None of this can get very far without enabling policies in the background—that make possible community finance and ownership, that respect self-governance over paternalistic decrees.

It permits expressions of affective voice but not, for most users, the more direct power of affective voice.

headquartered at a stylized computer nerve center in the capital

What if each of us, and each of our overlapping communities, were a Cybersyn, all intertwined with each other?

What I have been up to all along in this book is a kind of metagovernance

In times of growing criticism and anxiety about the online economy, the language of “metaverses” and “metacrises” offer the promise of transcendence: sort-of acknowledging that technology is compounding problems in the non-meta world, while at the same time promising to transcend them. The problems, to this line of thinking, are just wrinkles in a grander metanarrative of progress.

All three have been stewards of this place, but not necessarily claiming exclusive domain over it, since their seasonal, migratory ways of life long permitted them to coexist.

Self-governance is not a solution, it is a practice for problem-solving, and practices can go awry until they find their footing, until their participants learn the skills to manage them. But then, in governable spaces, our difficulties are our own and not someone else’s.

Technologies make policy when their designs dictate what information users do and don’t see, and how. Technologies make policy in how their interfaces teach us to use them.

The skills people need in governable spaces are not simply about how to use the technology, like a user’s manual, but about how to craft its policies: what is at stake, and what decisions have effects on our lives and communities.

I experienced that in my short career as a steward at Gitcoin—which was characterized mostly by the helplessness we feel when information does not meet us where we are, when it seems to confuse more than teach.

Technology can be governable only when users have the skills to understand its flows of power. Mystification helps keep ostensibly decentralized systems, for example, under the control of the small expert elite.

Atop those, participants add more layers of software and culture to further hone their self-governance.

independence

“liquidity event”

As with so many of the assemblies, juries, digital consultations, and community meetings that governments use every day, however, Macron’s Citizens Convention for Climate was largely advisory, disconnected from the normal flows of power.

Macron’s France, however, was not quite ready for that kind of trust.

isomorphic

Many jurisdictions have acceded to corporate-backed laws that prohibit municipal or cooperative broadband services from competing with investor-owned firms.

sharing in the studios’ profits

as they called it

The platforms organize those rights on behalf of managerial control, of a kind tighter than on any industrial shop-floor.

Schor and her research team constructed a conversation that is otherwise missing across a field of dispersed experience.

isolation of suburban homemaking

lurking in the shadows of what the law prohibits

While such an arrangement lies well outside the norms of social-media systems, it is at home in feminist conceptions of the relational self, the person as a nexus of relationships.354

For instance, the European food-sharing platform Karrot allows a local community to remove a member only through a group process, rather than by the fiat of a single administrator.

Legal regimes might expect subsidiarity, as discussed in chapter three, as a prerequisite for protection from liability. Rather than encouraging scalable governance by platform companies, the law could expect user self-governance at the scale of communities. Platforms would gain immunity only by giving up and sharing power.

instrumental power flows from company CEOs down to the feudal admins and mods, according to terms that government regulators set or fail to set.

fate

To practice equality in everyday life is practice in being ungovernable and in holding space for self-governing;

This was one more instance of melodrama in the career of a snippet of law known, in the title of a book-length study on it, as “the twenty-six words that created the Internet”

atriarchy thus reconfigures itself as an allegedly benevolent paternalism through the “exertion of positive rather than coercive power,” as Liena Gurevich puts it.345

I once again rely on Freeman’s essay as a gravity well that attracts shared concerns among diverse feminist perspectives.

The pursuit of governable spaces is a strategy for policy that takes this strain of insights seriously.

When a Malaysia-based international process developed “Feminist Principles of the Internet,” the principle of “governance” extrapolated this logic with a call to “democratise policy making affecting the internet as well as diffuse ownership of and power in global and local networks.”

within such spaces, participants have found the capacity to establish protective codes of conduct and clear lines of accountability.

In response, Freeman offered proposals for “democratic structuring.”

tools.”334

Illich warns, however, that achieving conviviality is possible “only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools.”334

These kinds of policies are what Ivan Illich called “tools for conviviality,” which support “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.”

A listening society needs policy that enables more than it constrains: policy that ensures people have the power to solve problems on their own terms.

A hard constraint can feel like a mighty accomplishment, though often it backfires unexpectedly.

Too often the temptation is for policy-making to be a practice of constraint—to stop what seems dangerous or immoral, to rule it out for good.

This does not mean, simply, rulers listening to their subjects, but a kind of listening that occurs everywhere in society, as a basis of shared power.

The heart of my argument is a call for shifting the orientation of policy-making from top-down regulation toward what Audrey Tang, the “digital minister” of Taiwan’s government, has called “listening at scale.”

