Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

Most open-source communities have avoided explicit governance, regarding it as a distraction from writing code. The result was a cascade of power vacuums, which implicit feudalism stood ready to fill.

Online spaces do support certain kinds of voice. They excel at chatter. Social media have facilitated a golden age of complaint against every imaginable authority, from corporations and politicians and teachers to the overworked volunteers trying to moderate posts from a thousand strangers. Seth Frey and I have therefore argued for the need to refi

Andreas Hepp’s formulation of “deep mediatization” points a further way out of determinism. Under this condition, Hepp writes, “all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures.”28 If society has become so thoroughly mediated, how could we expect democracy to emerge in not-especially-dem

One rupture involves initiatives among territorial governments that introduce forms of citizen voice, often with new media in hand. These range from the advent of participatory budgeting processes in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 to the digital deliberation platforms adopted more recently in places like the city of Barcelona and the national govern

I will argue that the constraints on governance in online spaces have contributed to the peril of democratic politics in general. It is not enough to merely defend existing governmental institutions; healthy democracy depends on enabling creative new forms of self-governance, especially on networks.

Perhaps leaning so hard as I have on democracy will only cause it to snap. Perhaps we need another word; perhaps the word can be refurbished and put to better use. Either way, technology is sure to be drafted in the cause. A further fruit of Langdon Winner’s reflections on artifacts and politics is an observation about the amnesia that surrounds in

Democratic practices can emerge among feudal technologies. Administrators may feel rhetorical or social pressure to respect the values of community members in how they exert their otherwise absolute authority. Feudal networks can thereby exhibit forms of accountability that political scientist David Stasavage calls “early democracy,” resembling the

The bylaws of the garden club and the associations Tocqueville admired would not translate straightforwardly online. Too much is different in online spaces: the ease of joining and leaving, the cultural and geographic diversity, the speed, the anonymity, the metrics of reputation, and on and on. And yet his basic insight has remained salient: a syn

If democracy is the horizon, self-governance is a plausible practice for moving in that direction. Governable spaces, then, are where democratic self-governance can happen.