Networked Leviathan
* Book: The Networked Leviathan. Paul Gowder.
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"tackles the challenge of governance in social media and proposes ways to deepen democracy online in an age of polycrisis." [1]
Review
Robert Gorwa:
"The problem, Gowder suggests, lies in the fact that multinational platform companies are sprawling, complicated institutions, which, like other historically powerful and yet complex governing institutions, can become plagued by a problem of information. Drawing on James C. Scott and similarly minded thinkers, this can be framed as a problem of monitoring activity, understanding what is happening in the polity, and then acting on it: these are “difficulties with integrating knowledge from the periphery and offering legitimate rules to diverse constituencies.”
In a marked break from the well-worn portrayal of today’s tech giants as all-knowing, Orwellian forces of control and manipulation, Gowder’s “platform leviathan” faces inherent organizational and technological limits on its power. After all, today’s planetary-scale digital platforms are exponentially larger and more complex than the somewhat niche specialist microcommunities of early social networks. Amazon manages an ecosystem of a few million third-party sellers. YouTube famously has claimed that more than five hundred hours of video are being uploaded to the service every minute.
As they grow, these profit motivated and cost-minimizing corporate actors face increasing pressure to ensure that products are safe and don’t violate local consumer protection laws, and that user speech isn’t inciting dangerous forms of mobilization. Companies respond by hiring experts, building bureaucratic systems for international policy development, and developing automated systems that try to evaluate content — or outsourcing these tasks to a burgeoning “safetytech” sector.
However, some challenges defy easy solutions. Myanmar was “the only country in the world with a significant online presence” that hadn’t widely adopted Unicode, a system for converting written scripts into a standardized and machine-readable form for display on digital devices. Most residents of Myanmar, using the popular Zawgyi typeface to represent the very complex Burmese script, were thus producing content that was literally intelligible to the systems Facebook relied on to monitor what users were up to. Other emerging areas of policy concern — such as child sexual abuse material online — are similarly hard to parse and expensive to counter responsibly, involving dedicated teams of specialized investigators with wide remit to proactively search for illegal content.
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If we were to rebuild today’s platforms from the ground up, what would we do to get around these dual problems of governance legitimacy and governance capacity? One strategy might be to decentralize power to users, a goal pursued by Eugen Rochko, the German developer at the heart of the Mastodon project, a service built on the open ActivityPub protocol.
Gowder’s proposed solution prioritizes capacity over legitimacy. If we’re thinking about the platform information problem, could one make the extractive kingdoms of the contemporary internet economy more representative and effective? For instance, could a platform like Bluesky — with a more conscientious team at its helm than Musk’s at X — deepen platform democracy by creating citizen assemblies? Gowder envisions a system where ordinary users can participate in platforms’ governance: providing policy feedback, deliberating on local impacts, and maybe even directing future expenditures of resources on safety and product development. The elevator pitch is simple: What if Meta or OpenAI or Google or Bluesky put a large and internationally diverse set of individuals on their payroll as paid policy consultants?
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Gowder’s approach feels much like the current status quo — a world which preserves, for most of us, the everyday reality of how we use social networks and other platforms. There are still sysops — teams of policy employees in Menlo Park and Dublin and Seattle — but now they’re better advised. Some users might even periodically be asked to participate in a form of “jury duty” for the major firms. If all goes well, these individuals give good counsel, and their input is meaningfully incorporated into how tech companies make decisions. Our new corporate overlords better understand the intricacies of how their service is actually being used around the world. Perhaps they even learn from the whole experiment that they should value all of their users, especially those that come from low-income countries where the dollar-per-user value is low for Big Tech.
(https://jacobin.com/2024/12/internet-democracy-musk-zuckerberg-profits)