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 wanna welcome you to today's book. Talk.
In governable spaces. Author 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 Aroni, an author 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. Just gonna share a link on 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 is 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. And a session. As we round towards the end of our discussion today.
No question that always comes up. Yes, we are recording this session, and tomorrow 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 Hansen to the screen. Dave is the Executive Director of Authors Alliance, where a cohost for these book talks, 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 a hiatus over the summer with our book 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.
Cosponsor, this book 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 gonna get into a bit today with governor spaces. You know, as I think about how authors exchange their ideas with the world, and how we can best support them, and 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, you know, we 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.
From authors and and others.
So I'm 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 wanna benefit the world by seeing widespread dissemination of their works. And wanna 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're 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 a platform for the voice of authors who wanna support the public interest?
And you'll also hear more about some of the cool stuff that we're doing and 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 our guest today. So 1st 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.
She's the author of chasing innovation.
Making entrepreneurial citizens in Modern India, by published by Princeton University Press.
And also redacted with Jesse Marks by taller California.
She organizes tech workers. 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.
She is co-founder of data, worker organization projects and activism tool.
Took up to Con. I think I said that right. I googled it, but I found no pronunciation guide. So, Lily. We'll 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's design lab.
And the Ma program in media and public engagement.
He's the author of 4 books.
The most recent. We're gonna hear about todayable 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 2,018.
So I think I have said enough. I I had longer bios that I could have pulled from, but I think you get the sense that 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 governmentable 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'll I think.
We met.
You're a journalist.
Activists. 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 worst 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 really grateful for you, overcoming writers perfectionis and putting it out into the world.
I thought maybe a place we could start. The conversation is you know, starting with.
I don't know. Many of us might have an experience of, you know, X 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 the book, kind of implicitism, like a, you know, really centralized form of governance that is convenient for us, and we've done a lot over the last decades 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 in the Us. Is like moving in the right direction, like.
We're, you know, here in San Diego and on the Kumi 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 where do you find optimism and 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. That's been similar to colonized.
Like, where do you find the possibilities for optimism?
And where do you think self governance might help.
Be with you.
I've learned so much from from your work, and.
From our relationship. And thank you, Dave and Chris and Caitlin, and that archive and the author's alliance for.
For hosting this
It's it. These are organizations that are just so deeply resonant with.
You know the values I tried to to bring into this work.
You know. I I think we have.
To, you know. To me the hope is kind of in plain sight.
And that is the.
The kind of.
Initial impulse that that motivates this book is was this conversation 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 I'm I'm the admin of this email list. And I didn't really know how to address this.
Problem democratically, and nothing in the tool set 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, you know 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 and so that's it was just kind of this.
Shock it, shock recognition, that.
Maybe the ways of solving these.
Problems with online space.
Are right in front of us, and there are things that we have known before. Both in.
You know, in the context of, you know, these colonizer societies as well as an indigenous communities that have preceded them.
That 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 of online spaces, and how.
Things came to be the way they are. But it.
Came to, you know, 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 a an insight that goes back to like Alexis de Tocqueville, Clr. James Wb. Dubois. So many thinkers on democracy.
In recent centuries have stress that you can't have democracy at larger scales unless you're also developing it and practicing it.
At at in, at the scale of everyday life.
And that start that that to me.
You know that? That's what connects this question of like, how do we run.
You know 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 this really scary appeal of of almost monarchist politics, taking hold around the world.
And I think, actually, that.
You know that larger scale kind of imaginary, of how we run our governance, and the kind of everyday.
Scale of how we live in our 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 wanna 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.
Yeah.
Billy. Okay.
Well.
So.
You talk about. Okay, this is.
You know, we need them. 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 wanna kind of.
Draw attention to the fact that, like, you know, the Garden Club.
Is also, you know, the garden's in a bill, and tradition right like we've got suburb 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 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 we've grown up with, like I me growing up in the Mall and on commercial and then working in Silicon Valley like, there's a lot of democratic muscles. I actually didn't have.
And a kind of society that was optimized for me, producing cool, startup ideas for Sergeant to mostly own.
The
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 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 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 exploring this.
This history.
You know I look at 2 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 crypto subculture. Very different languages, very different.
You know, cultures and 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
Kind of a kind of admin who's in charge.
And this is what our online spaces are set up for is for you.
Whoever's running the server to be in charge.
A kind of top down model that that I call implicit feudalism. This is the idea that.
That you.
That 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.st
That, you know. I think about your group chat. Somebody's in charge of that group. Chat.
