If you've spent any time online recently, you'll know that the internet is a
really wild place.
It feels as if we're learning in startling ways here 30 years on that the norms
that we have in the real world don't really carry over into our online spaces.
But what if it didn't have to be that way?
What would we need for society to be better online and governed online in the
same ways that it's governed in the real world?
Hi everyone, I'm Chris Freeland and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive.
I want to welcome you to today's book talk.
In Governable Spaces, author Nathan Schneider explores how we can transform
digital spaces into more democratic and creative environments inspired by
governance legacies of the past.
Joining Nathan for today's conversation will be Lily Arani, an author, professor
at the University of California San Diego, and faculty director of the UC
San Diego Labor Center.
As we start up here, I'd like to make sure that you have grabbed
your copy of Governable Spaces.
Duncan, who's working behind the scenes here today with Caitlin, hello both of
you and thank you, is going to share a link out in the chat so that you can
either download and read the free open access edition or you can purchase it in
print from a number of booksellers that Nathan has listed on his website.
So before we dive in, let's take care of some logistics.
Please use the chat to say hello.
Introduce yourself and let us know where you're joining in from today.
Our chat is open for discussion.
Please keep it relevant and respectful and feel free to drop in questions using
the chat for our panelists to pick up during our Q&A session as we round towards
the end of our discussion today.
Now a question that always comes up.
Yes, we are recording this session and tomorrow all participants will receive an
email that contains a link to that recording, the links that we're sharing here
in the chat, as well as the chat transcript.
So you don't need to be worried about furiously writing everything down.
We're capturing all of it.
It'll be shared on Internet Archive tomorrow and you'll get an
email in your inbox.
So now I would like to welcome Dave Hanson to the screen.
Dave is the executive director of Authors Alliance, who are a
co-host for these BookTalks.
And Dave's going to help provide additional background for today's conversation.
Over to you, Dave.
Hey, Chris.
Hi, everyone.
I'm really glad to be back.
We've had a hiatus over the summer with our BookTalks series.
And it's, yeah, it's really exciting to get started again.
We have a great lineup for this fall.
So thank you to the many people who are back, for those of you who haven't been
with us, Authors Alliance and Internet Archive co-sponsor this
BookTalk series, because we have a lot of things in common when it comes to
trying to understand and address issues related to access to knowledge and the
free exchange of ideas, especially on the Internet.
So which I think we're going to get into a bit today with governable spaces.
As I think about how authors exchange their ideas with the world and how we can
best support them in doing that, so much of it depends on having well-run spaces
online for those types of interactions to happen.
And for those of you who know Authors Alliance, we spend a lot of time thinking
about law and policy. And actually, over the last few years, we found ourselves
more and more involved in some of the legal disputes around governance of online
spaces and what kind of legal rules and liability rules attached to online
providers when they're hosting content from authors and others. So
really, really excited for this talk today. I guess I should say a little bit
about Authors Alliance, for those of you who are
new and haven't heard of us before.
So Authors Alliance is a nonprofit that was formed about 10 years ago by authors
who really have as their main objective to have their works be read. They want to
benefit the world by seeing widespread dissemination of their works and want to
see the kind of maximum reach and impact of their writing. And so
we have about 3,000 members, authors of all
types, everyone from Nobel laureates to journalists to fan fiction writers, and
kind of everything in between. And what really unites us is that we want to see
the world become a better place through the addition of our creative outputs.
Membership is free, so I would be remiss if I did not invite you to join. You are
very welcome to join and doing so gives a few benefits. One is a closer
connection to us so that you can help inform kind of the direction that we go and
help us voice the, provide a platform for the voice of authors who want to
support the public interest. And you also hear more about some of the resources
that we put out, particularly educational resources to help authors navigate some
of the complex law and policy issues that they face, especially online.
So with that, I'm excited to be able to introduce our guests today.
So first is Lily Irani, who is an associate professor of communication and
science studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she is the
faculty director of the UC San Diego Labor Center.
She's the author of Chasing Innovation, Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern
India, published by Princeton University Press, and also Redacted
with Jesse Marks, published by Taller California. She organizes tech workers
coalition San Diego and serves on the steering committee of the transparent and
responsible use of surveillance technology SD coalition and the board of
the United Taxi Workers San Diego. She is co-founder of data worker organization
projects and activism tool Turkup to Khan. I think I said that right. I googled
it, but I found no pronunciation guide.
So Lily will be moderating and in conversation with Nathan Schneider,
who is himself assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado
Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in
media and public engagement. He's the author of four books, the most recent we're
going to hear about today, Governable Spaces Democratic Design for Online Life,
published by the University of California Press, and also author of Everything
for Everyone, The Radical Tradition That is Shaping the Next Economy, published
by Bold Type Books in 2018. So I think I have said enough. I had longer bios that
I could have pulled from, but both of these folks know what they're talking
about, which is part of the point of some of these introductions. And if you've
read anything, even just a little bit of Governable Spaces, I think you'll
appreciate that this is touching on a very important issue right now. So with
that, I will turn it over to Lily and Nathan. Thanks.
