Governable Spaces: Designing Democracy for the Internet
I´m once again speaking with Nathan Schneider about his newly released book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potent...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here with one of my favorite guests to have on. His name is Nathan Schneider. You've been on, I think, already two previous times, maybe more. Maybe it's your third or fourth time. I can't remember.
But he is a journalist and academic.
Yeah. Your honorary co host. But he is a in case you don't know, a journalist and academic focused on cooperative forms of organizing, whether that is through the use of technology or not. And he is author of a new book called governal governable spaces, Democratic Design for Online Life. And so, yeah. Hi, Nathan. How are you doing? Hi. Good to see you again. I'm doing well. So for this conversation, we wanted to talk about your new book, Governable Spaces, which basically details, I think, the history and as well the current state and provides a good analysis of what we what you termed implicit feudalism of a lot of tech platforms and the nature in which they are very undemocratic as far as how they are organized, not only as corporations, but also the way that you are able to make your own online communities are oftentimes unable to be democratic in any type of way, and this has a lot of political consequences. But maybe to start off, if you want to from a high level, I guess I'm curious to hear from you because you've been doing a lot of this research for a long time. Like, what for you was the purpose of the book? What kind of did you want to to bring with it?
Thanks. It I could start at a lot of different moments. But one moment that came to mind as you were speaking there was, going back more than a decade, to the protest movements around 2011. And I was a reporter for different magazines, as well as a news platform I'd started, covering social movements. And so I was really focused on this wave of protests that had that was spreading around the world in 2011, starting in North Africa, going through Europe and then to United States with Occupy Wall Street and far beyond. I did a book about Occupy Wall Street called Thank You, Anarchy. In that time in the years since, I've just been really wrestling with the limits of our ability to build political power online. Those movements were profoundly shaped by early social media, or at least early commercial social media. And, that those tools enabled these movements to spread incredibly rapidly. But were not those tools were not super conducive to, to holding that power, to building power that would be durable. Enabling people to organize, build economic strength, build capacity, make decisions together. None of these things were really possible, in the spaces where the movements were spreading. And that's something that has really stuck with me since, and I've been puzzling with. Why is it that these tools were so good at mobilization, but so poor at, at what Zainab Tufekci calls capacity building, the ability to have lasting power. And, that's in that question has informed a lot of my, my my work as a media scholar in thinking about how did we get here, and, and how could our networks be shaped differently? So that, for instance, future social movements that grow across networks actually could have the capacity to make, to make other kinds of lasting change, not just disruption, but actually build new institutions and new worlds.
Yeah. So, like, from at that kind of moment in time in kind of early twenty tens, there was, like, this belief that social media would spread the message far and wide that we can have a better world and we can have radical change, and that would lead to this domino effect of, more progressive change, essentially. And that was the expectation, and there was a moment where it felt like that maybe was in the process of happening. But then looking back now, a decade later, we can say that, that really panned out. And in fact, oftentimes, social media now almost has this connotation of being quite reactionary and being more more facilitating of reactionary politics.
Yeah. And and we've also tended to focus on the, the power of these big companies. And that's very real. That's what I've spent a lot of my last decade exploring and trying to counteract with my work around cooperatives and, alternative kinds of models, or the models that should be truly mainstream, not just alternatives. But, but with this project in the last few years, after working with a lot of these these democratic experiments, I started to feel that the problem isn't just political economy, isn't just, in the, in the structure of companies, but it's also, feeding into everyday online life in some really powerful ways. That some of these patterns of political economy, and culture have fed into the design of space, in the same way that a, a capital building that's designed after the style of a kind of Greek temple has certain connotations and implications in it and shapes the structure of the governance process. Similarly, the digital spaces that we use to organize, shape our own our imaginations of what's politically possible. And, I explore how this design that I call implicit feudalism, feeds into, the practices of our everyday online lives. And in turn, actually feed our political imaginations and limit our political imaginations. Even while we the the implicit part is that even while we claim we're being democratic online or doing democracy online, in many respects. These spaces are not designed for processes by which groups of people can hold leaders accountable, by which people can redress grievances through a counsel of their peers. The basic things, basic rights that we expect in, in democratic life are shockingly unavailable in online life. And, in in its place, in their place, the logic the kind of libertarian logic of exit is etched into the ways in which our tools allow us to self organize.
