Listen to the podcast (David Bollier interviews Nathan Schneider) located in the “materials” tab.

Outline of Podcast

Speaker 1: Nathan Schneider
Speaker 2: David Bollier

nathan-schneider-episode-49

Summary

• Digital governance and the internet’s impact on democracy.0:00
  • Nathan Schneider argues for democratic governance in online spaces.
  • The internet started as a gift economy run by computer geeks and academics, but it evolved into a corporate feudalism with top-down power eroding democratic skills.
  • The relationship between online and real-life behaviors is complex, with the internet offering promise but also entangled in real politics and culture.
• The limitations of online democratic spaces.5:00
  • Speaker 1 argues that the structure of online spaces does not include the tools and norms for self-governance, leading to a decline in democratic practices.
  • Speaker 2 suggests that there are still islands of democratic activity in digital spaces, such as the free and open source software world and wiki pedia, but their longevity and relevance are uncertain.
  • Speaker 1: Most open source software projects lack structures for collaboration, leading to top-down power dynamics.
  • Speaker 2: Online life’s phenomenology makes democratic collaboration harder, with technical barriers and convenience prioritized over negotiation.
• Democracy, technology, and governance in online spaces.10:27
  • Speaker 1 argues that democracy is not necessarily hard, but lacks good tools and norms for solving problems, leading to toxic behavior in online spaces.
  • Speaker 2 agrees, citing the limitations of Ostrom’s work in addressing political economy and enclosures.
  • Speaker 2 suggests commoners must find ways to “own finance, control our spaces” in response to the destructive logic of capital.
  • Speaker 1 agrees, noting that even in the blockchain sector, which has the technical infrastructure for decentralized ownership, old forms of capitalism have surged in and become investor-driven.
• The potential of decentralized technology and its limitations.15:05
  • Speaker 1: “There’s no firewall between positive social democratic versions of software and investor-driven possibilities.”
  • Speaker 1: “The belief that new technology guarantees decentralized outcomes is an Achilles heel of this movement.”
  • Lee Drummond discusses John Perry Barlow’s vision of a decentralized internet, noting that while Barlow’s ideas were appealing, they lacked practical solutions for self-governance and protection from corporate colonization.
  • Drummond argues that the language of colonization was used to describe the early online community, despite its intentions to become a democracy, and that this vision has yet to be realized.
• Challenging liberalism and building a commons.20:29
  • Speaker discusses challenges to liberalism, including top-down governance and assumptions about borders, and explores alternatives such as local self-governance and digital networks.
  • Speaker 1: Borders are fake, overlapping territories are real.
  • Speaker 2: Commons need guardianship of shared wealth, not exclusive ownership.
• Democracy, community, and power in digital spaces.25:07
  • Speaker 1: Democracy must evolve to survive, and crypto contexts are experimenting with new forms of participation and decision-making.
  • Speaker 2: Reinventing democracy is a challenge, as it’s easier to go with existing capitalist norms, but there’s a need for new forms of participation and decision-making.
  • Speaker 1 highlights the importance of joy and play in activism, citing examples of transformative justice organizers who prioritize self-care and pleasure.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the relevance of African American activism and feminist theory in addressing the challenges of digital colonialism and safeguarding community wealth.
• Building alternative democratic structures in the digital age.31:03
  • Speaker 1 emphasizes the importance of everyday practice in decolonial thought, citing W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis as influences.
  • Speaker 2 agrees, highlighting the need for building alternative structures to address injustices like slavery and mass incarceration.
  • Speaker 2 discusses the need for a “parallel polis” in totalizing regimes, emphasizing the importance of horizontal relationships and prefigurative politics.
  • Speaker 1 highlights the value of practical experiments and experiences in shaping a different digital order, with a focus on governable stacks and changing underlying systems.
• Building durable power through networks and organizational forms.35:58
  • Speaker 2 highlights the importance of local-level organizing and critical connections in creating viral movements, citing Grace Lee Boggs as a key influence.
  • Speaker 1 discusses the challenges of maintaining momentum after a viral explosion, drawing parallels with Occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square.
  • Speaker 1: How to create durable power through networks, despite viral messages and cultural impact.
  • Organizers discuss the need for new forms of political power and the limitations of current progressive structures reliant on elite funding.
• Designing tech for democratic participation.42:14
  • Speaker 1 highlights the limitations of current activism platforms, which often prioritize performative accountability over actual power-building.
  • Speaker 2 questions the effectiveness of traditional activism methods, such as tweeting or signing petitions, and suggests alternative platforms that prioritize action and alternative creation.
  • Speaker 1: Democracy requires empowering citizens, not just defending institutions that have failed.
  • Speaker 2: The challenge for democracy is enabling bottom-up creative action, not just defending existing forms of power.
  • Speaker 1 emphasizes the importance of building grassroots power through democratic practices that are accountable and flow through everyday life.
  • Speaker 2 thanks the speaker for their book and encourages thoughtful consideration of how to organize better pathways forward.

Transcript

Speakers

Nathan (73%)

, David (27%)

NS

Nathan Schneider

0:00

In an age where social movements are so often running on the rails of the internet, how do we create durable power? How do we create those critical connections that can enable the movement to fulfill its promises fulfill its viral messages. And it seemed to me that that ability to self govern to hold anything in digital space was central. These movements are relying on networks not designed for building durable power. They’re designed for advertising and inflaming people.

