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."

Review

"How can the Left organize effectively in this fragmented new era of digital communication?"

Robert Gorwa:

"Nathan Schneider — writer, activist, and communication scholar — has long grappled with the democratic shortcomings of digital spaces. In his latest book, Governable Spaces, he joins a tradition of leftist media criticism, following works like Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform and recent contributions by Ben Tarnoff and James Muldoon. Like these authors, Schneider refocuses debates about technology on the need for collectively managed systems. His book is a thought-provoking call for better digital tools explicitly designed as “democratic mediums.”

Schneider argues that the increasingly important digital platforms that billions of us around the world are using to work, play, and communicate are, with a few small exceptions, run as autocratic and unaccountable corporate fiefdoms, with little ability for ordinary users to shape how they work and are run. For Schneider, the issue is not just about governance structures but about how these platforms undermine everyday democratic practices both online and off.

Schneider contends that our digital sphere has experienced serious democratic erosion. Seamless “free” services, funded by venture capital, advertising, and other business models, have largely replaced user-managed tools like community newsletters and local bulletin boards. Once a vibrant part of online culture, this kind of grassroots participation is now largely confined to highly technical hobbyists.

This corporate capture of the digital public sphere mirrors the broader decline in democratic engagement. The defeat of unions has dealt a huge blow to meaningful workplace democracy. Political party membership has massively declined in Europe and beyond. Today’s “capitalist realism” fosters a retreat into private life, limiting many people’s engagement with democracy to voting every few years.

The same trend plays out online. Platforms increasingly outsource system administration and community moderation to low-wage call center workers around the world. In the late 2000s, many US-based internet startups, with an eye on growth and profit, made the bet that users wouldn’t want — or would be too busy — to oversee the growing workload of content regulation. Instead, firms delegated this labor to ad hoc teams of lawyers and policy wonks, eventually outsourcing content moderation to call centers in the global periphery to handle the overwhelming volume of flagged posts.

Governable Spaces seeks to reverse this trend by rebuilding democratic practices online and collectively creating new forms of radical digital commons. For Schneider, it isn’t just about the purpose and goals of online spaces but also about how they are structured to facilitate participation. His analysis involves a historical view, critically examining how spaces like BBS and USENET were governed, as well as reflecting on some of the innovations embraced by other connective technologies not traditionally understood as social media. What would it mean to explicitly push beyond a “feudalist” mindset and seek, from the ground up, to engage citizens and communities in collaborative forms of norm building, rulemaking, and justice seeking?

The book’s vision of digital democracy is rooted in grassroots efforts and local experimentation. Schneider and his collaborators develop practical tools for people seeking, for example, to move their neighborhood WhatsApp group onto an open-source server that they can manage together. Their “Metagovernance” project offers guides for creating custom policies, rules, and even voting systems to empower users. Through education and organizing, Schneider hopes to help communities transcend the “sysop problem” through informed decisions about the trade-offs inherent in different forms of online organization."

(https://jacobin.com/2024/12/internet-democracy-musk-zuckerberg-profits)

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/)