Yeah. So we'll definitely go into the details of that. I have some things that I wanna say, but I'm gonna hold it. Before I get to what you want. Interesting. I will say whatever I definitely. But, because I wanted to also give it the historical context that I think it it deserves. That was because it was a lot of stuff that I wasn't super aware of just because it was, like, part of the Internet before I got online. I wonder if you can give us a quick recounting of the history of how people got online, especially with, like, I think, BBSs. And there was a time of the Internet when actually, usually, someone would be hosting the server that would hold all the data in which you would be interacting with all your friends. They would hold it at home, and it wasn't held by a large tech company. And maybe on the surface, that sounds like an amazing idea, but there were also a lot of problems with that as well. Well,
this was even before the Internet was publicly available. And you people could dial in to somebody's bulletin board system, as you said, often sitting in their home or in a closet in an office somewhere, or, a very physical object, this kind of humming and buzzing computer, that where they could have these text only interactions that, in many cases, really important. A lot of it early on was, like, people on computers talking about being on computers. But, but also very quickly, this stuff turned into, these became spaces for, for queer communities and for, for others who were not, able to find each other as easily in offline life. Charlton McElwain has a a wonderful book, Black Software, exploring how, how black communities in The US use these, use these kinds of networks to to find each other and to build culture and power. And but with every in every case, almost, there are many experiments, but the the the logic that ended up developing was an assumption that, okay, I hold I own the server. It's sitting in my house. I can pull the plug at any time. Well, I want all the software to just enable me to have power over that space. In the same way that you're hosting a dinner party, the host sets the rules. And and that's fine, because everybody else gets to be a host too someday. But, but in a context where, oh, no, we're actually always coming to my house every day. And we're increasingly these servers become not just something in somebody's house, but actually something that, large corporations run. That same pattern of systems designed for absolute power, held with the admin, start, that pattern sticks, but in a very different context, where suddenly, this is the one place where we can go. And there are a few dynamics worth noticing. One is, the use of, of labor. Early on, there were efforts to actually pay people for moderation work. Mhmm. Moderate paying moderators of a forum or something. And this actually started to present itself as a real expense, to the companies running these spaces, especially if they were to follow labor law and debut in any kind of fair way. And so it became clear, oh, this is not gonna work. We have to turn this into something else. And I think that what happened was essentially the deal became, we'll give the moderator of this subreddit or of this Facebook group or whatever absolute power in exchange for their free moderation labor. It became a kind of exchange, relationship. And then in a lot of the systems too, there are just power vacuums built in. Systems like, even MediaWiki, the underlying system for Wikipedia. The intricate governance system of Wikipedia is not built into the software. The software just says, well, however you wanna organize yourselves, go ahead. The person in charge of the server is in control. Or email lists. So many of our tools have these, like, absences of power built in that then, again, defer power to whoever controls the server. And, and this evokes that old warning from the feminist scholar and activist, Jo Freeman, of the tyranny of structurelessness, which she warned, not talking about the Internet, but talking about, like, activist groups in the sixties saying, if we don't specify what she called democratic structuring, we're gonna get the old hierarchies of society reinforced and reenacted in our spaces. And I think that's really what happened. And that's why so many people in digital life have read her essay, The Tyranny of Structuralist, again and again and thought, this is me. I once asked her, can I interview you about the Internet? And she's like, I'm sick of people asking me about the Internet. I don't know anything with the Internet. What she saw has certainly repeated itself.
Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely that, it resonates with me and, like, my own experiences of being a moderator of online communities that I even though I don't want to be, even though I I preach for democracy, I have to be a hypocrite Yeah. In order to, like, have an online community because there is not really any other choice for me. There aren't too many tools out there that kind of what is built into a lot of the platforms that I use have this implicit feudalism that I, as a moderator, and I guess other people, if I add them as moderators as well, have the ultimate dictatorial power. And this is something I think is interesting that it came out of this existed before big tech, really. To me, it just seems like an an absence of governance. Like, nobody thought about governance for a while, you know. And I think there was the belief that
exit could be sufficient governance. Right? Right. If I can leave, that's great. And the story is inscribed into, for instance, the space that you run. It's on Discord, like, they use the language of server. Right? Even though it's all on virtualized systems that one company runs, they pretend verbally that, what you're on, what you're hosting is a server as a nod back to a time when, in fact, each community was its own server. And, and it's a kind of it's the method I like to use around history is I don't consider myself a historian. But there's this concept of media archeology that I claim to practice, which is I'm less interested in going through all the archival documents and everything like that. That's very important work. What I'm most interested in are what are the relics of the past that are with us today, that are still speaking to us today, that we're still inhabiting, and that yet we need to in order to really understand them and what they mean and what they can mean, we have to recognize where these concepts and languages and habits came from, and how they developed genealogically. So so your the space you're describing is a perfect example of this of this concept.
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting noticing the kind of, like, vestigial organs that are still around in the the body of the Internet. But so essentially, this implicit feudalism has, therefore, a lot of consequences. It means that, like, at least for me and what I think in the book from what I've read, is that it basically has almost because more and more life has become online in a certain way, but that life and those communities that we're taking part of don't have any kind of democratic governance mechanisms. I feel like that we've in many ways lost our democratic muscle, so to say. And so that's why you have a lot of these complaints about canceling cancel culture. I think there's a lot to say about that that probably has already been said, but I think one of the things that is often missed in that conversation is that we have there is, like, nothing else to do besides cancel someone. Like, it's just just, like, post angrily because we're and all that does is, like, within the confines of the platform and its logics, like, the platform is neutral and doesn't care whether or not you get along. It simply cares that you post on its platform.
Yeah. I I think this is such an important thing, actually, about cancel culture. And it's true. I I'm not alone in this recognition. I think, for instance, Meredith Clark has written really well on this. But this recognition that this what has come to be called cancel culture, which is a kind of right wing appropriation of, like, discourse from black Twitter, is this behavior of kind of mass denial of platform to somebody or mobs of crowds of online people bombarding somebody with, attacks or this sort of thing. And I really think it is true that we can't simply blame the people, who participate in this. We have to recognize that the means available for people to address issues of concern, and bad behavior by power holders are very limited. If, for instance, you go off some kind of deep end, and suddenly the community in your server decides, hey, this really is not working for us. This is not the space we want to be in. Unless you are willing to somehow be persuaded, or relent voluntarily, they have no recourse. Sure. This is probably not something that discord is going to take remove you for over. And, and so I distinguished with Seth Frey, my colleague at Medigap who's at UC Davis, we talk about it's the most academic distinction ever. The difference between affective voice and effective voice. Right? Affective voice is what we have under implicit futility. And we can complain a lot. We can talk. We can blah, blah, blah. The effective voice we have is very limited. It's based on this old libertarian notion that, like, all you need is exit. You don't have actual, effective voice to for instance, I can't put forward a binding proposal in your Discord and say, I think Josh needs to be replaced for a little while. Josh's term is up. That's not available to us. If we wanted to have that kind of rule set, we'd have to consciously bend over backwards and create those rules separately, distinct from the, from the tool that are provided to us. And so I just like invite us to think about in our online live, when things go wrong, how much is a result of people behaving badly, which is all gonna happen? And how much is a result of the fact that when people behave badly, we don't have good means of actually addressing these conflicts. We we don't have the tools that we would have in other spaces of life. And I I take a lot of guidance from the, activists doing work around transformative justice, people trying to seek alternatives to cops and prisons as a solution to violence and harm. And these folks, people like Mariame Kaba and Adrienne Maree Brown, they're really prominent, like, social media influencers. Like, they're not afraid of tech. But they always say in their, like, handbooks, like, do not attempt justice process and accountability circle in an online space because these spaces are really not designed for that. And I think that's a really damning observation. Right? That that, wow, our online spaces are totally inadequate for addressing conflicts. And we we probably need that to change because so much of our lives are taking place here.
