Governable Spaces

Democratic Design for Online Life

by ,

Paperback, 205 pages

en language

Published Feb. 27, 2024

ISBN:
978-0-520-39394-3
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3 stars (1 review)

When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and "benevolent dictators for life." In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls "implicit feudalism" a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities' democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, …

1 edition

reviewed Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider

Mixed bag

3 stars

I'd say this book has two sides two it:

The first half makes a very well laid-out argument about how the design of our digital infrastructures not only mirrors the communication structures of the organisations that create them (Conway's Law) but increasingly also inverts this, to shape what types of organisational structures we think are realistic and something we should strive for. Thus, the "admin" model of the world ultimately diminishes our modes of participation and moves from the Californian Ideology into "implicit feudalism". This part was great and I'd love to have seen more musings on that. I also very much loved the critique of "scale" and all the issues related to scalability and how subsidiarity can address this to create more governable spaces.

The second half of the book tries to explore potential solutions, and this is the part that I personally found so much weaker on multiple …

Subjects

  • co-ops
  • cooperatives
  • workplace democracy

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