DB

David Bollier

0:35

This is frontiers of Commoning with David bowyer. We’re going to talk today about digital governance. How can communities of shared interests govern themselves online in more inclusive democratic ways? Nathan Schneider has given this topic a lot of deep thought, and he shares it in his new book, governable spaces democratic design for online life. Nathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the media enterprise Design Lab. The problem with the internet Schneider argues, is that most governance and web platforms is based on an implicit feudalism as he calls it, there’s a deep propensity for online communities to be run as autocratic fiefdoms were trained to surrender any democratic aspirations and to simply accept the platform structures and rules that the Elon Musk’s and Mark Zuckerberg and other corporate CEOs offer. The most commercially attractive structures and rules, of course, happen to be the most extractive exploitative and socially disruptive. Snyder believes that online spaces could in fact, host a creative, radical and democratic Renaissance. He makes his case by drawing on the history of democratic governance from a variety of sources, political philosophers, web 3.0, gurus, African American activist, religious communities, feminist theory, and many others. All of this has obvious relevance to the comments as it grapples with corporate enclosures of online life. Nathan, welcome to frontiers of communism.

NS

Nathan Schneider

2:03

Thank you, David. It’s so good to be here.

DB

David Bollier

2:05

Let me begin with a big picture question. You know, the internet started out as a gift economy run by computer geeks and academics as sort of a non commercial generous ethic, people actually want to talk about netiquette and courteous social behaviors online. What happened in this big picture to get to the space where we’re at now?

NS

Nathan Schneider

2:24

It’s a great question. You know, there are so many ways to begin answering it. But just to take some language that you use there. I mean, maybe in some respects, the the commons that was allowed to form in the early internet was, was too generous, it opened the door for sharing and collaboration without ensuring that communities doing that work building those spaces really had control over their own worlds and their own the value that they’re creating. In particular, though, I tell a story in the book about how patterns developed in informal non commercial spaces migrate into into more formal ones, and how structures of the internet and of online spaces, the structure of the server in particular, this the site through which communities would flow and communication flow would become a kind of choke point that we never really figured out how to collectivise how to turn into a Commons at any large scale. And corporations were able to take advantage of this, they were able to take advantage of the practices, the informal practices of people, communities, and online space, which ran along the lines of what I call, as you said, implicit feudalism and turn it into a kind of corporate feudalism that we have today. But in this book, I also really, you know, I don’t just want to tell the story about Big Bad Mark Zuckerberg and that sort of thing. I also want to focus on the ways in which even just among ourselves in our online spaces, we have come to tolerate a kind of top down power that is eroding our democratic skills, our capacity to be commoners in our online spaces, even before the corporate kind of overlord stepped in to take advantage of that context and become the the Lords and emperors and the Pope’s of this feudal regime, I

DB

David Bollier

4:17

suppose there’s a temptation to regard the internet as a separate entity, when in fact, of course, it’s entangled in complicated ways with real life and real politics. So the question I asked maybe is also about what’s happened over the past 50 years in our political culture and economy. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the relationship that you see between so called real life and internet online behaviors and how they interact, how the online world offers promise.

NS

Nathan Schneider

4:48

In this I draw on the tradition in political thought that just recognizes that you can’t have democracy in large scale politics without democracy and every A life. And this goes back to like Alexis de Tocqueville and 1830s. And then Robert Putnam WB Dubois number of social thinkers have just amassed evidence after evidence about the way in which everyday practice is tied to the larger politics. So in everyday life, in offline worlds, people’s ability to come together has been really essential to the practice of democracy. And we’ve known for a while that that’s been eroded. You know, Robert Putnams, famous book, Bowling Alone is kind of a landmark statement around that. And this is tied to media, you know, he pointed the finger at cable news, and things like this have been eroding people’s spaces of coming together. And a lot of those spaces have moved online. And you know, and what I argue here is that the structure of those online spaces does not include the tools, the norms that enable people to really self govern those spaces. I mean, when was the last time you participated in election for the administrator of a Facebook group, or when was the last time you were called to a jury to adjudicate moderation dispute on X or on Reddit, the things that we do with our democratic hats on are just not available or present in these online spaces. And increasingly, they’re missing and offline spaces, too. I argue, too, that we’re in some sense, being trained in our online lives out of the democratic practices that have been so essential to practices of political democracy, there are a lot of anxieties about like, what is the internet doing to democracy? What is the internet doing to cause the rise of authoritarianism around the world and spread of misinformation, all this stuff? It’s as if they’re two separate things. And I would argue to the extent that we are living much of our lives online, it also matters how we practice democracy there. And that we should be asking not just the question of what is the internet doing to democracy, but are we exercising our democratic skills online, just because that’s where we are. That’s where we’re finding ourselves.

DB

David Bollier

7:05

Makes a lot of sense. But I also think that there are a lot of islands of democratic activity that are even actually robust. From the free and open source software world to the wiki pedia world, and many other less famous digital spaces. You know, are they now aberrations? Are they templates for what we can build on? Or are they simply naive artifacts of another time that have been eclipsed, and we have to build a new on different foundations?