Oh my god, hi. This is so exciting to be here to celebrate your book. I've known
Nathan for a long time, you all. I think we met. You were a journalist
activist and I was a grad student activist, and so we've been kind of on this
learning path together with our different projects, like just trying to build
things with people and then figure out the words to even talk about what are the
problems that we're facing and like how do we talk about it with other people. So
yeah, like this book just shares so much learning that you've done and so much
kind of reading and thinking you've done with other people. And so I'm really
grateful for you overcoming writer's perfectionisms and putting it out into the
world. I thought maybe a place we could start the conversation is starting
with, I don't know, many of us might have an experience of, you know, ex-Twitter,
which, you know, has for me at least turned into kind of hellscape of crypto spam
and Elon Musk suing other capitalists for not advertising with him enough. But
it's always been a place of what you call in like a, you know, really centralized
form of governance that is convenient for us. And we've done a lot over the last
decade to like advocate for slightly different kinds of governance, different
content moderation policies. But it doesn't really feel like our culture of
social media or maybe I would say like being here at the border, our culture in
the US is like moving in the right direction. Like we're, you know, here in San
Diego and on the Cume Island, like we're leaning into strengthening the border,
you know, like anti-immigrant rhetoric as a kind of false solution to a lot of
the issues we have in our kind of public spaces like housing. So something
strange and terrible is happening, I worry. And in your book, you write, there's
optimism in the rot, but also you warn that self-governance is not a solution.
It's a practice for problem solving. So I think that's one of the possibilities
of where we find ourselves, at least, you know, you and I both live in the United
States and settle on settler land has been settler colonized. Where do you find
the possibilities for optimism? And where do you think self-governance
might help?
Thank you, Lily. And first of all, thank you so much for being in this
conversation. It's always such a pleasure to be with you. I've learned so much
from your work over the years and from our relationship. And thank you, Dave and
Chris and Caitlin and the archive and the Authors Alliance for hosting this.
These are organizations that are just so deeply resonant with, you know, the
values I tried to bring into this work. You know, I think we have, you
know, to me, the hope is kind of in plain sight. And that is the kind of
initial impulse that motivates this book, is this conversation, this series of
conversations with my mother while I was having trouble with managing a
complicated email list where somebody was misbehaving on the internet. And I
started realizing, wow, I'm the admin of this email list. And I didn't really
know how to address this problem democratically. And nothing in the toolset of
the email list was helping me do that. It was all about how I could just make the
problem go away by removing people or otherwise asserting raw power. And
meanwhile, having conversations with my mother about her garden club, which she
had just been elected president of the garden club for her neighborhood. And I
was just struck by how that garden club had more sophisticated practices of
governance than I had ever experienced in any online space. And so that's, it
was just kind of this shocking shock recognition that maybe
the ways of solving these problems with online space are right in front of us.
And there are things, there are practices that we have known before, both in the
context of these colonizer societies, as well as in indigenous communities that
have preceded them, that we know how to self-govern.
And actually, we turned off a lot of that knowledge when we go online. And we've
created tools that don't open doors for that knowledge and that actually inhibit
it. And this took me on a journey through the history of the development of
online spaces and how things came to be the way they are.
But it also came to, brought me to a recognition of the stakes. These things that
are hidden in plain sight, these garden clubs, are actually an essential fabric
of democratic life. This is an insight that goes back to like Alexis de
Tocqueville, C.L.R. James, W.B. Du Bois, so many thinkers on democracy
in recent centuries have stressed that you can't have democracy at larger scales
unless you're also developing it and practicing it at the scale of everyday life.
And that to me, that's what connects this question of like, how
do we run an email list to the question of what is going on in our democracy as a
whole? Why are we having this resurgent authoritarianism, this really scary
appeal of almost monarchist politics taking hold around the world?
And I think actually that larger scale kind of imaginary of how we run our
governments and the kind of everyday scale of how we live in our
online lives are actually intimately connected.
Nathan, I just realized that you'd also prepared kind of a small overview of the
book, right? Do you want to actually go into that right now or do you want to
just keep the conversation going? We can definitely come back to
picking up some of these threads.
Yeah, I think we can keep the conversation going.
Really? Okay. Well, so you talk about, okay, this
is, you know, like Nathan and I, like we like talked about this before, but I'm
actually just responding to what you said right now. So like, when you talk about
Tocqueville and the kinds of skills of democracy that we already have kind of in
plain sight, you know, I also want to kind of draw attention to the fact that
like, you know, the Garden Club is also, you know, the Garden Club is an
ambivalent tradition, right? Like we've got suburbs in Los Angeles, like I grew
up in the suburbs of LA, the Garden Club can be like predicated on keeping
certain people like out of the neighborhood and using the police to do that.
And in your book, you actually draw, like you start with the Garden Club, but you
actually kind of take us through examples from like transformative justice and
like abolitionist movement. So like, how, you know, like, what are the kinds of
practices that we have in plain sight? And what are the kinds of practices that
might require us to learn some different muscles than the ones that we've grown
up, you know, the ones that we've grown up with, like I, me growing up in the
mall and on commercial social media, and then working in Silicon Valley, like
there's a lot of democratic muscles I actually didn't have in a kind of society
that was optimized for me producing cool startup ideas for Sergey Brin to mostly
own. You know, it was actually in a conversation with you
some months ago that I realized that, you know, the, what I do as a, as a scholar
and before that as a journalist is, is the study of negative space, like what are
the things that we don't, you know, that aren't normal, that could be. And, and
this book is really an exercise in that. And in order to find those places, you
know, we have to see where are the cracks in the, in the, in the dominant mold.