The system is set up for that.
And
Black.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like slack channel of my students. Yeah.
Hit.
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 action and collective governance, that.
That the the current tools are not set up for.
In the case of the transform of justice folks.
In a lot of the the documents out of that. 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.
You know that these are not like.
People who hate technology. These are people who 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 like, what would it look like if if that was.
If that was the kind of used case that we were building tools around, how would our tools be different.
In the context of 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 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 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 be a practice.
And in some ways the.
You know, in both of these cases 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. 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 when nobody we're like. There's things we don't know about that people are 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.
Is not had 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.
Bunch.
Students and I, and also some folks in the Dsa. Here been working with the taxi workers, San Diego over the last 4 years.
Yeah, taxi workers is a taxi worker center and we've been helping them launch an app called Rid 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 wanna make decisions about what drivers don't wanna 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.
Ha! Who.
How do we, you know, like, what are some of the things that are? Gonna 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.
1st of all, it's important to recognize that governance is always happening somewhere.
Hmm, hmm.
And and if it, if you're not doing it, someone else is doing it.
And that doesn't mean that it's.
Brings out my anti answer.
It's easy for them, I mean, like.
Read an account of of early startup culture, right, you know, or watch the social network, or whatever I mean, like.
The 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 is decision making structures. There are boards all these things. So you know, in some respects, I just wanna hold that recognition that like.
This stuff is happening already. It's just that many of us are not.
Cut in on the deal.
Hmm.
Right? So it's it's really a question not of like.
Could we possibly self govern? But actually like, can we change the 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 involved in, some things that we don't. In the book I explore a bunch of what I call stacks 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 in the room like May first, st which is a kind of server hosting, cooperative. I've been part of for years. Social Co-OP, which is a masted on server, that a group of us co-govern.
And in each case, you know, may first, st I don't have to be too involved. I go to an annual meeting. Put in my 2 cents, social 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 we have to recognize that there's going to be a topology.
Of 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 and and that, and that can change over the life of an organization. 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 whatever, or if they want to be really involved, they can be.
But this is a design. Space, I think, is just.
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 a 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 40 something, you know, cooperatives that provide electricity. Just in Colorado there are hundreds around the United States, and you know.
Anymore. Elsewhere, they've been dealing with problems of participation and attention to.
You know, and they have different ways of addressing that here in Colorado who, you know, 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 meeting. Maybe another context.
You know people of 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 the question here is, 1st 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 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 couldn't also mean, like childcare at the governance meetings.
There's this Trickon project this is a platform for Amazon mechanical trick, like.
Data processing gig workers.
To
Report employee. It basically write reports about how employers are treating them so that we can share it with other workers.
And for 10 years that was kind of running on.
Me, and like 6 silver men and some worker moderators, kinda like running on fumes.
We didn't really have time to self govern the skills frankly, either. But then, over the last 5 years.
We got a grant actually to pay worker 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 are 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 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.
Add a little bit citing some feminist philosophers. Talking about social, which I really appreciated.
In your book.
So
I guess like.
And with that, like, I 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 gonna you know, runable.
You know, not meant to be a scale community software.
You know, in the case of the taxi the cooperative taxi app.
We basically like cobble the money together through a bunch of different grants. And like, there's, you know, taking a tiny bit of the fees from the rise people take that is eventually supposed to help pay for the software bills.
You are. How do we think about.
Like trying to do this cooperative democratic space design and building work and.
A kind of like.
Policy space. And he talked about this in the last chapter of the book. You know, policy space is like deeply imperfect.
For supporting it like we could be struggling for policies and 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, you know, 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 like, how how do we think about doing this work like imperfectly and transitionally.
Yeah, no, I I appreciate so much what you say about that social.
We really do have to recognize that governance is is an expense. In some respects it's something that should cost something.
And it does again in in our other 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 and and mutualist activity, I think that would be, you know, is, would be a very reasonable thing to ask, and and in context, like, for instance.
Agricultural cooperatives, real cooperatives, credit unions where we have.
Policy structures to support.
Co-governance.
You know, if people get paid to to participate in governance? It's not, you know. Th. 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 it starts out with our intimate everyday. You know, communities? That we we inhabit online. But it 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 and ownership.
And and I think this requires creating that are, you know, competitive with something like venture capital that enable community ownership and and in turn governance and and I, I really think that this is achievable. I've been working for many years with cooperatives and 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 in the United States, for instance, we have.
A situation where.
Where rural broadband is not available in many places where it needs to be.
