Sam Liebeskind

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the... See more

Strategic philanthropy has more difficulty funding bona fide organizers who are embedded in and responsive to the communities they serve. In contrast to their support for outspoken moral activists, philanthropic funders cannot meaningfully predict in advance what particular issue(s) grassroots organizers and their communities will prioritize. That... See more

Broader societal issues that are difficult to quantify and measure—such as desirable social values like human agency and respect for fundamental rights, power and resource asymmetries, and oppressive social structures—that are encoded in and/or intersect with algorithmic systems thus often fall outside the purview of “fairness” due to its narrow... See more

In the 1970s and 1980s, the philosopher of technology Langdon Winner dismantled the idea that technology is a “neutral” tool (Winner, 1978). Winner’s work emphasized how those developing technology benefit the most while already disadvantaged individuals and groups pay the highest price, laying the philosophical foundation for subsequent work in... See more

There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns,... See more

In every case, the platform's architects // successors assumed that the product was the platform and the community was an emergent feature that would re-emerge given similar conditions. They had the relationship exactly backwards. The community was the product and the platform was the container, and when the container breaks, the product spills and... See more

In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive structures in predictable ways. Community is what you get when agents stop being interchangeable to each other. When Alice doesn't need "a neighbour" but needs that neighbour, the one who watched her kids... See more