But then I watched that Philosophy Tube video. It began with the familiar rhetoric of “Nebula is owned by the creators who are on it”. But there was more. “50% of the equity in Nebula is distributed between the creators”. This was the first time I had heard a Nebula creator say the number 50% referring to ownership. “The other 50% is owned by the parent company, an agency called Standard”. At this point the math really wasn’t adding up. A parent company by definition owns more than 50% of a subsidiary, that’s what makes it a “parent”. Also a 50/50 split would mean there’s no percentage left over for Curiosity Stream. But then there’s the real kicker: “When you’ve been on Nebula for a certain amount of time you get the option to buy a piece of the parent company. Standard actually invented an entirely new kind of cooperative corporate governance to make this happen”.
The fact that there’s interest in buying into Standard seems to indicate there’s something lacking about the ownership you get from just being a Nebula creator, but what really sets off the alarm bells for me is the “entirely new kind of cooperative corporate governance”. If you want to have a creator-owned cooperative you can just do that. There’s nothing novel about co-ops. So why not just do that?
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