And this is a problem we solved before 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 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 service. I used it. It worked just fine. It was much better for the drivers than Ubuntu it. 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 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 wanna 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 the CEO was talking about how much investment they're doing now in data centers.
Co-ops which you might not know are co-ops like Lando 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 in a century ago.
And and and now they're able to deploy that and 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 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.
Maybe 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-capitalism in the 21st century, but also envisioning really Utopias. And he talks about.
Like in the 19 seventies and Quebec.
There's this big social. And there's like some kind of social movement. And they basically got.
The Government to pass a policy that funded childcare.
For everybody.
But the Government would only pay for the childcare if it was paying a cooperatively governed childcare facility. People could pay for their futilely governed childcare 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 between like making a law.
That actually requires.
More fair and dignified governance that then actually like, enables those kinds, the resources to flow, to.
People who wanna build those kinds of collectives or institutions.
Promising, and I mentioned that because you said something about you know, we need to.
Have these like self governed entities compete.
With capital. 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 lift 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 more, you know.
To basically form like alternative rideshare. So I'm I'm hoping that Minneapolis sticks to its guns.
And you know, but I think competing isn't always, gonna even actually be a realistic thing.
We can have policies and make it so. You don't have to.
Have competition with venture capital, right?
Oh, like, literally, just.
Good correction.
Well, you can use different words here, and I 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 over and left out. They said, Uber and lyft, you have to follow the law, and you. You have to fingerprint your drivers for safety, and Uber and Lyft decided we'd we won't.
Play, by fair rules, right.
And and.
And.
Every everything about you know, the current structure of of our economy is set up around.
You know is was.
Was created, I mean the 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.
Our our created and and the the ideas about what can.
Can work.
you know, are crafted. And and I think we we need to design those rules much more around, enabling democratic problem and enabling shared ownership and shared benefit.
In fact, like those electric. I I keep mentioning that loan program was kind of indifferent to the structure.
That that came out, but actually.
It was designed in a way to support community communities coming together to solve these problems. And so it was really the cooperative that that took hold in that in that context.
The you know the case that you you're describing with Montreal. You know it's it's rooted in earlier work.
In Italy.
You know that that also really designed policy around.
Around community governed solutions to healthcare problems, into care, challenges and.
You know. And and again, if we centered democratic problem.
As 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 gonna be there. They're gonna show up.
But we can design policy that recognizes.
Yeah.
You know, you know this. This is this needs to be a viable option. This needs to be 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 I'm in a number of communities on slack that try to do like voting 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 1st class default assumption of what you're doing.
And and that's the, you know the challenge of 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.
But 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, you're 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 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, 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 wanna incorporate more of this entire life like.
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 you 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 fat, the whole moving fast and breaking things like we talk about it. But also it'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 times, 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 design? What emotional have you had to unlearn.
Thanks. Yeah, I I think this is such a hard question. And and to me it really come, 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 the Garden Club, and it's Roberts rules of order and and and it's kind of.
You know class.
Identities and and things like that is is that it assumes that there's, you know, it's often been out of a culture that assumes there's 1 way of doing self governance, and there's so many.
You know, one project I've been working on over the years is this effort called governance archaeology, trying to gather and and.
Synthesize and and find the a broader repertoire of 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 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. 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 of my life, politically, was sitting on a a criminal jury in New York City, in in Brooklyn.
And and it just forced me into a kind of embodied.
Conversation that I had never been in before.
You.
Also just turning to our own cultural traditions or coming into conversation.
With with culture 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.
Form of 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 from from continuing to inhabit. You know the kinds of practices that our ancestors have have used and you know, to continue exploring and building new ones, and and experimenting and modifying and and and sharing those learnings out.
And and.
You know so so often to me the lessons are.
Are are not around. How do we totally reinvent ourselves and reinvent the wheel? But how do we actually recognize how to rebrand 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 excluded from from the spaces that need them most.
Yeah, let's remember some of that knowledge.
Thank you for this.
But 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 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 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 and 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. W. What's the secret sauce, or what's what are the right ingredients to really drive engagement with governance.
And 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 government.
Stuff is that people rightly recognize that this.
E. These decisions are not gonna 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 that it's 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 1st of all asking, how much 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. You know where the where people, what people put in, you know, is reciprocated.
And and that's.
You know that I I had some folks who are building a a cooperative dow called land. 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 experience the same way they think about designing a product that.
Is worth people's time and and use. And I think that's that's 1 approach that that.
In some respects honors.
