horizontal decision making process, but in the same time one person may be a good accountant, which means they are like a boss in this field, we when they are deciding on accountant topics or things, another person can be similarly a specialist in another area, which means they have kind of situational hierarchy, and it’s not a bad thing, it’s normal thing because people are different, they have different knowledge, different skills, so they will create some sort of hierarchy anyway. But if we apply cooperatives cooperative follows and principles, we can create more humane system, more horizontal system in any way, even if we have some hierarchical relationships inside.

[01:04:37] Stefan Ivanovski So basically hierarchies are not antithetical or they’re they have their own place within cooperatives and horizontal organizations, so to speak. Even in the most horizontal organization you’re describing that there may be the existence of hierarchies because of the differences in skills, knowledge, and perhaps situational awareness.

[01:05:06] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, that’s true. That’s how we want to create our own governance model in Rad Cop, and we already have something similar in Pacho because there is the first level individual cooperatives and there is the second level of volunteers who work together in their Patio core I can say.

[01:05:37] Stefan Ivanovski Now that you’re bringing the topic back to to Patio, I remember when we first met at the cooperative AI conference in Istanbul earlier this year in November, the profile was saying that you research how cooperative governance models differ across countries. Given that we’ve talked during the conference about the importance of global responses, unified responses for developing a type of cooperative AI, what do you see as the biggest challenges in creating an infrastructure to develop a more humane type of collaboration among IT firms that spans these differences in countries and cultures and so forth.

[01:06:40] Yuliy Lobarev From my not knowledge but experience, I think probably the main barrier is that for every almost every cooperative it’s always easy to find clients inside the own country because clients usually also expect someone from their own country to work for them. To provide services or create products. Of course, every country is different, some has high barriers for any international, not just cooperation, but for international markets or providing services internationally. Some countries have lower barriers. But as the core, I think it’s the idea that’s it’s easier because a lot of people just tend to do what is easier. So it’s easier to find maybe a commercial partner inside our own country instead of looking for the same sort of partner, but a cooperative outside the country.

[01:08:43] Stefan Ivanovski So it’s easier to collaborate with what you know and who you know rather than trying to branch out to cooperative members outside of your country. Okay, great. I would now shift the discussion to artificial intelligence. What does artificial intelligence mean to you?

[01:09:05] Yuliy Lobarev No, it’s very interesting term. I understand that many people think it’s like human intelligence, but it’s not. It’s still artificial, it’s still machine intelligence, but because people have used to communicate to other people, they started to extrapolate it to the machine intelligence. But I understand it’s kind of popular belief, but I still think it’s just a machine, maybe very good in particular fields, but it’s a bunch of algorithms computer power something which can help people or maybe not help. It depends.

[01:10:11] Stefan Ivanovski Do you engage with any AI tools? And if you do, which ones?

[01:10:19] Yuliy Lobarev Do you mean personally or in Oh. Pacho in red coat.

[01:10:25] Stefan Ivanovski Personally and then we can move to talk about how the cooperative decides and how the Patio decides which AI tools to use. So let’s start with the personal use.

[01:10:37] Yuliy Lobarev From my own perspective, I find largely language models very useful tools. Of course, commercial tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, they are quite good, but fortunately people can run open source models or even commercially sourced models using their own equipment. It may be not as fast, but it will be very private because you’re not sure sharing data with commercial companies with big tech. For me, they are good for research and some other related things. I think image generations generators, they also have potential. Of course, they create competition for designers and people like this, but in the same time, designers can also adopt such tools, and such tools can probably make them more creative if they use them properly.

[01:12:01] Stefan Ivanovski And now moving on from the personal use to the organizational use of these tools, how does Rad Cop engage which AI tools to use and in turn how does Patio do so?

