Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

Across his lattice structure, four dimensions of political skill form a network of intersections that cascade across society: vertical (from national to international), geographic (from local to global), institutional (from one institution to many), and ideological (from one commitment to networks of commitments).

Safe, the most popular “multisig” wallet that DAOs use to manage their digital assets, expects communities to set a certain threshold among their members to approve a transaction. But Safe also supports a project called Zodiac, “an expansion pack for DAOs” that enables communities to create and adopt diverse governance modules. Another widely used

the dominant design patterns of social-media technologies have constrained social and political possibilities, including the cultural options and possible power structures.

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

transformative justice, a movement to abolish policing as we know it through participatory processes,

wiki-style efforts to crowdsource constitutions, assemblies of randomly selected citizens drafting policy proposals, and the use of artificial intelligence to identify clusters of participant opinion independent of political parties.

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 government of Taiwan.

Albert O. Hirschman between the signals of “exit” and “voice” in organizational life.10 Exit is the capacity to depart, such as by quitting a job or shopping with a competitor; voice is the capacity to make change from within, such as by lobbying one’s city council for a local policy change or filing a complaint about a defective product.

“Technology is not central; what is central are the choices that we make, each of us, in laying claim to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in our own lives.”47