Yeah. There's two things that, hopefully I remember both of them. One of them was that this obsession with exit or this, like, belief that exit is appropriate enough of a governance mechanism to, like, deal with online life, I think it comes heavily from, I talk about in the book, California ideology, like libertarianism. Like, what if I think Vitalik even made this observation a while ago in one of his tweets that, like, libertarians, they want less state. And one of the ways that they come up with a way to if you ask them, like, how do you deal with bad actors in your libertarian society, of course, some of them will revert back to authoritarian statism, but other ones who are probably more true to their libertarian principles will say that there should be a kind of like, I forgot how they describe it exactly, but like a shaming of that person out of the social group. Which is basically just a long winded way of saying cancel culture. The libertarians who often complain about cancel culture as being something that is, like, core to leftist ideology, and Mao Zedong did a super cancel culture and the Cultural Revolution, Like, it actually like, if you go back, it it comes from, like, a lot of their writing previously and has been ingrained within the very software of the tech that then was built out by Silicon Valley. So I I so, like, there's, like, a tremendous amount of politics even in these spaces that are that often really want really want to tell you that are completely apolitical.
Yeah. That, that's so right. And I think there are, some glimpses of how the this politics is, taking shape. And, it it comes up in a bunch of different forms. And I think it's really important for understanding our emerging global politics today, that actually our imaginations have been shaped by this stuff. And I'm guided here by by a a tradition of thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville on the one side, or also anti colonial thinkers like C. L. R. James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who talked about the centrality of, like, everyday democracy to democracy on any large scale. And the, these little practices and opportunities are central to our ability to participate in broader democracy and that the the health of democratic practice and in larger politics actually begins with, like, whether we can do it in our bowling leagues. Right? To take Robert Putnam's example. And, and when you look at these spaces, the logic of that that entered into so much tech culture. The early, account of an online community, Howard Rheingold's book, The Virtual Community, talked about homesteading on the virtual frontier. Right? This it explicitly embraces the language of colonialism. And this becomes the logic of online life that that we are colonizing this new frontier, this new land without people, to take a really deadly phrase. And, and we are going to parcel it off and contain it and put borders around it and all this stuff. And this logic of homesteading certainly extends to, like, the developments in the crypto world since you mentioned Vitalik. Early versions of Ethereum were codenamed Yeah. Homestead and Frontier. And the, but all of this all of tech culture has taken so much, like, in its imagination from the practices of how online spaces are governed. And this extends in a number of interesting directions. In some respects, I think the most honest person in tech culture is Mencius Mollbug, the monarchist blogger, who, yeah, who an entrepreneur who who it just comes out and says, no, we should have politics that looks more like our tech companies. And Yeah. Let's stop pretending that we're anything other than monarchists. And, yeah, we want, like, good monarchs. We want, like, a meritocracy. But let's be honest about the kind of politics we're practicing. And similarly, he was a kind of, it's debatable to what extent, but a kind of influence in the Trump administration. What's the first thing Donald Trump does after he leaves the presidency is he becomes an admin. He, starts his own platform, Truth Social. And it's just one of many examples of this kind of convergence between the figure of the server admin and the figure of the political leader. We're starting to recognize more and more that these are convergent identities. Elon Musk taking over Twitter then X, I think is a powerful example of this. At least in the earlier regime, like, there was this claim that this is a platform. This is an open platform. Right? And and yes, our company controls this. And yes, the CEO has dictatorial power, but we're gonna pretend that's not the case. When Musk takes over, it's bull bugging. But it's like, no, no, this is actually my space. I'm gonna promote my tweets and I'm going to, like, get rid of people who I don't like. And, like, I'm not even gonna pretend this is a neutral platform anymore. This is, to me, like, the legacy of implicit fuels and coming to fruition where it's extending from being just, like, a convenient way to write software for servers to becoming actually the increasingly dominant political imagination in the world.
Yeah. It we've I mean, Trump or sorry, Musk is, like, the even even Zuckerberg, really, all of them are just it's easy to make an allusion to medieval kings and we're all inside their pastures. I know, I think that's why you also see Verifakis calling it techno feudalism now. But, I'm curious then.