The you know the participants more than like blaming participants, or, you know, blaming members, or whatever for for not doing enough when it's actually not worth their time.
May I jump in on this? Really, briefly, too, like, I think, yeah, 100% do it, Nathan? So.
I've also been in.
Collectively govern projects like Turkop, 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 is not mediated through like political carrot, like charismatic political leaders like wedge issues.
We actually can do a lot together. And it kinda so it's something that really frustrates me is 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 social media to have.
Even a heavier hand.
In unilateral and authoritarian like content.
Because, you know, like, that's like misinformation, I don't think is big a problem as.
A kind of lack of spaces to collectively problem, solve and evolve 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 gonna 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? We've talked about one a lot around. Participation, you know, is is, don't mismatch your expectations of participation to the actual problem.
Another is is.
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.
And to play that kind of role. The real question, I think, at 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.
What?
Who who do you wanna 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 gonna affect people in different ways. Who do you want.
To be, to ultimately be accountable, to.
That question. I think.
You know, is is more important than than W. What I think is often an impulse which is to imagine that.
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, for you know, people to you know, to hold positions of of responsibility.
And and again, you know, it's like a lot of the a lot of the.
Ways of addressing these things are kind of hidden in plain sight they're in. 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.
That kind of.
Total reinvention of of how we run our organizations and our communities.
Chris, I think I have. Do I have time for one more.
I think I have time for one more. So. There was an interesting.
Go for it.
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
Like, 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, cause it has a huge significance for what sort of legal structures apply to governance of that space? So so that I guess the question there is like, How how do you view that distinction. And how does that relate to self governance?
Lily, do you have any initial thoughts?
Yeah, I think 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, there.
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 self govern. 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 this is why, you know, 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.
And and this is.
It also breaks that distinction between private and public, between like.
Governmental and non-governmental.
And I think that's good. I think it this kind of.
This kind of journey, opens the door toward.
toward this this
This concept of of non exclusive sovereignties, of.
Of a world in.
We have overlapping.
Affinities and relationships. I. I end the book with a picture that comes from the.
The website, native dash 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 you Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. These are this. The land was not exclusively held by one or another. The it wasn't easy to distinguish between private and public in that context and and and it.
And and the practices of those people continue that kind of logic.
And I think this is, you know, an invitation. If we can self govern on ours.
To be able to inhabit.
New kinds of political belongings that are actually very old.
And to have and and to not have to rely on these these made up and militarized borders as the kind of.
Clearest dividing lines of our of our of our political and social lives.
So you know in some ways this.
Th, 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, Re.
Reorienting our imagination about.
About what we belong to, and.
And 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 wanna underscore how Nathan put it, just to give a really example. You know, I live here.
The border region where there's the Kumi Nations land.
And then there's the United States jurisdiction, and there's Mexico's jurisdiction, and we have water pollution that, like moves up, 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 in, you know. And then, like Kumi, people like actually know a lot about the kind of ways of 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 are like overlapping sovereignties, or even also respecting, you know, older sovereignties, that we're kind of.
That were ignored, treaties were broken. I I 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. 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 Lily, for for hosting such a fantastic conversation. Lots of lots of love here in the in the chat, and like Dave, I got so wrapped up in the conversation I forgot that I had some jobs to do, but but here I am. I'm back to help bring this to a close. So as Dave mentioned, read the book.
And Duncan's gonna drop a link out into the chat. Please read it online. It's available as a an open access addition online. And you can also buy it in print and and get it delivered, if you like to read and print from the booksellers that Nathan lists on his site.
So as we wind down here, I do. Wanna 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 wanna participate in. So on October 10th 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 bestselling book attack from within, Mcquaid deals with disinformation.
Information 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 2 days of events for the Internet archives. Annual celebration up 1st on October 20. Second 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 20 second, you definitely will not want to miss that.
And then.
On the next day, on October 23, rd we'll host the Internet Archives, annual street party and celebration at our headquarters at 300 funds in San Francisco. This year's gathering. 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 culture, ensuring that it remains preserved and accessible for future generations.
So we have tickets available for both in person attendance, which runs 5 to 10. It's a big party you want to come or you can just sign on for the virtual live stream from the great room. Which is it? 7 Pm. Pacific? 10 pm. 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 gonna be a lot of fun.
So to close down here. 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 Hansen and Authors Alliance for co-hosting, and as always to you, our audience for showing up being respectful, given great feedback, great questions and your your time and your enthusiasm today. We certainly appreciate it.
Final links were 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.