Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

global opinion polls, which exhibit collapsing affection for democratic ideals.

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.

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

It is through the practice of intentional self-governing that people can begin rethinking and remaking their tools.

the hardest step is not getting people to choose the best tools, but inspiring people to want to build something at all.

Reputation became a kind of compensation.

determinism—interpreting some device as single-handedly steering social outcomes and thereby denying the role of people in shaping their own cultures and power structures.

E2C is an invitation for startups to explore bringing their most direct participants into structures of ownership and governance.

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.