[Air-L] Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

[Nathan Schneider]

Dear AoIR,

Please permit me to share news about the release of my new book today, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. It is available from University of California Press in paperback and, most importantly, as a free, open-access ebook. Get it here<https://nathanschneider.info/govbook>.

Some basics:

When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, 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.

“This visionary book points a way to scrapping capitalist realism for community control over our digital spaces. Nathan Schneider generously brings together disparate wisdom from abolitionists, Black feminists, and cooperative software engineers to spark our own imaginations and experiments.”—Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

I hope this community finds it useful!

Nathan

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Nathan Schneider
Assistant Professor, Media Studies
University of Colorado Boulder