A premise for this message, further, is that social problems are best understood as engineering problems—making the engineer-rich platform companies uniquely suited for finding solutions.

As online life becomes ever more the medium of human life itself, the making of governable spaces points toward a political paradigm in which the nation-state need no longer be taken for granted as the eminent field of politics. The future of democracy thus depends not only on the defense of existing governmental institutions but, at least as much, on the creative co-design of self-governance in the emerging jurisdictions of networks.

My collaborators

or that it is too difficulty.

the cowrie’s array of uses is not unlike what people hope to enable with blockchains.

a module-based platform for governing with smart-contracts.

Governance systems were bespoke smart contracts

This has given rise to another set of platforms—with names like Boardroom, Snapshot, and Tally, for instance—that package governance as a dashboard: a way to review all together, and vote on, the proposals flowing through one’s various DAOs. In that kind of interface, each organization becomes a kind of module within a cluster of a user’s juxtaposed governance decisions. Polycentricity operates on multiple levels.

DAOs are establishing legislative and judiciary bodies that can keep each other in check. Within a DAO there might be temporal diversity as well, where part of the governance process requires participants to show long-term investment in a decision, while another may be able to blow with the viral winds.

Modular systems are enabling bicameral structures, where a proposal might have to pass both a token-based vote and a one-person, one-vote ballot among certified humans.

“an expansion pack for DAOs.”

“multisig”

“kernel.”

One of us, Amy X. Zhang, was already developing a highly expressive prototype governance platform called PolicyKit, and through the Metagovernance Project we added interoperability to it with a project called Gateway.

Before governable stacks were a concept, they were an experience for me, particularly through an organization in which I have been an anecdotal participant-observer for a decade. May First Movement

Experiences with governable stacks introduce us to possible elsewheres. The spinning wheel pointed toward an elsewhere, the invention of a democratic India, just as “feminist servers” in India today carry on and challenge that legacy.

Another emerging strategy for challenging digital colonialism has come from within. Employees at Silicon Valley giants have achieved reforms by organizing against certain ethical outrages at their workplaces.294 Yet there are limits to what these campaigns are likely to achieve, since these workers are invested—often literally, through stock options—in the basic business models of their employers. Employees’ actions can present the impression that their protest cleanses the colonial tools they produce.

If a company fears liability at the legal layer of its stack, it will avoid running social-networking software that gives users enough decision-making power to threaten corporate executives’ control.

Email is an open, decentralized protocol, but a powerful company can leverage its ubiquity and its familiar interface to make the protocol a centralized dragnet.

The geek-colloquial meaning of stack, in the most relevant sense, is a set of interoperating hardware and software.

The spinning wheel was a cipher Gandhi used to center self-governance in his strategy for struggle, under the guise of a governable tool.

The flag of the pre-independence Indian National Congress had at its center a spinning wheel, the symbol of Gandhi’s “constructive programme”: self-rule, or swaraj, as the basis of both resistance and the society that would follow.

The actor Charlie Chaplin

Before long we have recapitulated the final scene of the 1954 McCarthyist blockbuster On the Waterfront, in which the dockworkers flee from their union’s problems into the arms of the boss, newly able to experience their common exploitation as individual liberation.

Platforms have enabled their users to feel ungovernable and powerful for a time.

“governmentality”

Synthesize the dialectic.

Each seems to profess that the organizational forms of revolutions past no longer compute—especially because we now have computers.

This governace is a cheap sort of domination because the subjects do it to themselves: “Governance arrives to manage self-management, not from above, but from below.”

NGOs are the “laboratories” of governance, which turn democracy into labor.

Alica

Both settler colonialism and digital “user experience” involve regimes that dictate who has the right to self-organize, or not, and under what conditions.260

emerging

Democratic play

Much as gig platforms made regulators forget labor laws and cloud services did not face the privacy rules governing older telecoms,244 the strange new tech of crypto has made space for remaking norms about how networked assets are to be owned and governed.

Future protocols might include code that ensures certain protections for workers, prevents direct harm to humans, or guarantees a basic income to all users. Protocols might ban carbon-emitting miners and other ecological harms. Rights-based incentives and feedback loops could counteract plutocracy and make externalities more visible to a protocol that would otherwise ignore them. Cryptoeconomic designs can thus achieve goals not reducible to economics.

For instance, the experimental DAO 1Hive has developed a values-laden Community Covenant, enforced through a cryptoeconomic court system.

