Governable Spaces

* Book: Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. by Nathan Schneider. University of California Press, 2023

URL = https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520393943/governable-spaces

Description

"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, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before."

Discussion

Nathan Schneider:

"This is a book about the politics of everyday life, and everyday online life in particular—among the internet-borne social spaces where people see each other and interact through digital tools. I contend that the most quotidian kinds of online politics, such as those in the tale above, affect the flows of power at the largest scales. The ways people can and cannot collectively self-govern in daily online life, furthermore, have been constrained in dominant social networks. I will argue that the constraints on governance in online spaces have contributed to the peril of democratic politics in general. It is not enough to merely defend existing governmental institutions; healthy democracy depends on enabling creative new forms of self-governance, especially on networks.

Several proposals flow from those claims. One is the need for online communities themselves to self-consciously cultivate democratic practices. These practices can serve as the basis for a social-media design paradigm that invites diverse kinds of community governance to emerge and flourish. But community-scale democracy will remain only marginal within antidemocratic infrastructures. A further paradigm is therefore necessary for the policies encoded in law and technical systems that organize online life—self-governance, rather than top-down authority, as the basis for problem-solving. Such a paradigm would make networks home to new jurisdictions—enabled by but not always reducible to the jurisdictions of geographical territories.

Much of this book dwells in interactions of human politics and technological systems. But, as above, the more-than-human world envelops it all, providing the stage and the stakes: a planet waiting to see whether we can govern our way out of self-destruction, deciding whether to maintain the conditions necessary for human civilization.

Is there democracy in the wild? Creatures hurtling through space on a fragile world can expect no rights or powers of decision from physics and biology. A government’s claim to rule means little in a high-mountain wilderness or in a neighborhood whose residents have made themselves ungovernable to survive against a hostile police force. Yet governance and its cognates are names we use for doing what all life-forms must: orchestrating our perceptions and reactions so as to have a chance at thriving in our surroundings. Consider it simply the intersection of power and cooperation—an intersection hardly unique to us.

Any precise meaning of self-governance is necessarily contextual, depending on who is involved and what kinds of say they seek. Likewise, I claim no fixed definition for democracy. I understand it as always a horizon, a longing for power shared equitably among participants, a destination that moves depending on where one stands. An orchestra permits hierarchies intolerable to a punk band, but the people in each may still see themselves as living toward democracy. If democracy is the horizon, self-governance is a plausible practice for moving in that direction. Governable spaces, then, are where democratic self-governance can happen.

...

The online networks that are the subject of this book are a kind of wilderness. They are evolving biomes, host to a polyphony of people and machines. The networks are not fully apart from the governments that claim to rule the world, but not entirely subject to them either. What happens online is terrible and wonderful; I love my favorite online haunts. If I criticize our networks as they are, it is because I see glimpses of the governable spaces they could become. Our networks are spaces we have still only begun to co-create and self-govern and thus to make our own."

(https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/03/sunlit-governable-spaces-nathan-schneider/)