University of California Press
luminosoa.orgWhen 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 have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. 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.
“A prescient analysis of how we create democratic spaces for engagement in the age of polarization. Governable Spaces is new, impeccably researched, and imaginative.” — Zizi Papacharissi, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
“This visionary book points a way to scrapping capitalist realism for community control over our digital spaces. Nathan Schneider generously brings together disparate wisdom from abolitionists, Black feminists, and cooperative software engineers to spark our own imaginations and experiments.” — Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
“From feminist theory to blockchain governance, this dizzying array of topics pulls readers out of their comfort zone and forces a novel look at very old questions.” — Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nathan Schneider is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the master’s program in Media and Public Engagement.
More democratic structures mean more discussions, votes, etc. This means people with more time will take up all the space. It’s also susceptible to outrage campaigns and similar. This can lead to a community getting preoccupied with meta topics, distracting from the main topic.
And what’s the problem with that?
That works well in anti-democratic societies - you have no proof that it will even be possible to do such in ones that can actually be called democratic with a straight face.
The problem is it gives power to those with the most free time on their hands, eg the terminally online. That’s a fraction of users.
I’ve been active in democratically run groups for decades now and it is always an issue.
It certainly is a risk, but surely there must be ways to counter it…
What can work well is asking the community with surveys and then the mods make a judgement call.
Too much democracy creates a vulnerability to an influx of activists brigading for a cause unrelated to a community’s topic.
A loud minority can drive out a silent majority of users.
Contemporary example is Israel/Palestine. Some subreddits decided to become propaganda echo chambers, others made discussion of the topic against the rules.
I definitely agree that there can be such thing as too much democracy.