The largely abandoned cryptocurrency FairCoin, for instance, implemented a novel consensus mechanism called “proof of cooperation” that sought to ground its cryptoeconomics in cooperative membership among participant organizations that served as network nodes.

the first time in history that we can actually try out new governance models without the need of people getting killed.”

Self-enforcing smart contracts can operate without the police forces, courts, and armies that state-backed financial systems employ.

Crypto has made unusually explicit what has always been true: that money and other forms of capital are themselves media—malleable and programmable, made valuable through meaning-making.220 Economic media-making has proliferated with blockchains and the cryptoeconomics that enforces their design.

As a result, crypto has occasioned governance innovations across a wide range of applications:

Previous Internet technologies have presumed a central server, whose owner in the external legal world holds ultimate responsibility for what takes place on that server.

Yet the work of inhabiting a distinctive mythological, symbolic universe provides a gateway: a license to dispense with foregoing constraints, which arose for a world connected with different sorts of media. The mythology then permits a transition from economics to cryptoeconomics, from politics to coordination, from representation to decentralization.217 Moloch and his ilk are Tocquevillian gestures toward heaven, toward transcendent commitments that hold the early adopters together while their new technology aids in reshuffling the institutional tables here on earth.

Crypto enthusiasts at times describe themselves as LARPing—live action role-playing, like the hobbyists who dress in medieval costumes and hit each other with foam swords in a park.

Although crypto has drawn on certain earlier political lineages—particularly anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism216—as time passes its ideological space becomes less reducible to those, and more fecund for its own breeds of politics. The politics seem to evolve quickly in a world whose memetic repertoire spans transcendent registers from the Genesis Block to the hoped-for slaying of Moloch.

As Buterin puts it, cryptoeconomics allows software “to reduce social trust assumptions by creating systems where we introduce explicit economic incentives for good behavior and economic penalties for ba[d] behavior.”

non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

There is even a special term in MolochDAO, with corresponding software code, for when someone leaves in frustration: “ragequit,” a term derived from gaming culture. Other DAOs have since adopted the feature.

And while a season might correspond temporally with a quarter, the language evokes a blurry duration that in its distinct associations seems to alter the flow of time.

Since crypto projects tend to avoid reliance on state identity systems, the meaning and basis of identity becomes an open question, both social and technical.

The one-share-one-vote norm of corporations is meanwhile beginning to wane in the imaginative universe of crypto, in favor of algorithms that balance a voter’s stake with dimensions such as temporal commitment, or the number of other voters; these forms of tallying preference have little precedent in corporate governance.

It would be too convenient to dismiss what is going on as mere disguise or wholesale recapitulation. A new name invites the breaking of old norms, or at least fresh iteration with them. Names matter.

Among DAOs, an emerging species of blockchain-native “decentralized autonomous organizations,”

Five years after its publication, the blog post’s exegesis took financial form with MolochDAO

Scott Alexander,

Passages from Ginsberg like this, that is, actually describe breakdowns of signal and shared intent:

In comparison to almost any other kind of institution, the faith in scalability among social-media companies appears peculiar.

They stress that community accountability must inhabit a temporality distinct from that of social media.

Although Kaba called for moving police budgets to education and other basic needs in her Times article, this is a literature that overwhelmingly prefers forms of exchange that nourish dialogical thinking and ongoing reinvention.

Thus, when a crime wave struck after the protests—resulting at least in part from police withdrawing their labor—politicians had no recourse but to further fund the only institutional option available to them for reducing crime: the police.179

and a crime wave

Recent patterns of democratic erosion worldwide suggest that centuries-old institutions are increasingly inadequate for confronting ascendant authoritarians.

religion of divine covenant

Institutions are a precious inheritance. Even flawed ones should not be discarded recklessly, at the risk of being left with something worse. Lasting traditions of thought and practice are indispensable to a thriving political culture.169 Yet unlike feudalism and autocracy, democracy cannot survive in stasis. Alexis de Tocqueville’s canonical view of “democratic revolution,” a gradual progression toward ever more deeply democratic institutions, refuses to deify any particular institutional form.

shuttered

They refuse to acknowledge technology as the angel of history, the divine agent, and instead insist that we are still just talking about how people relate to one another.

In the dissertation, as well as in a talk on “The Structures of Everyday Life” while still a student,149 Agre proposed the mathematical concept of the lattice as a gateway between the particular and the general, the routine and the complex. Hand-drawn lines connect specific components of a car to the concepts necessary to understand their use. His lattice functions much like brown’s fractals.

Starting with the feudal designs encoded into their systems, the minutiae of technical administration expanded to become coterminous with geopolitics.

