University of California Press
luminosoa.orgWhen was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and ābenevolent dictators for life.ā In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls āimplicit feudalismā: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communitiesā democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
āA prescient analysis of how we create democratic spaces for engagement in the age of polarization. Governable Spaces is new, impeccably researched, and imaginative.ā ā Zizi Papacharissi, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
āThis visionary book points a way to scrapping capitalist realism for community control over our digital spaces. Nathan Schneider generously brings together disparate wisdom from abolitionists, Black feminists, and cooperative software engineers to spark our own imaginations and experiments.ā ā Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
āFrom feminist theory to blockchain governance, this dizzying array of topics pulls readers out of their comfort zone and forces a novel look at very old questions.ā ā Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nathan Schneider is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the masterās program in Media and Public Engagement.
Iām sure itās wonderful but the issues tend to be more technical than governance. Iām sorry this will be a wall of text, but please trust me itās worth reading. This problem isnāt directly solved as easily as just saying āwe need to do it differently.ā
Even on Lemmy, there isnāt a built-in mechanism for coming to consensus other and upvotes/downvotes.
There isnāt a built-in mechanism for elections of moderators or admins. Donāt even get me started on how itās basically impossible to do for admins. Lemmy at least has the ability for individuals to say āI donāt like these admins, Iām spinning up my own instanceā¦ with blackjackā¦ and hookersā¦ in fact forget the instance.ā The problem being you canāt vote out an admin whenā¦ the server lives on their property and they can just unplug itā¦ when theyāre the financial backing of the siteā¦ and so on.
These are major structural problems in how computers and the internet are designed at their backbone. Those same systems bleed into the way our programs work, too.
The internet is a giant communications hub where flow of data matters, partitioning data matters, and Access Control Lists reign supreme.
It would require so much more technical background work than almost any programmer has been willing to put forth. Even Tildes, a small, unfederated reddit-esque clone made by the bloke who built reddits Automod is still his own feudal feifdom. He has been working on a āreputationā system for years at this point without any clear path towards real democracy. And this guy started the site having read books exactly like this and having written a ton about the same issues himself. Yet he comes to the same technical conclusions that are basically āAs an admin, I am the Emperor of Tildes.ā
Somehow, all the people who read these things still end up with the same conclusions: Itās my place, follow my rules or get out.
Iāve seen exactly one site get it halfway right and thatās MetaFilter, and that involved them becoming a non-profit organization and having scheduled elections of board members. The hiring of moderators (who are paid) is still done like a business where you are interviewed and hired and the community doesnāt have a ton of input into who gets hired. MetaFilter has been around since 1999 so theyāve had a lot of time to build this structure, and most of the structure exists outside their technical platform itself, which still relies on admins and moderators top-down controls in individual threads. This is the only site I know of where the site servers itself are legally owned by the non-profit, and thus the community, instead of the admin, Jessamyn, who used to own it directly.
From the MeFi non-profit changeover document:
The only reason MeFi was able to achieve this, in my opinion, is having a very invested community for 20+ years. Our community on Lemmy has barely started, and it doesnāt include roadblocks for trolls like MeFi does (it costs $5 to open a MeFi account, tying your account to a payment card). How do we ensure our users are actually invested in our communities when itās a free for all to make as many throwaway accounts as you want? (or even worse, spinning up your own server and making hundreds of fake accounts flooding the fediverse)
Itās going to take a literal fucking technical genius to build a new system thatās not like that. The Mastodon/Lemmy developers are quality programmers, but they are not geniuses creating new types of consensus systems within their technical kingdoms. No, they all still want a level of control over what happens on what they would call ātheir property.ā (Thatā the other aspect, how much is built on property law and the fact that you can own a server.)
As I said, probably a great book, but the real issue is every new system being built with the same old top-down
admin > mod > userbreakdown. Until the technology adapts to a more democratic structure, we canāt actually escape this problem and it doesnāt seem like Schneierās book is laying out how we can program these new structures other than a seeming reliance on blockchainā¦ which seems superfluous.Thank you for all this insight into the problem. I guess itās a shame that itās
admin > mod > useralthough I guess if itās the admins paying for the server it makes sense that they donāt want to lose complete control over what goes on in it (which community governance (=democracy) would achieve). Perhaps this would be alleviated if only paying members could vote (like at MeFi I suppose)ā¦ but then youād still have the friction of having to found a nonprofit for it, and the legal work of doing that is not something that the average person, or even geek, knows how to do.deleted by creator