And, and, and I look at a bunch of different cracks out there that I think are,
are deeply connected. For instance, in the middle of the book, after, after
exploring this, this history, you know, I look at two particular cracks,
groups of people who probably wouldn't want to be in a room together, but who I
think have actually some interesting things in common.
Those are people who are exploring transformative justice, as you just mentioned.
People are trying to explore forms of addressing harm and conflict outside of
violence and incarceration. And then also people trying to build new kinds of
organizations with blockchains in the kind of you know,
cultures in all sorts of ways. But in both cases, they are, they're, they're
confronted with a problem. They have to find ways to solve, to,
to, to do governance, collectively, without relying on someone telling them what
to do, without relying on a kind of, a kind of admin who's in charge.
And this is what our online spaces are set up for is for, you know, whoever's
running the server to be in charge, a kind of top down model that I call implicit
feudalism. This is the idea that, that you, that on every online
service on every platform, and don't even think about like the big companies,
think about the small scale communities first, that, you know, think about your
group chat, somebody's in charge of that group chat, the system is set up for
that. And, Black, yeah, absolutely. My students. Pick your
tool. And yet in these spaces, both whether they're trying to manage a
decentralized blockchain, or address harm in, in neighborhoods, these are spaces
where people are having to solve problems of collective action and collective
governance that, that the, the current tools are not set up for. In the case of
the transformative justice folks, in a lot of their documents out of those
communities, they've actually just said, even though these are very online
people, don't do these processes online, our online spaces are not set up for it.
And to me, that's a really profound indictment. You know, that these are not
like, people who hate technology, these are people, people are on Instagram all
the time and all that, but they are, but they know that they're these sensitive
processes of addressing harm. We have not built our technology for that. And, and
that poses a question to me of like, what would it look like if, if that was, if
that was the kind of use case that we were building tools around, how would our
tools be different? In the context of blockchains, this is a space where people
are trying to build something that breaks the implicit feudalist logic without
necessarily using those words. In the sense of trying to create tools that are co
-governed among multiple participants. And, and, and, and from out of those
technologies, actually, it's created the problem of self-governance in a way that
we haven't seen online before. Like, and as a result, it's forced the development
of a whole bunch of new governance mechanisms and technologies to solve the
problem of collective decision making, to enable it to, to, to, to be a practice.
And in some ways that, you know, in both of these cases, they, they, they point
to the, the, the recognition that, oh, this isn't something we've even
tried to address yet.
And, and as they enter into these challenges, either by refusing to engage on, on
online, or to actually have to build a whole new set of tools from scratch, it's
a, it's a reminder of how much that implicit feudalism has been dominant and
how much actually we haven't really explored the question of what it could look
like to self-govern online. And it's that design space that above all this book
is an attempt to invite folks into. Yeah. So you're talking about like, where and
how do we like learn possible ways of self-governing? And like, I love this, you
know, finding the spaces like, you know, finding the spaces, like where nobody,
where like, there's things that we don't know about that people aren't making.
Then there's, you're talking about like having the tools to actually support
that, you know, like the capitalist internet programming culture and machine is
not, you know, it's not, it doesn't have the incentives to like give people
the time to build those tools.
But then there's also kind of, I wanted to ask you about time. You know, self
-governance is really hard. And so one of the things that's been happening in San
Diego is a bunch of students and I, and also some folks in the DSA here have been
working with United Taxi Workers San Diego over the last four years. United Taxi
Workers is a taxi worker worker center. And we've been helping them launch an app
called Ride United that's backed by a cooperative of drivers. And so the app is
accountable to driver wants and needs. But it's been really tricky to figure out
like what drivers want to make decisions about, what drivers don't want to make
decisions about, and then figuring out how to structure our time so that they
actually have the time to do that because they're working really long days, you
know, they're like always on the road, you know, we've like done workshops in the
middle of the taxi lot. You know, it took a year just to write the bylaws, you
know, and a lot of the drivers who are active didn't have the time to actually
spend the time doing the bylaws.
So like, how do we, you know, like, what are some of the
things that are going to be hard for us?
Like, what should we expect? And like, how do we figure out how to create the
time that we need and be kind of judicious about that? First of all, it's
important to recognize that governance is always happening somewhere. And if
you're not doing it, someone else is doing it. And that doesn't mean that it's
easy to pretend, you know, I mean, like, read an account of early startup
culture, right, you know, or, or watch the social network or whatever. I mean,
like, you know, these are complicated stories, no matter what. And, you know,
doing governance at large scale, like, investors do that in the stock market,
right? I mean, that's a, there is a voting structure, there, there is decision
making structures, there are boards, all these things. So, you know, in some
respects, I just want to hold that recognition that like, this stuff is happening
already. It's just that many of us are not cut in on the deal. It's really a
question not of like, could we possibly self govern, but actually, like, can we
change the question of who gets to participate?