NS

Nathan Schneider

7:36

I think that examples, like you’re pointing to, are really exceptions that prove the rule. You know, Wikipedia is an example of this. If you’ve ever downloaded the software behind Wikipedia, it’s called media wiki. And it’s open source software, I’ve run several media, wikis, and in my lab, so I’ve had some experience with this, you download the software. And you realize none of the practices of collaboration that make Wikipedia great are really encoded in the software. That was the work of people, very intentionally building organizational and cultural infrastructures that enable this whole structure of organization to develop. Similarly, an open source software, for instance, the Debian project, it’s a Linux distribution, you know, an operating system, essentially, that is really important. Most people don’t use it in their everyday life. But you do in the sense that, that many web servers are running on this, much of the internet is running on this technology. And this project is run as a kind of liberal democracy, with a constitution and elections and all these sorts of things, almost to a kind of absurd degree. But you know, again, that was a painstaking effort to develop. And most open source software projects don’t have those kinds of structures in place. And research is increasingly finding our kind of suffering as a result. But what we find most of all, is that when you fire up an online space, when you start up a new group, a new chat channel, a new discord, whatever platform you’re using, it invites you into a different form of of structure, it invites you into a very top down structure where whoever creates the space has essentially absolute power over it, that your tools for addressing conflict are essentially censorship and exile. This is the logic of of implicit feudalism and I think it is a an unfortunate school for commenting in my experience to building you know, more democratic online spaces, like for instance, social coop, which is a cooperatively run Mastodon server, Macedon is like an open source Twitter like alternative we had to bend over backwards to develop structures of you know, enabling proposals and voting and, and the kinds of things that we need to do to make decisions collaboratively. None of that was built into the tools that we got we had to cobble together stuff and and work against the norms of so much of online. So much of online life. maybe

DB

David Bollier

10:00

a lot of this comes down to the phenomenology of online life, meaning, it’s just easier to check in as a casual player or to buy, especially when everything’s been front loaded for convenience and user interface experience, as opposed to the hard work of democratic collaboration and negotiation, especially when there’s all these technical barriers that you have to overcome as well. Is maybe that a core part of the problem? I

NS

Nathan Schneider

10:27

actually don’t think so. I don’t think democracy is like, necessarily hard, right? This is something that people say a lot, but just bounce over to your average tech startup, and you see insane amounts of strife and conflict, and the co founders are at war with each other. And the investors are putting all kinds of malicious pressure and people’s labor is being abused and taken advantage of I mean, all kinds of human interaction are, are tricky. You know, we talk about things like canceled culture. And you know, the ways in which people solve problems online today are deeply problematic in lots of ways. And actually, I think a lot of those problems that we face are not a result of the fact that we have too much democracy is that we don’t have good tools and norms for how to solve problems. For instance, a lot of things that go by the name of cancel culture, I think that’s a it’s a really problematic term, a kind of CO optation of language from Black Twitter, by the right wing that’s trying to suppress it. But it’s essentially a kind of mob response to what’s perceived as offensive behavior by a user or something like that, in a context where there’s no appropriate means of addressing conflict, you know, in that ostomate Commons logic, you know, you’re supposed to have graduated sanctions, right? Somebody causes harm, okay, you find some kind of sanction that is appropriate to the level of harm caused and sanctions increase with time according to a transparent and accountable process. Well, if somebody’s wrong on the internet, you have no accountable process by which you can say, okay, let’s vote you out of that admin role for a little while, right? No, they have absolute control over it. And so the lack of appropriate infrastructure invites us into this kind of toxic behavior, because we have no other choice. When you try to follow say, like those Austrian principles for commenting in online space, you start to realize very quickly, how poorly equipped these spaces and our guiding assumptions are for actually practicing that stuff.

DB

David Bollier

12:30

I have to laugh a bit because in some ways, it all backs up to the political economy and capitalism and Ostrom, to my mind never adequately dealt with political economy and enclosures. So in some ways, how can commoners grapple with the destructive logic of capital, as it tries to build spaces that will allow it to extract as much as possible accumulate as much as possible, of course, it’s not going to be welcoming to an Austrian type environment. So I guess the burden falls back on us to find ways to own finance control our spaces.

NS

Nathan Schneider

13:03

Yeah. And I do think it ultimately comes to that if we don’t have the means to create the foundations for democratic practice, it’s not going to happen. One case that I look at throughout this book is this ambivalent story of of what’s happened with blockchains, which is a technology that in some respects, really breaks the logic of implicit feudalism in that it’s a form of online organization that does not depend on the choke point of a server. It depends on a network of many nodes. And those nodes one way or another have to make decisions together, whether that’s the people running Bitcoin mining, computers, or people who are holding a token in a blockchain organization called the Dow, there’s at least the capacity to co govern. But what has happened over recent years is that old forms of capitalism have surged into that sector. And despite the technical infrastructure for CO ownership, a lot of these systems if they’ve gotten anywhere, they’ve just been infused with venture capital and become very, very investor driven. And that’s just a reminder that unless we are able to develop structures of capital meant for CO ownership and for commenting, which we can do, we’ve done it before in history. We are going to see repetitions here. But even then, even in that context, like one thing that has happened around blockchains. Alongside all the scammy horrible stuff is a huge surge of investment in technologies for CO governance. Never before has more money and energy gone into developing online voting systems and actually rethinking what a vote even means different forms of decision making in virtual space that we never had to actually come up with before because we didn’t even have that opportunity. With these technologies. At least there was that moment of possibility even though to a large extent the forms of finance Seeing available reappropriated those technologies for pretty familiar kinds of power? Well, let’s

