In our Spring 2025 reading group with Social.coop we read Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life (2024) by Nathan Schneider. It brings together eclectic references, diverse intellectual lineages, and many projects to explore how online spaces can be more democratic for those who inhabit them. Below are highlights from our discussion and key takeaways.
Want to join with us? We are gearing up for our Fall 2025 reading group where we will be reading Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (2024) Adam Greenfield in October.
What we read
Over three calls we walked through the chapters of the book, each of which stand alone or were previously published as academic papers. The topics range from describing how online spaces recapitulate a form of “implicit feudalism”, how metaphors like homesteading and the logics underpinning it contribute to our current democratic decline, and the forms of modular politics and stacks that could lead toward flourishing self-governance. In between chapters, actually existing projects were profiled that demonstrate the book’s themes and concepts.
Discussion highlights
Metanarrative about democracy in decline
Schneider states that “constraints in governance in online spaces have contributed to the peril of democratic politics in general”. We discussed examples of anti-democratic tendencies in online spaces. We also saw them as the secondary effect of deeper issues like capitalism, big tech monopolies, and bad incentives in tech development. As a contrast, we all enjoyed the example of his mother’s garden club and its bylaws. Illustrating how practicing democracy in small, intentional ways builds skills for larger-scale participation.
Metaphors that reinforce or counter those narratives
We reflected on the metaphors that exist to describe being “online” as a place (like “homesteading” and “information superhighway”). We also talked about the meanings of the new metaphor coined in this book (“implicit feudalism”). The concepts of “stack” and “modularity” were extended as part of book’s positive project. We found it interesting to work with those, as they are popular technical concepts. Yet we recognized some limits they can impose along with low-level organization barriers that make it hard to tell a new story.
Challenges of building online governable spaces
The lack of clear models for online governance makes it difficult to overcome the challenges of operating online. In a context where users are used to having no power by default, where information is unevenly communicated, or where learning is required to adapt to greater agency. In addition we thought about how we’ve been acculturated to online spaces: that they can be left on a whim, or that any friction and effort is a negative that design should minimize.
Unease with crypto as a political imagination
We felt the book did a good job covering the governance work that is happening in the crypto space. However, it did not match many of our experiences with crypto, which were primarily about financial scams and enabling crime. Trying to be dispassionate, we asked: can we be inspired by these experiments and make them safe to use in contexts we care about? Crypto was juxtaposed with abolitionist work, we saw both projects as experiments with new approaches. We wondered would / could / should we want to do those experiments at the speed of crypto if we could?
Taking an archeological approach
We returned a few times to the overall approach of the book, which brought many distinct ideas together. Schneider quotes Catherine Walsh to describe this as finding “a past capable of renovating the future”. These pasts felt more like a menu to inspire future possibilities, as opposed to a rigid roadmap.
Key takeaways
Reading the book led to generative and rich discussions. Inspired by Schneider’s approach, we brought up other historical moments and examples from our own interests and backgrounds. We made connections to other thinkers and books which opened up new avenues to explore together.
We were left feeling the challenge of building new online governance approaches, particularly where:
- We need to explore and unpack the tools or interventions that add governance layers into tools to understand how they operate in fact
- We have to work within the constraints of limited available time (2 hours a week!-ish. tops!) to get to self-governance
We see opportunities to scaffold online governance from in-person strategies: by finding small ways to be incrementally more in community or around other people, or by longer-term participation in local and geographic hubs.
What are your thoughts on self-governance and democracy online? How do we get there? Tell us using the hashtag #CoSocialReads.