And, and, you know, and also, then the question becomes, you know, how do we
design practices that are appropriate to, to our organizations? And, you know,
that, that requires beginning to recognize that, you know, that there's an
attention economy here. And there are some things that we want to be really
involved in some things that we don't. In the book, I explore a bunch of what I
call governable stacks, contexts where communities have been trying to enlarge
the space of self governance, I focus on ones that I've been involved in. I see
there are a few folks from these here in the room, like, May 1, which is a kind
of server hosting cooperative I've been part of for years, social.coop, which is
a mastodon server that a group of us co govern. And in each case, you know, May
1, I don't have to be too involved, I go to an annual meeting, put in my two
cents social.coop, I'm a bit more involved. Also, think of things like my credit
union, which, you know, I'm not involved in at all, really, but it has a
stakeholder structure set up for that. And I think we have to recognize that
there's going to be a topology of participation, there are things that we should
really be involved in and should put time into. And then there are things where
we can design them to be essentially accountable to us without us
having to participate every day.
And that can change over the life of an organization too. Maybe at the very
beginning, there's a lot of work involved, but maybe we should design that
process so that at the end, those drivers can focus on driving, you know, or, or
whatever, or if they want to be really involved, they can be. But this is a
design space, I think is just beginning. Again, in cases like in the, in the
crypto world, some of these early experiments have shown the need to really
better design around attention economies. This is an area of research I've been
really focusing on now, just wrapping up a paper on precisely that topic of how,
what kinds of questions should you ask when designing, you know, a governance,
you know, a governance surface, a system for self governance,
and, and what is the appropriate level? This is, these are old questions again,
you know, the, the rural electric cooperatives of 40 something, you know,
cooperatives that provide electricity just in Colorado, there are hundreds around
the United States and, you know, many more elsewhere, they've been dealing with
problems of participation and attention too. You know, and they have different
ways of addressing that here in Colorado, you know, we have a robot who, you
know, a person dressed in a robot suit who comes to the annual meetings, you
know, just part of the way in which we make an effort to make sure it's fun to
come to your, to your rural electric co-op meeting, maybe in other contexts, you
know, people have other ways of engaging participation.
In other contexts, we recognize, you know, maybe we need more, maybe we need
less, but, you know, to me, the question here is, first of all, to recognize that
this is, these are problems we can solve and that we solve in other contexts of
life. You know, we, we self-govern at local levels and regional levels and
national levels all the time, and we figure out ways to balance those.
I don't think it's too much to ask to also be able to, to find appropriate ways
of doing that in our, in our online lives and beyond. Yeah, and one of the things
that also makes me think about those, you know, making sure people have the
resources to do the participation, and that could also mean, like, child care at
the governance meetings. There's this Chiricopticon project. This is a platform
for Amazon Mechanical Turk, like data, data processing gig workers to report
employee, basically write reports about how employers are treating them so that
they can share it with other workers. And for 10 years, that was kind of running
on me and like six silver men and some chirp worker moderators, kind of like
running on fumes. We didn't really have time to self-govern, didn't really have
the skills, frankly, either. But then over the last five years, we got a grant
actually to pay worker, Turk workers themselves, to figure out how they wanted to
govern the system and make decisions both about the system and what kind of
advocacy workers would do. And so, you know, Turk workers were being paid like 18
bucks an hour, because if they weren't getting paid for that, then they would
basically be having to do Amazon Mechanical Turk work to make ends meet. So like
fundraising can actually be a really important way of like doing the social
provisioning of making sure that you don't have only like middle class, upper
middle class people who have the time to be in these spaces. And you actually
talk about that a little bit, citing some feminist philosophers talking about
social provisioning, which I really appreciated in your book. So I
guess like with that, like I kind of wanted to talk about like other kinds of
resourcing as well. So like one of the challenges that sometimes comes up with
these projects that I've been involved in is, you know, actually finding the
financial resources to give, you know, in my case, like workers who are most
directly impacted the time to be involved in the actual design of it, getting the
financial resources for capital investment, you know, like venture capitalists
aren't going around looking for community run projects that are going to run
cloneable, you know, not meant to be at scale community software.
You know, in the case of the taxi, the cooperative taxi app, we basically like
cobbled the money together through a bunch of different brands. And like there's,
you know, taking a tiny bit of the fees from the rides people take that is
eventually supposed to help pay for the software bills.