Okay. Well, I just wanna the language of feudalism, we have to be careful with. Right? Because it was Sure. It's always been a caricature. Right? And it's always been an insult. Right? It was an insult concocted by the French Revolution against the people that, that preceded it. And really doesn't, for instance, do justice to the actually, a lot of interesting democratic practice that happened in the so called Middle Ages. But that caricature is in some respects useful, both from a political economy perspective, as Varoufakis uses it, and I think also from a kind of social and from the perspective of everyday life, which is really my focus, at least initially. Everything ultimately comes back to political economy.
Yeah. Good points. I was wondering maybe a bit if we could talk a bit about any kind of democratic alternatives that you saw in your research of kind of people attempting to make more democratic democratically governable spaces within the online world, and what are some, like, learnings from them perhaps?
Well, this challenge of trying to build more democratic spaces goes back to the beginning too. I met an older guy here in in Colorado. We were having lunch, and he was telling me about his the BBS he he was involved in Colorado way back in the nineties or whatever. And they had a constitutional democracy, and they actually voted him out of leadership. So there there were, buried in this history, attempts to do democratic networks. But what ultimately happened is generally, like, well, the server's in my house. There was a famous experiment, famous online space, in the nineties called Lambda Moo, which was an all text, like, role playing game. And there was a famous case of sexual assault in it that was chronicled in the Village Voice in a famous a famous article by Julian Druegel. And the, the response to this assault was actually to create a process of democratic rule making where participants could vote on policy changes. But ultimately, the people who ran the servers run out of Bell Labs, realized, you know what? Like, this we own this server and whatever happens on it, we're legally liable for. So we need to have it we're we have to be the constitutional matter. Sure. Right? That there there was this recognition that because of the nature of a server, on the Internet, and the nature of legal liability, The limits without, for instance, a cooperative structure undergirding it, there are have been cooperative servers, but not nearly enough of them. Without that struct ultimately, any democracy would be a kind of sham. And and so the, the it it becomes really important then to recognize the rupture that blockchains represent. And this is, to me, a really important moment. Not because everything with blockchains has been good or, or democratic in any way, but that that the the that this intervention didn't at least change the network structure. It introduced this network that rather than having one choke point of the server has, has shared governance by default. Right? Love or hate Bitcoin, it's still, in some important ways, co governed by the groups of people mining Bitcoin. The, Ethereum network, you know, is governed by the people who stake on it. In order to achieve decentralization, which is the goal for many people of these systems, you need co governance, you need shared ownership, and thus governance becomes a problem. And as a result, for the in the last few years, this little subculture of of crypto obsessives has produced, like, I think, the most significant outpouring of creativity about what online governance could and should be, that we've ever seen. And that's simply because the network structure changed. And that invites us into this insistence that, hey, we could do this differently. We could have a different kind of Internet that is built at various levels around around co governance, but we have to design for that. Another case that I really appreciate is, the experiments that that in some cases, governments have been endorsing around new forms of democratic practice. And Barcelona has been the capital of the world for this. And they the city government helped build support the development of a platform called called DECIDEM, which is a a kind of modular toolkit for citizen participation. And because that government said, yes, we actually do care about what our citizens say on the Internet, and let's structure it in constructive ways. Suddenly, if you look at the the list of modules available for decedent, it's just like a beautiful menu of diverse possibilities of human voice and participation. Just as many of the kind of crypto modules, can appear. And so when we give ourselves the chance to self govern online, the creativity that can emerge is so exciting. And it's that's an adventure that I hope this book might invite more people into.
Kind of like the metaphor that's been going on in my head as you've been talking and using the term governable space is also thinking about, for me, I'm like I'm a bit of, like, on the side, I'm an urban planning nerd a little bit. Like, I I really love public transportation. Like, give me pictures of good trains, metros, great railway systems, and I love it. I think it's because, at least for me, growing up, I I didn't have access to a lot of public transportation. And when I finally, like, moved somewhere where there was some public transportation and there was, like, not this obscene dependence on cars and, like, strip malls and, like, giant parking lots that took up all this space that greatly limited what I was and was not able to do physically. I started to realize, oh, there's so much more to what everyday life can be. And so I've been thinking about that lately as it's like the in Lawrence Lessig's, pathetic dot theory around what are the four things that can govern people. He says software is like architecture. And of course, I wrote about it in my book as well. It's not exactly like architecture, but there are some similarities. That it determines what you can and cannot do. And so by changing the network infrastructure or changing basically, if we use the metaphor of like, urban planning, like changing the size of the streets to be perhaps a bit smaller, a bit cozier, the ability to walk from to your friend's place rather than having to take your car, having bicycle lanes for smaller transport, it changes the way that your how what your relationship is with space, and space that is occupied by other people, and how they occupy it. Yeah. So I think that's, like, one of the things that interests me about has been interesting to me about blockchain, of course, is that there has been this opening. Of course, I think it is far from being realized, and it is very too much influenced by libertarian thinking. But that's what this podcast was meant so that I could rant about that.
