"Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life" 

Why does governance in our everyday online spaces matter? In this launch event, Nathan Schneider introduces his new book, "Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life." ​The book argues that we should turn the conversation about the internet and democracy upside-down. Rather than trying to find top-down fixes for the problems of the internet, we should be looking for ways to enable democratic repair with and through our online lives. Starting with the earliest online communities, a design pattern of "implicit feudalism" has constrained the options and imaginaries that communities could use to organize themselves. Schneider argues that decades of living with such systems have contributed to the erosion of democratic politics around the world. But there is another way. Our online spaces don't have to be governed by legacy systems susceptible to corruption under absolutist rule of the few. Instead, they can be sites for society to democratically coordinate in ways that are inclusive, empowering, and restorative.

About the speaker:

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of four books, most recently Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, published by University of California Press in 2024, and Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Bold Type Books in 2018. He edited Vitalik Buterin’s book Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains and co-edited Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Recent scholarship has been published in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and Media, Culture & Society, among other journals. He has also reported for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic magazine. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. He serves on the boards of Metagov, Start.coop, and Waging Nonviolence. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.

In concert with the installation of Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II during the month of September, scholars of media from the University and beyond will give short talks related to the topic of communications and community. This is the third in the series of talks.