Reviews and Comments

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 fronts: As is so often the case, there is a bias towards looking at US/North American solutions, with what feels like honorable (exotic) mentions for the rest of the world. While this might be fair enough (coming from a US perspective as a writer), I wish there'd been a deeper exploration of how different cultures think about governable spaces and how this increasingly clashes with the "Californian Ideology" due to the global reach of the online systems we use. The second bit, that I found even weaker, was that the author seems quite invested into blockchain (and related things like DAOs) as potential solutions to these issues of governable spaces. I feel like in 2024 it seems quite clear that this is not the case.