[01:12:16] Yuliy Lobarev Considering Rad Cop. We understand that for us AI tools is basically a must have because there are a lot of cybersecurity threats which already are using AI tools. For example, there are AI based Trojan viruses. Which may use AI agents if you have them on your own computer to find data, private information, and work rather independently from attackers. Also, many attackers employ AI tools to make attacks faster, diverse, and more efficient. So for us, we have to rely on AI tools for protection. Fortunately, people are building not only offensive AI tools but also defensive ones. And besides this, we also look into tools which can help us in our daily work, like large language models, rec systems, retrieval augmented generators, generation systems, which can help to create different sorts of like intelligent search and retrieval for information without relying on commercial systems and big tech. What are these rack tools that you just mentioned? Or systems? There are many of them. Basically, it’s quite smart idea how to use large language models with without any training. But in the same time, make them to use existent corpus of text. Basically, in simple terms for you and for viewers. You can upload some texts into this system. And a special program will create a vector database of pieces from different texts, then index these pieces. So when you enter a request like tell me about dogs, the system will look in this vector database and find you all pieces of text mentioning dogs. Then these pieces of text will be fed into a large language model with a request like this. This is a raw description. Please find something relevant to the following user’s request. And then The original request follows. So a neural network like LLM will look through these pieces of text and creates an answer for you using your own data.

[01:16:04] Stefan Ivanovski And these models can be run on local machines? Are there any requirements?

[01:16:09] Yuliy Lobarev Right, right. It can be run even without GPUs. You can run it on your laptop with requirements like five gigabytes of RAM and couple of gigabytes of storage space for this vector database and document storage. They will be slower of course, but they will be totally private.

[01:16:43] Stefan Ivanovski You’ve mentioned the importance of of privacy, so I was curious w what are the considerations that as a cooperative, particularly Rad Cop and Patio, what kind of considerations do you have in deciding which AI tools to use and engage with?

[01:17:05] Yuliy Lobarev Well, in Rad Cop it’s rather simple. We have the main priority is security. So we think mostly about how secure any system can be, because if we’re using a publicly available neural network, who knows what happens with the data? I’ve seen a report recently that crazy number of people, like sixty percent or even more from companies, they share confidential information to publicly available EI systems.

[01:17:53] Stefan Ivanovski And what do you mean by publicly available? Like chat GPT.

[01:17:56] Yuliy Lobarev Chat GPT, Gemini, Grok, and so on. And this data can be used for training, which means that with high probability, they can be extracted later. So you can share some sensitive private data like security, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and later someone will just extract them from the next generation of Grok, for example.

[01:18:42] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah, I see. And so does Rad Cop use ChatGPT or these publicly available L LM large language models?

[01:18:57] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, some people use them, but we try to increase the awareness of secure and private use of such systems, first among ourselves and then among other people. For example, you’ve asked about Patio. I had a couple of workshops for Patio people, specifically about cybersecurity, and one of the topics was how to work with EI systems.

[01:19:37] Stefan Ivanovski And are there any considerations as cooperative or taking the cooperative values into account when deciding how to engage with different AI tools compared to, let’s say, a hierarchical or a traditional IT firm?

[01:19:57] Yuliy Lobarev Well we’ve thought about this, about it in Patio and in the preparation of the conference in Istanbul you’ve mentioned. We discussed it among ourselves and we found that basically what we think probably the main difference is that commercial companies they usually want to maximize profits, but cooperatives they want to maximize good for people, benefits for people. Not only inside the cooperative but also outside. So we should take in mind how, for example, big tech models are trained, how they are used. You can probably remember this very enlighten movie we’ve seen in the conference In the Belly of AI. Yeah.

[01:21:03] Yuliy Lobarev So as far as I know some cooperatives in Patio oppose us oppose to use any big tech AI tools because of the reasons how they are trained, how they are created, how human labor is exploited to create such models, such systems.

[01:21:37] Stefan Ivanovski You’ve mentioned two two topics and I have two follow-up questions. So one was raising awareness about AI tools among members of the and workers in the Rad Cop cooperative, but also outside. So that leads me to ask about what does AI literacy mean? Before you answer, the second aspect that you’ve mentioned was the ethical considerations around the production of AI infrastructure and AI related systems like large language models. So first I would like you to talk about what does AI literacy mean? And then I would like you to reflect upon what is ethical AI mean to you. So let’s start with the first one. So what does AI literacy mean to you?

[01:22:30] Yuliy Lobarev Basically, it’s like other kinds of literacy, how to use a system for well for greater benefits, for greater good, to be more productive because AI systems have well they can empower people, but in the same time they have a lot of risks, like I’ve mentioned already: privacy risks, security risks, for example, there are agentic browsers around us made by big companies like Anthropic.

[01:23:29] Yuliy Lobarev Don’t remember the exact name. Basically what this browser, yeah.