DB

David Bollier

15:05

dwell on this because I think this is really a rich and puzzling area. For me, you describe crypto as a rupture of design possibilities, which is certainly the case. And I’ve always tried to parse out well, it is indeed a rupture there is huge possibilities of distributed governance in ways that were impossible in you, I think helpfully provide a list of a lot of governance innovations, I’ll just name a few decision making processes that evaluate preferences in nearly real time, voting systems unavailable and conventional politics or business mechanisms for incentive alignment among diverse participants, algorithmic dispute resolution, and so on. And then I have other friends who say, Yeah, digital autonomous organizations are really the vehicle for a democratic Renaissance, all of this coexistence with the most awful investor driven possibilities. And so I’ve always had trouble figuring out which is it or is there a firewall between them? How can the more positive social democratic versions of the software and community be fortified, expand defend themselves be the victors in this kind of Manichaean struggle? Give me some guidance?

NS

Nathan Schneider

16:18

Yeah, I mean, I would not say there’s a firewall, right. It’s an it’s it’s a mess. And it’s a it’s a complex thicket to have to wade through and my presence in this context is involves a lot of kind of notes holding, because there’s so much that that just really reeks about what’s going on in that world, particularly a reliance on financialization, a reliance on technology as the Savior. And to me, it’s a hard line to walk. On the one hand, I do think it’s important to be able to say, yes, there is a technological shift here that does open a door and that matters. And there’s also some really interesting cultural shifts. I mean, it’s a community of people who are interested in reinventing wheels in rethinking systems in fundamental ways, I think, in some respects, very healthy. But what I think is the kind of Achilles heel of this movement is the belief that a new technology will produce outcomes by a kind of guarantee that a decentralized quote unquote technology will produce decentralized outcomes. We’ve seen this show before. The web is a decentralized technology. Tim Berners. Lee in 1999, wrote in his memoir, because of the structure of this World Wide Web, we will not see it captured by large corporations. And now what is he doing but you know, spending his whole life trying to figure out how to de capture the his invention from Central corporations.

DB

David Bollier

17:37

I look back on all these libertarian Tribune’s like John Perry Barlow with his grandiose visions, and God bless it had a certain plausibility, but it also had a certain naivete about the capacities of capitalism to co opt in, contain and annex all of this for its own purposes, which I don’t think any of the early internet players or software world truly grappled with in a preemptive way. No,

NS

Nathan Schneider

18:03

and I think it was really, and continues to be a kind of privileged capacity to think that capitalism is on your side to come from a context where you think ultimately, the the holders of wealth in this society are doing something that will be good for you. It’s hard to see when you’re when you’re coming from a different content, which helps

DB

David Bollier

18:22

explain the illusion that it frankly took me a while to get over that being on an open platform or being open, whether open science, open data open whatever was the endpoint emancipation, when in fact, it also served to tee up the free taking of that by the big players, therefore, open is not the same as a protected commons, even though there are overlaps between the two. Again,

NS

Nathan Schneider

18:47

I think it’s not just a matter of Big Bad corporations and the good communities one of the early celebrated online communities that well right in his book about it, introducing it to the world. Howard Rheingold. The title, the book is the virtual community. The subtitle is homesteading, on the digital frontiers, you know, it’s like using the language of colonialism to talk about these new spaces. It was part of the story all along in some respects. And John Perry Barlow had this famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996, you mentioned very much this kind of Frontier libertarian from Wyoming and a rancher writing from Davos complaining about the government is doing back in the US. I mean, it’s just full of ironies, but he in some respects, presents this very appealing vision, then in some respects, I’m trying to reclaim which is this vision of an internet where we will govern ourselves and where we’re creating a new kind of space and a new kind of polity and a new kind of politics in this virtual world. There is something really beautiful and compelling about that. I love teaching Barlow because he planted a flag in the ground that has attracted many people since but the problem was is they never actually put any energy into how that self governing will have Then or how it will be protected from other kinds of interests, how it will become colonized, when in fact, the whole thing is couched in the language of colonization to begin with. And even in the well, that early online community created by some of the hippie, post hippie tech optimists, Stuart Brand, for instance, they talked about it as it will be self governing. It was always intended, okay, we will become a democracy someday. But we’re not actually going to figure out how to do that. Now. In the meantime, we’ll just run it like a kind of top down cult and and that question was always deferred. The practices of real commenting were always deferred. This

DB

David Bollier

20:38

conversation leads me to want to discuss a few things all at once. Are we in some ways, are we talking about the limits of liberalism as a polity and the implicit elements of that individualism, a tacit alliance with capital and markets to fulfill things top down governance from a representative system, all of which we’re seeing in bold relief right now, their limitation. And then I wanted to contrast that with one my own sense of the Commons as going beyond liberalism, but also the very heroes and inspirations that you cite in your book from Osterman Tocqueville to even Ilic Catholic workers movement, Adrian Marie Brown, the activist and author, Salvador Allende is project Cybersyn. And Chile. These kinds of things are not your standard liberalism, they do try to go to a degree of democratic participation that liberalism, frankly, has not cared to go to, maybe you could talk about all these things.