You know, how do we think about like trying to do this cooperative democratic
space design and building work in a kind of like policy space and you talk about
this in the last chapter of the book about like a policy space is like deeply
imperfect for supporting it like we can be struggling for policies that make it
easier or incentivize these things like I can see that as one branch, but then
also like, you know, the taxi app, the taxi app is operated by a private company
that's run by a nice guy who is listening to the drivers, you know, and he but
he's a private company, like we don't own the software because we couldn't get it
together. So how do we think about doing this work like imperfectly and
transitionally? Yeah, no, I appreciate so much what you say about that social
provisioning. We really do have to recognize that governance is an expense in
some respects, it's something that should cost something. And it does again in
our other organizational context, right? And for whether you're talking about
government or nonprofits or corporations, all of them expend money on governance,
they pay people who do governance work. And we need to understand that that is,
you know, is an expectation and should, you know, should be a part of how we
think about this challenge. You have to provision one way or another to support
this this labor. And if we had an economy that better honored self governance
in mutualist activity, I think that would be, you know, it would be a very
reasonable thing to ask. And in context, like, for instance, agricultural
cooperatives, real electric cooperatives, credit unions, where we have policy
structures to support co governance, you know, people get paid to participate in
governance. It's not, you know, this is in some respects a solved problem in the
context where we've decided to solve it historically. And, you know, at the end
of this book, it starts out with our intimate everyday, you know, communities
that we inhabit online. But it ultimately does pose the question of policy, and
it has to, because we can't get to that work of, you know, self governance,
ultimately, unless there's real stake and ownership. And, and I think this
requires creating frameworks that are, you know, competitive with something like
venture capital, that enable community ownership, and, and, and in turn
governance. And I really think that this is achievable. I've been working for
many years with cooperatives and related kinds of organizations in tech. And over
and over, I see very reasonable ideas that just because of policy structures, are
not able to access capital for, for things that just should happen, you know, in
the United States, for instance, we have a situation where, where rural broadband
is not available in many, many places where it needs to be. And this is a problem
we solved before with the with rural electrification, as I described, we solved
it with federal loan programs that are revenue positive for the government, they
don't cost anything, but that that are set up to support collective ownership. We
could be doing this for any kind of business, it might not be the same kinds of
things that we get with, with, with venture capital, but reasonable
proven businesses should be able to access capital. And right now they can't, you
know, we have situations like, for instance, when there was a time when the city
of Austin enabled the development of a, of a nonprofit ride share service, I used
it, it worked just fine. It was much better for the drivers than Uber and Lyft.
It took tiny fees in comparison. And yet it just was not able to, to
compete with companies that are able to pour billions and billions into, into
controlling markets. And, and so we really need to ensure that
there's the capacity to, to direct capital to shared ownership to reasonable
things that people want to do. Again, I think this is, this is more possible than
it sounds. And in other sectors, through our history, we've done it, you know, a
few months ago, I was down at CoBank, which is a cooperative bank for, for
agricultural cooperatives in Denver. And the CEO was talking about how much
investment they're doing now in data centers, co-ops, which you might not know
our co-ops like Land O'Lakes are running farmer owned AI, you know, they're
already doing cooperative AI, because they have access to capital through
provisions developed in, you know, in a century ago. And, and now they're
able to deploy that and be on the cutting edge right now. We need to enable that
in any industry. And through that kind of policy design, and this really comes
down to a way of rethinking how we approach solving problems with the internet,
right, rather than hauling the CEOs into Congress and saying you solve this
problem from the top down, I think much more we need to ask ourselves with every
problem that we confront, could we solve this problem with self governance,
rather than with feudalism, you know, could we solve this problem by enabling the
people closest to the problem to solve it, rather than turning once again to
essentially reinforcing the power of a very few elite leaders of these
companies. One of the things you talk about in the book is like, could we
actually have policies that require the people closest to the problem to actually
be the ones charged with solving it? So, like, in Canada, there's a sociologist,
Eric Olin, right, and he has a great book called How to be an Anti-Capitalist in
the 21st Century, but also Envisioning Really Utopias, and he talks about, like
in the 1970s in Quebec, there's a big social, there's like some kind of social
movement, and they basically got the government to pass a policy that funded
child care for everybody. But the government would only pay for the child care if
it was paying a cooperatively governed child care facility. People could pay for
their futilely governed child care if they wanted to out of their private pocket,
but the government subsidy would only go to the cooperatively owned, and so
that's like interplay between like making a law that actually requires more fair
and dignified governance, that then actually like enables those kinds of the
resources to flow to people who want to build those kinds of collectives or
institutions seem really promising. And I mentioned that because you said
something about, you know, we need to have these like self-governed entities
compete with capital, but we can't always compete with something that's got a big
runway of venture capital, but we can have policies that resource them, so we can
have, you know, in Austin, didn't the Austin co-op take off because the city
actually kicked Uber and Lyft out for a while?
And Minnesota, Minneapolis actually just, well, they just passed a minimum wage
law that negatively impacted Uber, and Uber and Lyft cried and they left the
city, and so now the city is actually giving like $150,000 to form, you know, to
basically form like alternative ride shares.
So I'm hoping that Minneapolis sticks to its guns, and you know, but I think
competing isn't always going to even actually be a realistic thing. We can have
policies to make it so you don't have to have competition with venture capital,
right? Well, you can use different words here, and I think, you know, words
matter immensely, but that story of Austin I think is a really fascinating one
because it wasn't that they kicked Uber and Lyft out. They said, Uber and Lyft,
you have to follow the law. Oh, like literally. You have to think of
your drivers for safety,
and
Uber and everything about, you know, the current structure of our economy is set
up around, you know, it was created. I mean, venture capital was
essentially non-scalable until 1979 when a series of changes to the tax
code and rules around pension funds enabled, you know, the California pension
funds to start investing in venture capital, and we have to recognize that the
rules as they are today are created, and the ideas
about what can work, you know, are crafted, and I think we need to
design those rules much more around enabling democratic problem solving and
enabling shared ownership and shared benefit. In fact, like those electric
cooperatives I keep mentioning, that loan program was kind of indifferent to the
structure that came out, but actually it was designed in a way to support
communities coming together to solve these problems, and so it was really the
cooperative that took hold in that context. The case that you're describing with
Montreal, you know, it's rooted in earlier work in Italy, you know, that also
really designed policy around community-governed solutions to
health care problems and to care challenges, and, you know, and again, if we
centered democratic problem solving as a way of approaching these questions, I
don't think we have to, you know, kick out other models, recognize that these
other things are going to be there, they're going to show up, but we can design
policy that recognizes, you know, this needs to be a viable option,
this needs to be possible, and right now often, you know, that capacity to
assemble and solve problems democratically is just not even there, and this is
the case with this financial policy we've been talking about, but it's also the
case just in the user experience designs of the technologies we use, you know,
you mentioned Slack, for instance, like try to figure out, you know, I'm in a
number of communities on Slack that try to do like boating and try to like make
collective decisions together, and we can kind of hack it, but it always feels
like we're working against the tool, you know, what would it look like to build
tools where self-governance was kind of the first-class default assumption of
what you're doing, and that's the, you know, the challenge I'm posing both for,
you know, the practice of user experience design as well as for policy design.
