Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life by Nathan Schneider

Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life is a daring work that masterfully combines unexpected theoretical inspirations with experiments in conceiving governable spaces. Every chapter finishes by discussing proofs of concept and lessons learned with the Media Economies Design Lab, directed by author Nathan Schneider. The other sources of praxis that help Schneider build a grounded argument are the May First Movement Technology, a cooperative of predominantly activist organizations that provides Web hosting, cloud services, and public education, and Metagov, a network of researchers and builders.

In the first chapter, Schneider argues that many online networks use systems of permission to enact an implicit feudalism. He uses the word “feudalism” here metaphorically “to describe concurrent communities across a network, each subject to a power structure that is apparently absolute and unalterable by those who lack specific permissions” (18). Schneider first addresses a time before and during the early internet, dating back to the bulletin board systems in the 1970s, when the sysop was the ultimate executioner. He then argues that the language used in these communities reflects authoritarian structures, from the “serfs” and “barons” of Usenet; to Linux’s “benevolent dictator for life,” Linus Torvalds; and to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s constitutional monarch. With the rise of platforms, implicit feudalism ceased to be a necessity; instead, it became a business model.

In the second chapter, Schneider turns to the politics of no-politics theorized by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in The Californian Ideology, arguing that what got inscribed in the digital was the ideology of homesteading, the conquest of the Western United States. Schneider strikes with another semantic point: “As recently as the mid-2010s, the names of the first two major versions of the Blockchain protocol Ethereum were Frontier and Homestead” (43). Although many of the projects using technology for social change proclaim democracy as the goal, Schneider notes that democracy does not seem to be recognizable in the means, especially when the quality of being exitable makes a community nominally democratic. Refusing homesteads, Schneider sees alternatives in learning from bell hooks’s “homeplace” or adrienne maree brown’s “fractals.”¹

The third chapter moves from diagnosis to remedy and begins to reimagine the means of building democracy by building governable spaces. Schneider draws from transformative justice and cryptoeconomics, two fields of praxis that attempt “to organize self-governing infrastructures that do not rely on state violence to establish order” (60). He looks, on the one hand, to movements for police abolition and their principles of radical subsidiarity and, on the other hand, to cryptoeconomics, “a project of reimagining economics and governance through internet-native blockchain protocols” (60), for their ostensible potential as alternatives to implicit feudalism. Most importantly, Schneider acknowledges the differences between the play and the play-nots, the crypto builders with access to speculative investment and the activists in overpoliced neighborhoods with limited resources for building infrastructures.

Noting a wide variety of terms explaining the “forms of domination by governments and corporations through their control over internet technologies” (85), Schneider proposes “digital colonialism” as a useful blanket term for the regime from which governable spaces can possibly emerge. He emphasizes, however, the difference between the data extraction of digital colonialism and the military occupation of “real” colonialism. Here Schneider’s elaboration of terms such as “colonialism,” “democracy,” and “feudalism” seems underdeveloped, and the relation between neoliberal capitalism and these “-isms” casts a spectral absence. Nevertheless, I appreciate that even his somewhat rushed and imprecise diagnosis comes with a wealth of remedies in the form of modular politics that enable “experimentation with and circulation of governance designs” (99), as seen already both in the civic participation platform Decidim and in the broader context of blockchain technology. Schneider does suggest that the most appropriate diagnosis and the remedy are context-specific; governable stacks or “the socio-technical substrate of governable spaces” (92) need to respond to the reality on the ground.

Chapter 5 begins with “Monsters Come Howling in Their Season,” a 2019 science fiction story by Cadwell Turnbull in which the residents of the Black-majority Caribbean island of St. Thomas operate a decentralized and governable computer system called Common, which has access to the minutiae of the residents’ lives, coordinating their actions and successfully protecting them from storms.² This chapter parallels policy design and technology design: “Policies appear in the shape of interfaces” (124). For readers not satisfied with examples from science fiction, Schneider points toward the role of microtelcos in Latin America: phone and internet service provision in spaces not interesting to corporate providers.

Schneider consistently anticipates the criticisms that crossed my mind, from US-centrism, to the peril of crypto’s expansion of economic logic, to the originary sins of open-source, and even to his “at times outsized faith that human beings are capable of democracy in the first place” (14). He ascribes his optimism to experiences with Catholic social teaching, economic democracy, and democratic high school education, lessons that made him believe in self-governance. However, for a book recognizing the importance of “redirecting the flows of finance and regulation” (14) for enabling democratic designs in online life, as the subtitle of the book indicates, Schneider appears somewhat naive. For instance, he considers the citizen assemblies that succeeded the Yellow Vests protests in France an example of “existing power structures [recognizing] their own limits” (121). However, what occurred in that specific context was French president Emmanuel Macron’s designation of France as a “start-up nation,” which led in turn to an expanded role of management consultants and commercial start-ups in governance.³ Elsewhere, Schneider is more discerning, for instance, when he notes that governable spaces such as Decidim in Barcelona contracted once the parties that introduced these innovations lost their power.

Governable Spaces relies on examples that seek to build “governing infrastructures that do not rely on state violence to establish order” (60); however, these systems’ reliance on venture capital and angel investors simply shifts control from one form of property-related violence to another. Schneider recognizes the predicament elsewhere: “Community accountability is friction from the perspective of an investor’s profit margins” (68). Noting, albeit not overdetermining, the still-powerful reach of realpolitikal formations, Governable Spaces recognizes the potential of technology to aid in self-governance and enact nonreformist reforms. Noting as well as choosing to transcend the powerful hold of states that control access to infrastructure and land, Schneider’s book is an important contribution to abolitionist praxis packed into an inspiring read.