It's so important to recognize that, first of all, something valuable is happening here. And and you've done such a good job in your book and your podcast as well, in in explicating that and ensuring that we have the chance to hold space and talk about, about what else could be done with these with these tools. And I do think that opportunity is essential. I first heard about Ethereum when it was still just a white paper. I was actually on my book tour for my Occupy book. I was doing an event in San Francisco with Rebecca Solnit. And, and that afternoon, an old friend of mine said, we gotta have coffee. And we met nearby at this Iraq Veterans Against the War, pop up cafe. And we, we talked about he told me about this, this white paper that just come out. And it struck me as, Oh, this this could go so, so wrong. But also it struck me as, Oh, this could be actually what, you know, the answer for enabling those powerful democratic experiments that I saw in the protests of twenty eleven, on the streets to actually go onto the networks. Here, you could write into code your democratic experiment. And, and I appreciate too the way in which, even while this scene has been so, so profoundly informed by a kind of libertarian starting point, it has been fun to see, many people in this space, like, rediscover others. Recognize that actually, oh, one token, one vote, like, produces some pretty plutocratic outcomes. And, and if we only rely on exit, what gets lost in terms of, like, what you might call the social layer or other aspects of life that we care about? And, I hope, you know, that that especially as the disasters continue to compound in this space, that people recognize that, oh, actually, we need to design these this architecture, as you put it, more intentionally. And with, like, human beings more in mind, we need to recognize that the goal here should not just be the system's purity,
but actually the flourishing of the human beings who who participate in them. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that you also noted in the book that I thought was funny, that still, while Blockchain, I think, does offer this opening, of course, it has followed the tradition of a lot of previously existing or still existing open source projects and how they are governed. And a lot of open source projects, not all of them, but some of them, famously have a benevolent dictator, or even benevolent dictator for life, BDFL. And in the Ethereum space, Vitalik is treated in that way, in some ways. Which I think is, an interesting thing that there's been this kind of this still comes from the context in which there were maybe some problematic things or there were some things that maybe we need to get over. But at the same time, there are like alternatives being made. And I think like I can't speak for Vitalik, but I imagine, at least for me, I wouldn't want to be a benevolent dictator for life. So I guess I'm curious for you what are some things that you think Blockchain makes then interesting more explicitly in this, like, as far as creating our governable spaces even with the the baggage that it has?
