Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

Hello and welcome. It's April 9th, 2024. We're in ActInf.org Stream 8.1 with Nathan Schneider discussing the work in the book, Governable Spaces. So there's many places we can enter in and jump off from. But first, Nathan, thank you very much for joining. And perhaps you could say a quick hello and then we'll jump into some quotes. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Okay. So I have two quotes prepared and then we'll also see any questions people have from the live chat or anything else that comes up or anything you want to ask. All right. So this is a quote on page three of the book. Do you want to say any words before the quote about like, what is this book about? When did you publish it? How is it published? Who did it? Et cetera. And then we'll jump in. Okay, sure. Yeah, it's it was published in late February of this year, 2024. And with University of California Press, it's available for free online as well as in print from, you know, wherever you get books. And it's, it's really an exploration of the why the daily aspects of our online lives and the governance in those in our daily online lives really matters. I've spent a lot of years exploring like political economy of online life, trying to support the development of alternative platforms that are built as cooperatives and that sort of thing. So I've worked a lot with, you know, building things at the company scale, thinking about policy, you know, found an accelerator for those sorts of things. But in this one, I kind of stepped back or stepped into, you know, what is what are our political experiences in everyday life? And why do these matter? And it kind of starts with the history of how our, our online lives came to be structured and managed the way they are. And, and then it, it blows up from there into suggesting that, you know, maybe some of these, these daily practices are actually part of what's driving the kind of decline in crisis of democracy more generally. And, and then let's think about what to do about it. So it's, it's really a kind of plea for, for, um, uh, recognizing the, that, um, you know, we could do much more, much better in bringing democracy into the spaces that we inhabit online and, uh, to recognize the way in which we've, you know, often without recognizing, without noticing it, um, failed to do that. Awesome. Okay. Here's a quote on page three. And when I read it, I thought about active inference and about this opportunity for a two-way street, like for people who are learning active inference to hear about how the perspectives that you're bringing and drawing very richly on are just right up even next to it. So much of this book dwells in interactions of human politics and technological systems, but as above the more than human world envelops it all, providing the stage and the stakes, a planet waiting to see whether we can govern our way out of self-destruction, deciding whether to maintain the conditions necessary for human civilization. Is there democracy in the wild creatures hurtling through space on a fragile world can expect no rights or powers of decision from physics and biology. A government's claim to rule means little in a high mountain wilderness or neighborhood whose residents have made themselves ungovernable to survive against a hostile police force. Yet governance and its cognates are names we use for doing what all life forms must, orchestrating our perceptions and reactions so as to have a chance at thriving in our surroundings. Consider it simply the intersection of power and cooperation, an intersection hardly unique to us. So what made you write that? Great, great question. A very specific moment really. I was kind of early in imagining this work that I've been doing for some years already forming into a book and I was at a retreat at a Catholic retreat center I go to sometimes in Colorado and I was going on a long walk and felt just like deeply embarrassed actually for all. I've…