[01:23:34] Stefan Ivanovski Anthropic, yeah, anthropic. They are behind Claude, yeah.

[01:23:37] Yuliy Lobarev Yeah. Cloud L. What this browser can do, it can look into a web page, find hidden text, and use this hidden text as an instruction what to do. And then it can send some sort of private information from your own computer using your own mailbox to anyone in the world. So it’s not only a privacy concern for me, it’s also about security. And what I think can help here basically we can start with something, how to use it responsibly. But then what we can do, we can think about how it influences your thinking process. Because people can talk to chatbots, and then they can create even conspiracy theories just by discussing particular topics. They want people to feel comfortable, to feel good when they talk to chat bots. Which means they can tell you something you like, not something which is true. And I’m studying a topic which I call metacognitive literacy right now. Basically, another sort of literacy, but how to think about thinking, how to consider our own cognitive process. And I think that basics of such metacognitive literacy will be also AI literacy, because it will help how to think about my own thinking, and even about thinking of AI. I understand that they think differently, probably very differently, and some people may not even call it this process thinking, but for regular users, we can say, okay, they think. And using this model, they can better understand the interaction between two minds: the mind of a person and the mind of AI system. So

[01:26:36] Stefan Ivanovski That’s it. That’s very succinct way of describing the importance of AI literacy and I like how you brought in the metacognitive aspects and the importance of thinking about thinking and thinking about AI and understanding that AI it’s not essentially the same way as human thinking, but rather it’s machine algorithms. So now moving on to the second aspect that you touched upon in the previous response, it’s the ethical considerations. You’ve mentioned that some members, some cooperative members of Patio are against the use of corporate AI large language models because of how or big tech models because of how these large language models are produced. What does ethical AI mean to you?

[01:27:40] Yuliy Lobarev I think the ethical AI would mean a system which wasn’t created using labor exploitation, because we can think about how rare earth components are mined for modern smartphones and electronic equipment. It’s very similar to how data is mined or somehow processed by people with very low wages to use by AI companies if we can create a more humane process to create databases to create core well, let’s say databases for training models and to maybe how we can improve these models using well, we have to use people’s work. On many levels and we can do it responsibly, then we probably can create a sort of ethical AI system.

[01:29:20] Stefan Ivanovski And who would be responsible for the creation, development and deployment of responsible and ethical AI systems? What is the role of individual users? What is the role of cooperatives, of private companies and governments?

[01:29:41] Yuliy Lobarev I think that private persons and commercial companies they probably wouldn’t have a big role, at least right now, because people tend to think about themselves, and unfortunately many don’t care about ethical aspects. If they have a good tool which can produce interesting dialogs or funny pictures, they will just use it. It’s very similar for commercial companies, if they mostly care about profits, it means they will use any AI system, ethical or unethical, doesn’t matter. But government governments they can regulate it somehow. Of course it depends how the government is formed, what kind of people they have, what kind of values they follow. But if the government itself is aligned with more humane values, they can probably ask even commercial companies to follow the example to be less exploitable and more humane. And as for cooperatives, I think as many cooperatives follow some sort of cooperative folios and as they want people around them to get something from their work, from their activities, they can probably somehow lobby this sort of approach or maybe even collaborate together to participate in creating or designing such systems.

[01:31:55] Stefan Ivanovski Cooperatives are quite small, as you’ve established most of the worker cooperatives within Patio, they have less than ten members, and the largest one being over a hundred worker workers. This is very small compared to a big tech firm which has hundreds of thousands of workers and developers and so forth. Given the size, the small size of the IT worker cooperative movement, and the small contributions that cooperatives have in the development of AI systems. What are the contributions that cooperatives can make to helping make more ethical AI systems but also contribute to AI literacy?

[01:33:00] Yuliy Lobarev I think that it may be not very easy because as you said there are not many cooperatives, not many cooperative people around. But in the same time we can look into non tech cooperative because even agricultural cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, they still use some technologies, IT services, IT systems, and probably even AI systems.