NS

Nathan Schneider

21:36

Yeah. And I add to it anti colonial thinkers, you know, who are really important for me in this people like CLR, James, even Gandhi, Franz Fanon, people who have in struggles against colonizing empires have seen the centrality of local self governance as a strategy for large scale resistance and who resists the kind of liberal compromise as well. Another component of liberalism, that I think this this stuff challenges is the assumption of borders, a liberal state needs a very clear border needs to be able to say, who’s a citizen, and it needs to have cops along that border, and a probably a wall or something to make sure that all those markets and wealth can be can be protected from people who want to have a fair shot at life. And it’s something that I think is also a part of that appeal of that old Barlow idea that these digital networks could stretch across the world and could cross the physical borders that we’ve erected around the world and allow Freer flows of information and relationship and community. And I think there is a sense where when we start talking about democracy online, when we start talking about even like citizenship and a network, the ability to co govern in our online spaces, suddenly, we might become less attached to those borders as the structures of belonging at the end, I point to this beautiful website, native dash land.ca, which is a map of the indigenous territories and so many of them are overlapping the borders are not clear. You know, I speaking now from Boulder, Colorado, which is the overlapping territory of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people they use the land differently across seasons and moved through it without claiming that kind of exclusivity over it. That’s the I think the really radical side of what some of these ideas bring us to is it actually unsettles the foundations of the liberal state, if we start to understand ourselves more as potentially being citizens on our networks and starting to feel the power in the possibilities of that humans

DB

David Bollier

23:39

before citizens of a state humans before property owners with boundaries. It becomes complex though, because I’ve often thought that Commons need to protect the shared wealth they do create, I was often grappled with property theory, you know, okay, so do they own that as property but Silke Helfrich, my collaborator on many issues, and I realized that it’s a semi permeable membrane, similar to the blood brain barrier in which the good stuff can get in the nutrients, the energy, the creativity, but the Commons has to be capable of screaming out the pernicious things that might destroy it. So there is a sense of guardianship of the shared wealth, but it’s not in the same capitalist liberal sense of this is mine, I can have exclusive dominion over it go away. One

NS

Nathan Schneider

24:28

thing that you and silica did so powerfully, right. It’s really rethink the comments from being a thing to a practice from being like a noun to a verb. I think that’s in some respects, subtle, but in some respects is just so incredibly turns the whole concept upside down in that the goal is not to create a fixed and stable thing but as to enable practices that can overlap and evolve borders are an attempt to erect a fake structure onto the world that does not need to be there. that has often outlived its usefulness practices are things that arise in relationship to needs and opportunities. And you see this like in some of the better context of these online networks, I mean, you talked about the ability to move more freely among them. And if you look at, for instance, somebody who’s active in online communities, they’re part of many, they’re moving across many kinds of spaces, people who are active in the different kinds of crypto communities, you look at their wallet, and they have all these like NF T’s or you know, tokens that signify belonging and different kinds of spaces. And yes, those spaces have to all think about, you know, how do we prevent free riding? That’s a fair question. How do we prevent CAPTCHA? How do we prevent enclosure? One thing I’ve been really interested in is seeing some of these crypto spaces move from being totally one token, one vote to increasingly an interest in one person, one vote, or at least a blend of the two so that they’re able to resist capture by financial interests, they’re recognizing that this is a real problem. And we need to develop structures that fit what we’re trying to accomplish. And in some cases, that means some sort of financial gating, because you want to make sure people have a real stake in the system before they participate. In some cases that might be participation gating, saying, We want to make sure that the people contributing labor are really have a say over what’s going on in valuable ways. You know, it’s something it’s a question that we can ask in each given context. And we do need to be serious about some kind of boundaries, without trying to reify those as the only border that matters. And those boundaries become less violent, when we have the opportunity to operate across them. And among them,

DB

David Bollier

26:43

it seems that part of the challenge is really do we really want to reinvent democracy? Is that an aspiration? Or, you know, it’s so much easier to go with the flow of the existing capitalist norms, and you know, there’s money, good money to be made there. Whereas it’s a mind numbing process and a serious commitment to say, Yeah, I want this to be a community in the highest, idealistic sounds. First of

NS

Nathan Schneider

27:09

all, I think democracy has no choice like it has to evolve to survive. That was something de Tocqueville understood, that’s something that, you know, is honestly something that I learned in my, in my time as a social movement reporter contexts like Occupy in the Arab Spring, the drive to reinvent democracy is just so crucial to the survival of democracy, this stuff cannot survive in stasis. And, and that’s in some respects a contrast with a caricature of feudalism. Feudalism is a terrible caricature of medieval life, which was actually much more democratic than we give it credit for. But in the feudal caricature, you have these lords who have eternal power, whose power rests on telling everybody that God gave it to them, and they have it forever. Whereas democracy cannot claim that and always has to be reinventing its institutions. Yes, tradition is important. Yes, we want to be stewards of what we’ve inherited, but we also need to be evolving them. And honestly, in the spaces that I look at, there’s a lot of joy in that, like in the crypto context, a lot of the like stuff around voting and making decisions together is like full of memes and humor, and play. It’s kind of a big video game. Democracy is always a bit of a game. It’s a big sports match. And they just lean into that very deeply. Another context, I look at transformative justice organizers who are generally not doing their work online, even though they’re often very present online. These are people who are trying to develop alternatives to policing and prisons for addressing violence and harm, and their writings are full of poetry and mysticism and healing. They’re deeply interested in practices of self care and pleasure. You know, Adrian Marie Brown, who you mentioned, yeah, has this beautiful book of pleasure activism, this is how this is the vibe of the people doing the work. I’m trying to highlight if they’re not a bunch of like, serious bureaucrats who are obsessed with getting the system just right and doing the work and eating their vegetables, and whatever. These are people who are bringing joy and play to the craft, and it’s that that I want to focus on.