Yeah, there are a lot of really cool examples in the book of kind of technology
designs and systems that, you know, instead of defaulting to assigning someone to
be the administrator or moderator, like defaulting to assigning, the whole
community is needing to vote on like whether to kick somebody out or to take down
the post, like there's a lot of examples of actual things people have built in
here that we can all go and look for and see if we can incorporate some of those.
There was one thing that I, okay, so like I guess my last question that is like,
you know, we were talking about the capacity for self-governance, like sometimes
if, you know, it's something that there's a lot of ways we do it in our day-to
-day life, but there's also a lot of ways where for certain kinds of systems, for
certain kinds of products and industries, like it's actually really difficult
because of things like tax codes and regulations and, you know, infinite runways
of venture capital to write laws in California, I'd say. So like what are some
of, you know, as we are all, as we try for those of us who are convinced that we
want to incorporate more of this into our life, like what are some of the things
that we might have to learn, not just as skills, you know, about how to run
stuff, but as kind of capacities in our bodies, emotionally, in terms of how we
relate to each other in order to be able to do this. And for me, one of the
places this is coming from is, you know, I was, you know, trained in computer
science, you know, intense long work grinds, working on projects, working to
deadlines, like a real, like, moving fast, the whole moving fast and breaking
things, like we talk crap about it, but also there's like something in, for me,
the culture of tech, where I see a lot of people get really excited and just like
to move fast, get frustrated, taking the time to at least have slow discussions
to teach each other the different things that we know. Like what have you had to
learn in order to be able to be part of this democratic design? What emotional
habits have you had to unlearn? Thanks. Yeah, I think this is such a hard
question. And to me, it really comes, it's hard
because there's so many different answers.
And I think it's really important to hold that, that recognition that there is no
one kind of self governance. And I think one of the deep limits of cultures,
like, you know, for instance, the Garden Club, and it's Robert's Rules of Order,
and it's kind of, you know, class identities and things like that is that it
assumes that there's, you know, it's often been out of a culture that assumes
there's one way of doing self governance. And there's so many, you know, one
project I've been working on over the years is this ever called governance
archaeology, trying to gather and synthesize and find a broader
repertoire of governance practices that have existed through human history and in
diverse cultures. And this is, I think, an opportunity for us to, you know,
explore, explore those, you know, that depth of the traditions that we inherit,
different ways that we can, that we can embody self governance, whether that's
through a kind of, through things like collective decision making, voting, these
are one, these are one kind of thing we know how to do.
Another kind of thing that we could develop learning on is practices like juries,
you know, things that, yeah, I mean, one of the most important experiences of my
life, politically, was sitting on a criminal jury in New York City and in
Brooklyn. And, and it just forced me into a kind of embodied conversation that I
had never been in before. Also, just turning to our own cultural traditions, or
coming into conversation with, with cultural traditions of others and asking, you
know, how would you solve this problem? How would my ancestors solve this
problem? And then exploring what could it look like to have technical systems
capable of representing those of, of, of being spaces in which those practices
are possible. A lot of, you know, we were talking about the transformative
justice work, a lot of that comes out of ancestral practices, trying to reclaim
ancestral practices for problem solving. And, and I think that's,
that's a lot of the work, you know, is recognizing that that these are not new
challenges. Actually, the problem is, is that we've created, we've created these
technical spaces that actively prevent us from, from continuing to inhabit, you
know, the kinds of practices that our ancestors have used. And, you know, to
continue exploring and building new ones and, and experimenting and modifying
and, and sharing those learnings out. And, and, you know, so, so often to me, the
lessons are, are not around how do we totally reinvent ourselves and reinvent the
wheel, but how do we actually recognize how to reground things that we already
know how to do? And, and how do we recognize that, you know, a lot of the answers
are kind of around us already. They're, they're just misplaced and, and,
and, and excluded from, from the spaces that need them most.
Yeah, let's remember some of that knowledge. Thank you for this.
Thank you for this conversation. I was so entranced by it. I kind of forgot I had
a job to do, which was to, to ask you some questions from the audience
that were coming in. And we have some really, really good ones. One that
I thought was a really fascinating one, especially at this time of year where,
you know, we are now bombarded with messaging about governance at the national
level. There's an election happening and you'd have to be like
living under a rock to not know this.