As the Islamic State idea spread through brutal, viral videos and social media groups, the Californian ideology’s anything-goes social liberalism did not take hold. But the homesteading did—in this case adapted to the frontier of a stateless warzone, an act of exit from the international order. The implicit feudalism of the networks decoded there into an archipelago of territorial feudalism.

umma

The Californian ideology has a soteriology of its own. Barbrook and Cameron describe it with the parallel dreams of an “electronic marketplace” and an “electronic agora”: a frictionless economy and limitless speech that, if society accepts them, would wipe away the troubles of the analog world in a flood of true democracy. The flows of online life, that is, were to be vehicles for a kind of bloodless revolution. Implicit feudalism organized the technological basis for living out that vision, and the salvation it offers has not been especially democratic.

But it strayed too far from Californian homesteading to become dominant.

As recently as the mid-2010s, the names of the first two major versions of the blockchain protocol Ethereum were “Frontier” and “Homestead.”

To the extent that cancel culture has become a term of derision, perhaps it should be wielded not against the crowds for their excesses but against the systems that leave them little choice.

the Python Enhancement Proposal system, a piece of software designed for proposing and adopting changes to the programming language.

Governance defaults in offline domains present an instructive contrast. Even quite autocratic governments at least carry out performances of democratic institutions, such as elections and competing parties, because such practices have come to stand as prerequisites for legitimate authority.

Sole recourse in disputes to platform owners

This is most evident in the power Mark Zuckerberg retains over Facebook through its dual-class stock structure. To extend the metaphor of feudalism: if admins are ladies and lords, Zuckerberg acts as a monarch, who holds similarly absolutist powers over the rules by which his nobles operate, even without appearing to interfere in their fiefdoms directly.

GitHub fills the Git power vacuum with a familiar access and permissions system that identifies a single “owner” and multiple “collaborator” roles in a given project.

Progenitors: BBS, Usenet, and e-mail lists

As people began to make communities on these networks, creating and producing on them, the computer’s way of granting power through permissions became the default social order.

the founder, Scott Converse, once told me about when the members voted him out of power.

What kind of concept is implicit feudalism? I have been tempted to consider it a species of communicative affordance—according to Andrew Richard Schrock, “An interaction between subjective perceptions of utility and objective qualities of the technology that alter communicative practices or habits.”

In groups on Zuckerberg’s Facebook, power works the same way: If you start it, you keep it. In Black Lives Matter, the logic of a hashtag became the governance of an organization. The politics of the foundry holds its shape in the politics forged there.

The bylaws of the garden club, or the associations Tocqueville admired, would not translate straightforwardly online. Too much is different in online spaces: the ease of joining and leaving, the cultural and geographic diversity, the speed, the anonymity, the metrics of reputation, and on and on.

The club has survived from the heyday of suburban housewives—which my mother, as a retired government employee, never was. But the club elected her president. She described to me the debates, the subtexts, the meetings, and her strategems for guiding the process toward her goals. The club’s bylaws occupy eight pages in an annually printed, thirty-eight-page handbook. It also has chapters on hospitality and flower arranging. The bylaws’ structure includes articles, sections, and enumerated subsections.

Even under Chinese authoritarianism, such forms of consultation have flourished.

Technologies can open political doors that ordinary politics may not open alone. We see this pattern in governments’ willingness to let ridesharing apps categorically violate labor law, or for nuclear weapons to justify consolidating the authority of the US president.33

The lab’s multitudes of functioning computers, games, mobile devices, and technical manuals have reminded me to test ideas through the companionship of machines through proximity and play.

I take additional cheer from Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s Life after New Media, a work that puts the emphasis on life. They cast media studies as constituting a “theory of life,” involving “the interlocking of technical and biological processes of mediation.” Here I find permission to think about fungi as media, as well as about the habits and rituals involved in making an online place feel like home. If mediation constitutes a cyborg life-form, we can more fully exit the dichotomy of user and machine, of determiner and determined. The possibility of self-governance rests on recursion, again, between the biology and technology, the self and the network, the creative and the critical. Kember and Zylinska offer another kind of permission, too. In introducing themselves as artists as well as scholars, they model an interplay of analysis and intervention—a “creative mediation” that they summarize as, simply, “doing media studies.”28 Doing-through-study is what I aspire to here.

For instance, the modern cooperative movement first took hold in England among Chartists—factory workers demanding the right to vote in elections. To exercise and prove their democratic skills, they formed cooperative stores where every customer had a vote.

More than the other sides of the story suggest

Network ubiquity

What if those people were more skilled at making decisions online, because they were used to having real power?

preschool and an orchestra permit hierarchies intolerable to a punk band, but the people in each may still see themselves as living toward democracy.