DB

David Bollier

29:07

I’m glad you said that, because so much of the world of comedy that I’ve witnessed are some of the happiest, most satisfied, most engaged people. And it is in the midst of a political economy and culture that is god awful and dismal right now a form of salvation to have that kind of peer group and know that you have a shared purpose for something larger than yourself. It prompts me to want me to have you talk a little bit more fully about some of the lines of thought African American activism, one of your chapters on organizing against digital colonialism, talk about the colonial literature and what insights they offer, you know, feminist theory, tell me about how some of those traditions speak to the challenges that commenters face in safeguarding their shared wealth and fortifying their community so

NS

Nathan Schneider

29:57

much. I mean, so much of this book is framed around those traditions. First of all, nobody captured the problem of like digital community, as well as the pre digital essay of Joe Freeman, a feminist organizer and scholar called the tyranny of structure lessness, which was originally published in 1971, talking about the post 1960s, feminist and rap group communities and noticing that, hey, if we don’t design a kind of appropriate structure for how power works, someone who holds external privilege and power is going to be able to take control over our over our organizing of our groups. And this just happens over and over. And so many people living in digital communities read that essay and just feel like oh, this is me, this is what I, this is my life. And she brings that kind of deep feminist insight of visible Ising, the invisible visible lysing, the invisible labor, because historically, the subjects of patriarchy have so often recognized how they are doing work that is unrecognized by the society. And so there, they have a profound attentiveness to to the lies that society tells about itself. In the decolonial context, I really focus on this tradition of decolonial thought that emphasizes everyday practice. And also, as you mentioned, African American thought, I mean, WB Dubois just captures this so powerfully in his concept of abolition democracy, which he describes in Black Reconstruction in America. And it’s been kind of reclaimed by Angela Davis and brought into the discourse of contemporary abolitionists working around police and prisons. And this is the idea simply that you can’t just abolish an injustice, like slavery or mass incarceration, you can’t just say no to it, you have to build the alternative structures, not alternative the democratic structures that actually produce citizenship and belonging and participation. For Dubois, for instance, a big part of that was cooperatives. He founded an organization of black cooperatives, he did a study a national study, you know, we have it in our library here at the University of Colorado, beautiful, a study of black LED cooperatives, he was a deep believer in Everyday Democracy as an essential practice of black liberation. And then someone like CLR James, who is a, an important historian of the Haitian Revolution, as well as an organizer, an instigator of African revolutions against European colonialism, he had famous essay called taking a line from Lenin, every cook can govern in this, this idea that to produce the kind of liberation we seek, we need to build a society in which we were willing to trust every member with self governance, you know, he points back to the practices of Athenian democracy and essentially random selection of power holders, you know, this tradition, and we see it as a as an act of resistance. But if you take for instance, like Gandhi, seriously, you know, he would say his movement against the British Empire was 90%, what he called the constructive program, which was people in village communes, weaving on spinning wheels, right. And building the kind of local self reliance that he believed is essential for liberation of the mind. And the acts of resistance are just like the tip of the iceberg. And that insight is hard to see because acts of resistance are so digitally gripping. But I’ve heard the same thing from civil rights organizers from the 1950s in the American South, I’ve heard you know, I just heard this story so many times from people who’ve led successful social movements that you can’t do it. You can’t win in resistance, unless you are building the practices of Commoning. I

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David Bollier

33:30

totally agree. I ran across the term by Vaclav Havel, the the Czech cultural dissidents later President, and he talked about the need to develop a parallel polis and under a totalizing regime in which you cannot engage in civic action that is meaningful or successful, what do you do, and developing those horizontal relationships of integrity, being able to speak the truth without compromise, been able to develop the kinds of working relationships with each other that can bear fruition and a prefigurative way later, is maybe the best we can do. But it’s, it’s a positive alternative, maybe the resistance gets a lot of dramatic press and play. But the real story, as you say, is building this alternative regime in which it can function is built on solid relationships. So that’s why I think feminist theory has so much to say as well about developing this relationality as the foundation for a different order. It’s

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Nathan Schneider

34:25

been really important for me to engage in those practices to even do the thinking that led to this right. It’s like for years, I’ve been a member of a web hosting and email service and Co Op called may 1, and I’ve experimented with these forms in my life and in my practices. And as a result, it helps me see where we could go in a way that I think is hard to see when you’re not constantly trying to see what does it take to live digital life in a way in accordance with suppose democratic values? I think those practices are Just absolutely essential. And so the last few chapters of this book are two strategies essentially. One is, how do we, under current conditions, expand the spaces of democratic practice? through what I call governable stacks? Where, okay, you know, the world is not ours yet, but how do we still claim more of these technologies for community control? And that’s always going to be limited, but it’s important work. The last one is okay, how do we construct a world in which actually, this is the norm? How do we change the underlying systems so that they recognize democratic networks as as a reality as normal, that involves like rethinking our approaches to policy, the role of the state, the role of how we design, technical protocols, there are all kinds of ways you can kind of approach this, but the to go hand in hand, and I don’t think you can take down the big tech or whatever, if you don’t also have an imagination for you know, what comes after it. You