And one of the major challenges or what we see happening is there's this huge
effort to get people who are basically totally disengaged from the governance
system, from, you know, caring at all really about voting to try to motivate them
to go vote. And so the question is about like in online spaces,
what's the secret sauce or what's, what are the right ingredients to really drive
engagement with governance? I mean, I think it really begins with
asking like governance for what and for whom and, and making sure that it is,
that it's aligned. I mean, a lot of the problem with participation in, in
government stuff is that people rightly recognize that this, these decisions are
not going to serve me no matter what. And the disengagement I think is earned,
you know, and, and I've seen that a lot in online spaces where I've like, you
know, crypto projects coming and asking like, why is it that nobody participates
in my token vote? And it's like, it's obvious because it doesn't affect them.
Same for why like a corrupt, you know, electric co-op doesn't get people showing
up at its annual meetings because those people know that the board of directors
doesn't actually listen to them. And, and so I think it's, it's first of all
asking how much participation do you really need to ask of these people? How do
you align the participation to actually fit into their lives and honor their
busyness and their, and the value of their time, but also to ensure that we're
designing systems really around, you know, where the, where, where people, what
people put in, you know, is reciprocated. And, and that's, you know, that, I had
some folks who were building a cooperative DAO called Collabland. It's a massive
cooperative using tokens and things like this. And they were describing how they
think of governance as, as part of their product design. You know, they, they
think about the design of governance experience the same way they think about
designing a product that is worth people's time and use.
And I think that's, that's one approach that, that in some respects honors the,
you know, the participants more than, than like blaming participants, you know,
blaming members or whatever for, for not doing enough when
it's actually not worth their time.
Can I jump in on this just really briefly too? Like I think, yeah, a hundred
percent to what Nathan said. I've also been in collectively governed projects
like Turakopticon, where there's people who actually would vote on really
different places in the political spectrum. But when we're actually working on
something that's like, we all have a stake in and it's concrete and it's not
mediated through, you know, big, like political care, like charismatic political
leaders, like wedge issues, we actually can do a lot together and it kind of, so
it's something that really frustrates me as the ways that, you know, I feel like
the US government has like leaned into misinformation and social media as the
characterization of the problem. And then policy attempts at policy solutions
that are like laws that basically empower implicitly feudalist social media to
have even a heavier hand in unilateral and authoritarian like content moderation.
Because, you know, like that's like misinformation, I don't think is as big a
problem as a kind of lack of spaces to collectively problem solve and devolve
like resources and decision making to the people we're
actually doing the thing with.
So one more, I have a whole list, I'm not going to be able to get to them all,
but this is, I guess, a sort of softball question, but I think it would actually
be really helpful for the whole, everyone on the talk. One person asks, if you
could share just a few bits of wisdom that you've, you have about common
misconceptions or pitfalls of self-governance, especially to those who are new to
it. Yeah, thank you. You know, again, we've talked about
one a lot around participation, you know, is don't mismatch your expectations
of participation to the actual problem.
Another is the role of leadership, is that having collective governance
does not remove the need for leadership and for people to hold vision and to
play that kind of role. But the real question, I think, at stake here is who are
leaders accountable to? You know, when I talk with people who are building
democratic organizations, a question I often ask them is like, who do you want to
be worried about when you're lying awake at night, you know, trying to work
through a hard challenge? And, you know, you have to make a call that's going to
affect people in different ways. Who do you want to be to ultimately be
accountable to? That question, I think, is, you know, is more
important than what I think is often an impulse, which is to imagine that you can
run communities with as a kind of undifferentiated mass in which they make kind
of spontaneous decisions and so forth together. I think there's still a need for,
you know, people to, you know, to hold positions of responsibility.
And again, you know, it's like a lot of the ways of addressing these things are
kind of hidden in plain sight. They're in the things we're doing. It's about
realigning some of the things we're doing to the people who, you know, getting
the accountability flows right, rather than imagining a kind of total
reinvention of how we run our organizations in our communities.
Chris, I think I have time for one
more. I think I have time for one more. All right.
So there was an interest that came in actually at the beginning of the talk. And
I've been pondering the whole time, which is basically getting at differences
between public and private spaces.
And is that actually a meaningful distinction in online spaces and governance?
And to me, that's super interesting because depending on what room you're in,
from a legal standpoint, people fight about this all the time because it has a
huge significance for what sort of legal structures apply to governance of that
space. So I guess the question there is like, how do you view that distinction
and how does that relate to self-governance? Lily, do you have any initial ones?
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question and it's a hard one, you know,
in part because I think the, you know, if you take some of these ideas seriously,
they're in some ways kind of moderate and humble, but at the same time, they're
kind of radical because if we were really self-governing our online spaces, we
would be citizens of something that crosses borders, that is not really
under the jurisdiction of our territorial governments, that kind of breaks a lot
of the political categories that we're used to. And, you know, I think this is
something that is profoundly needed. You know, it's something that is why we
spend so much time in our online lives because it enables us to connect with
people, not simply, you know, in the context of imagined lines in the sand.