Well, the you you're right to draw that connection. And certainly, Vitalik has privately and publicly lamented, the kind of persistence of his role despite having no official role in in the governance of the system often, having, comparatively modest voting power in the system. And and yet, he retains this charismatic role. And I think that really stems from power vacuums. Right? It stems from the the absence of sufficient structures to do better. And this was certainly the case for so many important open source software projects. Linux is a classic example of a system that, was, and continues to be essentially run by one person. And this is like vital public infrastructure for the globe. And Yeah. It's pretty absurd, that it is run this way. I think it it comes down to habit as well as just, like, mailing lists. Like, this was a piece of software developed over mailing lists over email lists, and email lists are futile. There's whoever's the admin of the list has absolute power, and, whoever is the maintainer of the software, has absolute power. This is a logic that got fed into then GitHub, which is now the dominant platform for, for software development. It assumes there's an admin. And in many cases, this is just because this is a culture that resisted the idea of politics, sees as really a deeply meritocratic culture. And so in meritocracy is the belief that, that, oh, we don't have to argue about things. We can just let the most skilled people make the calls. And as a result, too, there was a kind of allergic, quality to politics. There were exceptions, like the Debian project, which is built on top of Linux, is a constitutional democracy and is actually a completely vital tool that, you know or infrastructure that enables Linux to be useful for anybody. And so it's a extremely important project that, whose democracy enables it to serve many constituents. But, but that has certainly conveyed into crypto where, you know, there is that opportunity for some self governance, but often the governance that has been established has been far too minimal. So it's like, okay. We can vote on a proposal or we can vote on a version update, but we don't have any structure to decide, okay, who designs the next version, who invests in the development costs, how are the smaller level decisions made, what are the kinds of, countervailing powers. The the governance that people have actually built into blockchains is very minimal. And and as a result, significant power vacuums, remain in these contexts. And I think if get to know any DAO that has, like, established itself, over time in any way, you start to see, wow, they've really developed some pretty intensive structures of organization, work streams and stewards and all kinds of funny terms for, like, old things that humans have done for a long time, that now get new names. But this is just out of our recognition that, yes, like self governance and governance of any kind is complex and involves multiple structures. And we can't just wish those politics and those practices and those structures away, that that's just not an option for us. That dream of being able to have have self governance without structure or without, without even bureaucracy, I think, is part of what some of the most profound disasters in the crypto world have have recognized the fallacy of.
Yeah. I think that's for me, I've played around with the term of this kinda, like, being this libertarian to cooperativist pipeline that as people who engage in DAOs, maybe from a libertarian point of view, they end up seeing the, yeah, the silliness of kind of the assumptions being made in that. But, maybe before because I know you have, you had to leave in in a few minutes. Would you wanna give any updates on the Medigov project, which you've been working on for quite a few years now, where you have been actively exploring governance within the crypto space?
Yeah. So this is a community that I really wrote this book in conversation with. It's a network of people who are studying and experimenting with online governance in different contexts. You mentioned Lawrence Lessig earlier. I recently the project emerged from a, conversations he had with a German game company, trying to imagine governance in an online space in a game, Dante. But since then, it's developed into just a huge web of projects and explorations. We've been doing a lot of stuff around standards building in in the DAO context. We're doing projects around, public ownership of AI. We have a public AI effort, exploring what that could look like. We're looking at, what I think is a really crucial question, which is how do we finance online communities? How do we finance DAOs, for instance? I think what we're seeing right now is this a repeat of this old recognition that happened with the World Wide Web, which is that, a decentralized technology does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. The economic layer, so to speak, can capture the protocol layer. And that's what happened with venture capital and the rise of of the monopoly platforms. And I think we're seeing something very similar happening with DAOs. You have a decentralized technology, but you have centralized financing, capturing it. And so one one project that that we're beginning to explore in Medigob is alternative financing mechanisms. But for anybody who's interested in these questions, please hop on over to medigov.org, and, we'd love to have you at our seminar and our conversations online and and our occasional in person spaces. It's just a wonderful community of people to explore these questions creatively.
Nice. I've definitely, learned a lot from a lot of the the research that you guys have outputted. It's been nice, to get some good critical analysis and perspective on things that are going on in the crypto space that I feel like sometimes gets ignored, but there's actually quite a lot of good things to learn from, even from the from the failures in the crypto space.
Yeah. Absolutely. One of my problems is I don't look at the news around crypto, like, in the big in the, like, New York Times or whatever. I just focus on, like, the people who I like in this space. And then, like, these horrible scams happen or whatever. And I don't even know about them. I'm just focused on, like, the new, like, mechanism designs people are coming up with. And we need both. But I've sometimes blinded myself to what probably actually most people are experiencing when they interact with this stuff. I hope that the better parts start to prevail, or else maybe this technology burns to the ground and we'd
come up with something better. Yeah. Sure. I think, hopefully, through this process of assisting and helping the ones that are trying to do better, by actually providing alternative governance mechanisms rather than another scam, another pyramid scheme, then we can move forward in the crypto space. So yeah, thanks so much for coming on. I know you gotta go. The book is called Democratic Design for Online Life. I believe it's freely available online. That's right. Free to the world. Yeah. Yeah. So true to the open source ethos, you can get the book online. I have it on my ebook, so I've been reading it there.
And, yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you, Josh. So good talking with you as always.