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David Bollier

35:58

talk about governable stacks using a software term of stacks, which I guess can be loosely construed as a different set of protocols that work at different levels, interoperable ways, you might say, but I think your focus really on doing this at the local level, I loved how you describe that, that that creates a rupture and opens the imagination. And I think when so much of the system is shut down or captured, and there isn’t the space to experiment, to innovate, to develop different relations that are operational, simply at your seemingly small local level, having a rupture that opens the imagination, the way you could say occupy or many other type movements did. And they quickly become viral because they speak to the cultural oppression that so many people feel. I think that’s really important. And I loved also how you cited Grace Lee Boggs, the Detroit activist who talked about it’s about forming critical connections over Critical Mass scaling is important. Yes, Critical Mass is important. Yes. But really, it’s kind of thin, superficial and vulnerable, unless you develop the critical connections and relationships among yourself. And that tends to be more personal and intense, or often local. So I love those insights, because they seem to be hardy principles for guiding us. Thank

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Nathan Schneider

37:19

you for raising I mean, Boggs. She was the connective thread between CLR James who I mentioned, who was a collaborator of hers, they wrote these pseudo anonymous books together, like back in the 50s. And then Adrian Marie Brown, who she was a Boggs was a mentor for I first met Grace Lee Boggs, right after Occupy Wall Street, when a group of activists from that movement, you know, I was writing a book about it. So I was following them around everywhere turned to her because they had experienced what as you mentioned, this huge viral explosion in late 2011, this occupation and Wall Street in New York kind of exploded all over the world, it was everybody was seeing it in the news, that was this kind of big moment. But then after a little while, like the viral wave just ended, and it felt like there was nothing left. And that problem is also really central to my concern here. Same thing happened with Tahrir Square, right? All these, you know, young Facebook, liberals or whatever, like, pour into Tahrir Square, and they bring down their Mubarak regime. And then what happens? The Muslim Brotherhood takes over, right? Because it’s actually organized. So to me, that experience left me with the challenge. In an age where social movements are so often running on the rails of the internet, how do we create durable power? How do we create those critical connections that can enable the movement to fulfill its promises fulfill its viral messages. And it seemed to me that that ability to self govern, to hold anything in digital space was central. These movements are relying on networks not designed for building Durable Power, they’re designed for advertising and inflaming people and exciting people and getting them to bite it. So when the movements were able to spread a message that would inflame people, the networks worked really well for it, when the movements were okay, we need to make decisions about our next steps. We need to choose a direction. The networks were really, really bad for that. And that left me with this challenge. What would it look like to have networks to have internet technologies that would actually support maybe not be the entire infrastructure for but actually support and enable the building of durable power, the kind of power that would enable a movement not just to create a rupture and a viral moment, but to produce lasting change in a society? I mean, so far, so many of our social movements over the last decade and a half, have been very successful at spreading messages and going viral, impacting the culture changing narratives, but they are really not becoming vehicles for changing the flows of power and and we need to really own up to that It

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David Bollier

40:00

strikes me that were maybe at a similar moment, say to 1965, when in the years after that Nadir, the environmental groups innovated by creating a new organizational form the Public Interest Group, and it was sort of a timely and appropriate for moving a political agenda forward and was very effective. It seems that in these times, we’re searching for organizational forms, which necessarily have to involve the internet and networking behavior, what is the organizational form that is going to create new forms of political power? And I think that’s an open question. Your book is very inspiring and instructive for asking some of the right questions offering some of the embryonic ideas. We’re not there yet, though?

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Nathan Schneider

40:45

No, no, I agree. But I do think there’s something really important to learn from that legacy you’re describing and past forms of organization, you think of, for instance, the current state of progressive politics, and in many states, particularly I think the United States is, ironically, the progressive discourse is coded in many cultural contexts as elite. And I think we come by that really, honestly, in the sense that we have created institutional structures that are dependent on philanthropy and elite funding. And so the incentive for survival is learn how to talk to elites, and make elites think you’re going to help other people, but you’re actually just talking to the elites. And I’ve experienced this very much firsthand as a board member of multiple nonprofits involved in this space. And one thing that’s very, very unpopular these days is building a membership base, building a mass base, building a roll of members, I talked in the book about this, this scene of an interview of a radical labor union in Detroit in the, in the 60s, and, you know, you see this guy sitting in an office like surrounded by, but look like membership rolls, just like lists of people and, and documents and the paper equivalent of spreadsheets. And this is like the Revolutionary Party. In contrast, if you go to the website of your average progressive advocacy organization, there’s no button to join, there’s a button to donate. And it’s probably not for you. You know, we’re building our structures, not around accountability to the people that we’re actually claiming to serve, but around a kind of performative accountability that is actually directed at economic elites. And that to, again, I think, is a reason why we need to be intentional about how we design tools, because those tools do matter. I think when you when you look at the technologies that have been built by, for instance, membership organizations, and mass mobilization platforms, I think, for instance of Action Network, it’s a platform that’s designed around the idea of bringing people up the ladder of engagement. And it was initially kind of seated by a labor union, AFL, the AFL CIO, as an old fashioned membership organization, they know that their health is dependent on moving people up the ladder of engagement, not just click not just donate, but actually start volunteering, start getting involved, start getting into leadership. And it requires actually, I think, a different kind of approach to technology, when our goal is to build an encourage people to have power rather than just to discourse endlessly. Another tool that I use a lot in this context Loomio it’s like a Facebook group thread, except, at the end of the line, there’s an option to make a decision or a proposal. So it leads you not to endless disagreement, but actually invites you to say, Hey, could you propose something that maybe most people would agree with, which is the opposite incentive design of a Facebook group? It leaves me