And this also breaks that distinction between private and public, between like
governmental and non-governmental. And I think that's good. I think this
kind of journey opens the door toward this
concept of non-exclusive sovereignties, of a
world in which we have overlapping affinities and relationships. I end the book
with a picture that comes from the website native-land.ca, which is a map of
indigenous territories around the world, and they're overlapping. You know, I'm
speaking from the territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. The
land was not exclusively held by one or another. It wasn't easy to distinguish
between private and public in that context. And the practices of those
peoples continue that kind of logic. And I think this is, you know, an invitation
if we can self-govern on our networks to be able to inhabit new kinds of
political belongings that are actually very old, and to have and to
not have to rely on these made up and militarized borders as the kind of clearest
dividing lines of our political and social lives. So, you know, in some ways this
stuff is kind of small, and we're talking about user experience design and, you
know, tech stuff, but it's also about like reorienting our imagination about
what we belong to. And I don't think that some of the clean distinctions that
we're used to fit into that world.
And can I just, I want to underscore how Nathan put it, and just to give a really
concrete example, you know, I live here at the border region where there's the
Kumeyaay Nations land, and then there's the United States jurisdiction, and
there's Mexico's jurisdiction. And we have water pollution that like moves, you
know, back and forth across the border that's caused a lot by American-owned
companies, but that are located in Mexico that are, you know, and then like
Kumeyaay people like actually know a lot about the kind of ways that the land and
the water flows and works. You know, these are not, like, why does the solution
to that need to move through DC at all? I feel like something a lot of people can
sympathize with. And these questions of like overlapping sovereignties, or even
also respecting, you know, older sovereignties that were kind of, that were
ignored, treaties were broken. It's like the more profound kind of possibility of
what the discussion that Nathan is opening up with a discussion of just our
online lives, but it applies to much more. And actually, when I was reading the
book, I was actually thinking about that. And I'm kind of surprised the
conversation got here, and I'm really happy about that. So Chris has shown back
up on the screen, which means it is time for us to wrap up. So thank you both.
This was such a fantastic conversation, and I hope everyone on the call, if you
haven't read the book, definitely check it out.
So thank you. Thank you so much for hosting and facilitating and making this
space possible. And thank you to everyone who came. Yeah, thanks, everyone, for
your time, Nathan and Lily, for hosting such a fantastic conversation. Lots of
love here in the chat. And like Dave, I so wrapped up in the conversation, I
forgot that I had some jobs to do. But here I am, I'm back to help bring this to
a close. So as Dave mentioned, read the book, and Duncan's going to drop a link
out into the chat. Please read it online. It's available as an open access
edition online, you can also buy it in print and get it delivered if you like to
read in print from the booksellers that Nathan lists on his site. So as we wind
down here, I do want to, in our remaining time, if you need to bounce, go for it.
But I want to tell you about a couple of upcoming events that I think you'll want
to participate in. So on October 10, we'll have our rescheduled book talk from
earlier this year that we weren't able to do because of some absences. But with
author Barbara McQuaid for her best selling book Attack From Within. McQuaid
deals with disinformation and its effect on democracy, which will of course, no
doubt continue to be a hot topic in October as it is now.
And so I'm sure you won't want to miss that discussion. And then later in
October, we'll host two days worth of events for the Internet Archive's annual
celebration. Up first, on October 22nd, is Doors Open, our annual behind the
scenes tour and party of the physical archive.
We're opening the doors to an often unseen place where you can tour the physical
collections of books, film, music, and video in Richmond, California. You'll be
able to see the life cycle of physical books out from donation to preservation,
digitization and access. You also get to see samples from generous donations and
other acquisitions of books and microfiche and records and all the wonderful
stuff that the Internet Archive has in analog form as it's being digitized and
made available in digital form. All of that will be on display. It's a really fun
night. So if you're in the Bay Area on October 22nd, you definitely will not want
to miss that. And then on the next day, on October 23rd, we'll host the Internet
Archive's annual street party and celebration at our headquarters at 300 Funston
in San Francisco. This year's gathering, Escaping the Memory Hole, explores the
vital role that libraries play in protecting our digital heritage as corporate
decision makers increasingly control what stays online. MTV News, Cartoon
Network, anyone? Libraries like the Internet Archive stand as guardians of our
shared digital culture, ensuring that it remains preserved and accessible for
future generations. So we have tickets available for both in-person attendance,
which runs five to 10. It's a big party. You're want to come. Or you can just
sign on for the virtual live stream from the Great Room, which is at 7pm Pacific,
10pm Eastern. We know it's late. It'll be archived for replay and also streamed
on YouTube and other channels. So I do hope you'll join us for those events.
They're I would like to wrap, as we always do, with commitments and thank yous.
Today's session is recorded. The links that we've shared, the conversation that
we've shared, all the resources will be available on the Internet Archive
tonight. And tomorrow, all registrants will receive an email with a link to the
recording. As for thank yous, a big thank you, of course, to Nathan and to Lily
for such a great conversation, to Dave Hanson and Authors Alliance for co
-hosting. And as always to you, our audience, for showing up, being respectful,
giving great feedback, great questions, and your time and your enthusiasm today.
We certainly appreciate it. Final links are out in chat. You can stay up to date
on everything that's happening at and around the Internet Archive through our
blog and our events calendar. And to sign off here, I do hope to see you at one
of our upcoming events.
Thank you all. Have a great day.