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This is a look at a concept I’ve been developing, inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement: “the medium is the message.”

To me, this idea goes well beyond media. It suggests that how something is presented may have more impact than the content itself.

I’m thinking about this especially in the context of education — how students learn, how teachers interact with schools, and how the whole education ecosystem functions. If the medium is the message, then what message does a hierarchical school structure send to students?

It might be telling them that they aren’t capable of making good decisions for themselves, that they can’t act in their own best interests, and that they need an authority figure to guide them. If that’s the case, then schools are reinforcing this dynamic perfectly. And over time, you can see that same pattern trickling down into politics.

Yes, hierarchies in politics have always been present. But in the last hundred years, we’ve often prided ourselves on moving toward more democratic models, those where individuals have rights and a real voice in shaping their societies. Now, though, I see democratic institutions eroding worldwide. Perhaps the seeds of this were planted long ago in our school environments. With the exception of prison and the military, there are few institutions with as little agency as we see in the average classroom. It was manageable when young people still had agency over much of their time, with school only representing a slice of their week. Now though, more and more time is scheduled and based around non-agentic activities, things like sports clubs and piano lessons. With less time to exercise agency, and more time under the direct supervision of a ‘higher authority’, perhaps we have eroded the skills needed for healthy engagement in a democratic society?

So the question becomes: how do we begin modeling the kinds of human interactions we actually want?

Right now, I’m working on building a group of educators who can collaborate and offer consulting services for schools, institutions, and organizations. And as I build this, I notice that the easiest path forward is the one capitalism has already laid out: start a business, employ people, and hold absolute authority so you can direct everything.

But again if the medium is the message, what kind of message lies behind such a structure? If that system itself is the problem, then how might we organize differently?

Over the past three or four years, I’ve been really drawn to the idea of a distributed cooperative (sometimes playfully called a “DisCO”). This model has ideas I believe are crucial for an education-focused cooperative. It provides not only the right structure, but also the right message to align with the values many educators — and really, many people — feel are essential today.

Here’s how I imagine it working:

Instead of forming a partnership or limited liability company, we build a cooperative — an initiative owned by its members. Each member has a vote in decisions.

Using Teal Principles as a basis, cooperative members have a large degree of autonomy in the contracts they take on. As long as they are aligned with the shared vision of the cooperative, the ownership of the project remains with the member. They decide how they wish to meet the needs of the client, and seek support from the team to do this. In this fashion, there is no chain of decision makers that get between members and the work they wish to do, instead there is support for them through a reliable aligned network, and in exchange members fund core pieces of work for the Cooperative.

Here we incorporate insights from feminist economic theory, which encourages us to value work beyond paid labor, things like care work and love work. That means recognizing contributions like caregiving, relationship-building, and community support, not just income-generating activity.

Practically, the cooperative would function like this:

• Membership is open-ended — we bring in as many members as needed.
• Any member can find and secure a project or contract with an organization provided the nature of the work is vision aligned.
• Once they have a project, they can build a team from within the cooperative, drawing on the network’s collective expertise.

The project funds, after taxes, would then be divided into three “buckets”:

• Livelihood work (about 70%) — the paid work for contracts.
• Love work (about 20%) — passion projects that members propose and vote on, allowing us to invest time and energy into initiatives we care about.
• Care work (about 10%) — maintaining the cooperative itself: governance, organization, finances, and administration.

This way, livelihood work keeps the cooperative and members financially secure, love work lets us pursue creative and meaningful projects, and care work sustains the organization. The proportions can adjust depending on circumstances — if projects are abundant, care work can be compensated more generously; if not, members may need to share the load differently.

So how does this connect back to “the medium is the message”?

Imagine children seeing the adults around them working in this way: where they have agency, a real voice in decision-making, and genuine ownership over their work. The message embedded in that medium is powerful. It shows that collaboration, fairness, and shared responsibility aren’t just ideals but living realities.

I believe that’s a message far more aligned with the optimistic and aspirational values we need for how human beings should interact in the future.

At present, Mira Education is a General Partnership. Inspired by groups such as Enspiral, Disco.coop, and We Are Open Cooperative, we seek to create an organization structure as descibed above that reflects our values and desired impact on the world.

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