Sam Liebeskind

Doing stuff together, especially with people from different backgrounds than our own, is going to be really important for the future of the country. And it’s going to take a set of “muscular institutions”—institutions that aren’t bashful about asserting their prerogatives—to get us there.

All of this will tend to require that national actors— who sometimes like to act like every solution they offer is, almost definitionally, turnkey— become much better acquainted with the detailed operations of those they are seeking to help. And that will mean understanding that, at the operational level, almost every local newsroom is different, a... See more

Donnelly and Schrantz are arguing for a major shift: “a long-overdue scaled investment in community organizing around the country.” I agree 100%, especially because I concur with them that how we do politics now, as a purely transactional process of extracting votes from people, has contributed to the crisis of democracy and the allure of strongmen... See more

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.

The digital sphere is artificially built and those who operate it get to set its rules in ways that are enforced in code, which is to say that are enforced as the laws of the system itself. That is how structural power is established. Many parts of the digital landscape are presented on the surface as consumer goods (social, search) or as markets (... See more