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David Bollier

43:46

with the question of what exactly should people do so often, it’s the invitation to be performative to send out another tweet or to sign up and add to the name to a mailing list in which you’ll get solicited for more donations, or to turn up for this public demonstration, which may or may not be valuable, it’s resistance, but it may not be creating the alternative. How can some of these platforms be designed and oriented to create an action for an alternative that gets beyond? No, don’t do that. But here, I’m building the alternative.

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Nathan Schneider

44:17

I think there’s some really interesting examples in the context where there’s actually an opportunity. So one of my favorite platforms is DCM, which was developed, really out of the experience of Barcelona, which unlike many Occupy movements of 2011 actually produced a shift in the city government and that city government was really interested in large scale participation. If you look at the the menu of modules for this platform called deceided. You see this enormous menu of forms of participation that this platform enables. It depends on the premise of a city that’s willing to take people seriously. It depends on some basic things. citizenship, some basic sovereignty that people have over that space to make that real. Otherwise, it’s just like the time Facebook performatively invited people to vote on an update to the terms of service. And everybody knew it was a joke. And so it was a joke. But when the city is like, no, actually, we are going to listen to you. And then suddenly, like all these tools start emerging about let’s make a budget together. Let’s let’s develop a proposal together. Let’s do this petition campaign. Let’s randomly select citizens to participate in a discussion. All kinds of things become possible when there is that willingness to open the door. And we design our technologies differently. Suddenly, the design of a technology is not just an Elon Musk, I mean, you look at like Elon Musk was right after he took over Twitter was doing these polls designed to like vote on should I reinstate Donald Trump. And the Twitter engineers were being like, you know, these polls are the least secure, most unhelpful way of evaluating user preferences like they are not clearly not designed for managing power or for making decisions. They are purely designed to go viral and get attention. So clearly, that platform just treated polling as a joke. And that was the idea all along. But when you have a platform that is built on the premise of Oh, no, this is for real. Suddenly, like the design goals become different that the things that engineers are optimizing for become different. And the goal of the technology becomes real accountability, not performative play.

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David Bollier

46:32

What I hear you saying is, take democracy seriously. It’s not about raising more money. It’s not about expanding your membership list. It’s not about further press accounts. It’s about empowering and enabling bottom up creative action, which will find its own forms, which are not going to be the same, frankly, as the ones we’ve had over the past 50 years, stepping out into that vulnerable creative space may be the challenge that we most have to meet. I

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Nathan Schneider

47:00

think it is the critical challenge for the fate of democracy, I do not think we are going to save, quote unquote, save democracy simply by defending institutions that everybody with any vulnerability in our societies knows have failed us. For instance, we see now it looks like the Biden campaign going into the 2024 election is once again going to ride on this claim of defending democracy. That’s a very hard claim to make when you’re talking to people who in their everyday lives, see the fact that democracy is presently constituted as not serving them. You know, I think the only hope for this stuff is actually to be able to invite people into forms of democratic practice that are more accountable that do flow through everyday life. And this was something that 19th century populace really understood. For instance, in the United States, you know, these this movement that was full of angry rural people who were just being abused like crazy by the Eastern economic elites, and had their pitchforks ready to go. And the populace organizers knew that these people were very vulnerable to co optation. By demagogues, they just wanted somebody to understand their anger and William Jennings Bryan was right there ready to usurp their anger for his own power. And they insisted No, we need to build power in everyday life, we need to help to help them build cooperatives and labor unions and organizations where they could feel their own capacity to change their situation. Through that they were able to build a durable movement that continued growing and building and eventually won many of its demands in the context of the of the New Deal. This is an insight that I think is really, really central for this moment. Elite. Progressives love to denounce populists. Whenever I hear that it drives me crazy, because that word came from a movement that actually knew how to insulate itself against captured by demagogues, and was trying to harness a valid anger through the the methods of grassroots power. And when we denounce populism, and just say all those angry people are just wrong and stupid, we lose an opportunity to cure that anger, to recognize it, to know it in ourselves, and to do something really constructive with Nathan,

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David Bollier

49:18

I want to thank you for your book and synthesizing so much history and arcane digital topics to open up a space that we can consider this because we certainly don’t have many spaces in which this sorts of democratic innovation can proceed. I think your book deserves a lot of thoughtful consideration for how we might organize better pathways forward.

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Nathan Schneider

49:41

Thank you so much, David. I’ve been learning so much from you over the years. And I hope that’s evident here and I look forward to tomorrow.

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David Bollier

49:49

Thank you for joining me