[01:33:41] Yuliy Lobarev If they follow similar values, we can be aligned with them, and we can discuss how they can help us maybe with some volunteering, maybe with money donations, maybe with something else, like advocacy or even well, something else. I think there are ways how we can work together. Also, I see that this kind of movement to be more ethical, more humane, it becomes very popular, maybe not very popular in general, but at least in the same technology companies. I understand that some of them are doing it just to have good publicity, but in the same time it means people are starting to think about it, think about similar values, even working in big tech companies, which means we can also align somehow and probably collaborate. And you’ve mentioned also big layoffs, and these people are also potential cooperators. I think we should look after them, probably educate them about cooperatives, which means we can increase the number of people who support these ideas, these ethics.

[01:35:51] Stefan Ivanovski That’s a good and realistic outlook on cooperatives. I was just curious now what does cooperative AI mean and what does it look like?

[01:36:09] Yuliy Lobarev I think cooperative AI can be an AI system which at least partially Has been developed by cooperatives or designed by cooperatives. Because it can be something small, it shouldn’t be large language models with billions of parameters. It can be something used in image recognition on a particular factory, for example. Something small, but still it can be a good start. So if you are a member of a cooperative and listening to this, think how to start small. Maybe if you develop a small AI system, it can be the very first cooperative or AI system around the world.

[01:37:13] Stefan Ivanovski Great. And you mentioned that tech workers who are laid off could be potential worker cooperators and that worker cooperative should look after them. Why would a tech worker join a tech worker cooperative and not work for a traditional firm when there are already more traditional tech firms and things are established? So why would someone want to join and potentially do more work in a tech worker cooperative given that there is that expectation of participation in governance? So why would a tech worker want to join a worker cooperative over working in a true and tried system?

[01:38:02] Yuliy Lobarev I think that potential cooperators, worker owners, should look into history, because as far as I know, cooperatives are more resilient in times of perturbations, crises, economics, collapses, because cooperators they tend to look after each other. And if you join a cooperative, you may not get very high salaries as an in big tech, but in the same time you will invest into your future from the very first day. And basically it can help your cooperative to live to stay alive, even if regular companies like limited liabilities companies will go bankrupt because I understand people will still face difficulties, but at least you mentioned it yourself. I think that more cooperative will stay after a five years period than comparing to regular non cooperative enterprises. So I think it’s like investment in future to stay in a cooperative.

[01:39:56] Stefan Ivanovski Great. Now I would like to conclude the interview with a final question or comment. Is there any question that I have not asked you that you wish I did? And on that note if there’s anything else that you would like to share as your concluding comment?

[01:40:22] Yuliy Lobarev Well, I can share a bit more about Rad Cop as right now we don’t have any kind of cooperative workers federation in Russia, but we want to create one like the second level body for cooperatives. Unfortunately, we don’t have many cooperatives at all, but we plan to help people to find about cooperatives, learn more and build their own cooperatives, even if they start small. I also would like to talk and discuss cooperatives, governance metacognitions to anyone around the world, because I feel it’s very promising and productive to discuss things across cultures. Well, I can Tell it from my own experience, talking to people from Patio, from many countries. It’s a unique perspective. Thanks. Why is it

[01:41:51] Stefan Ivanovski Yeah, yeah, just a follow up question to that. Why is it important for you to talk about cooperatives and share this model with others in in Russia? How has working in a cooperative changed you?

[01:42:05] Yuliy Lobarev Well I think it’s good for people in longer horizon, longer perspective because people can find not only work but very good community in a cooperative. I can say it will become like a family for you, but still I believe many people can find friends in cooperatives and they can also grow as persons in cooperatives because if they do it correctly they will become like entrepreneurs for themselves, which should help them in the long run.

[01:43:08] Stefan Ivanovski Spaceba Yuliy. Thank you very much. This has been a very enjoyable interview. I hope we can do it again at some other point when you have more experiences and more adventures of your cooperative journey to share with me. And maybe we can talk also about metacognition once you dive deeper into that. So thank you very much for for your time and for those who are listening. I hope that you’ve liked this interview. Make sure to subscribe and and follow and also leave a comment to get the discussion going. And maybe you can drop a question for who you would like to have interviewed next and maybe a question that you would like me to ask the next guest on the show. Thank you very much, Yuliy again, and I wish you a great day, great week ahead and lots of success in your personal and professional endeavors at Rad Cop and Patio.

[01:44:12] Yuliy Lobarev Yes, thank you for you and good luck.

[01:44:14] Stefan Ivanovski Take care.

[01:44:15] Yuliy Lobarev Thank you.

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