1. Democracy in the Wild
Imagine a gathering under a tree, a couple dozen people sharing a picnic in a park. The day begins clear, good for cooking and playing and lying on blankets. Food and games are out, splayed around the tree and the lawn around it. As the afternoon goes on, clouds form and gather overhead, but few of the picnickers notice until the first raindrops fall. Murmurs begin to spread, bodies agitate. The murmurs all amount to some version of the same question: What should we do?
A choreography of rough consensus is underway. The networks of friends at the picnic activate, checking in with each other using words and how they carry their bodies. Some hold themselves high, determined to wait out the weather, while others look around skittishly, assessing the quantity of rain and the perceptions of others. Friends cross-pollinate information across the clusters of family. Within families, members seem to look toward one or two of them—an elder who speaks only the old language or a volatile kid or a guest, depending on the family—to make the call that the rest will follow. A ranger from the park service comes by, an agent of the regional government, to offer a warning about the perils of being under a tree during a thunderstorm.
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The air begins to smell of petrichor as moisture fills the pores of stones and dirt, releasing as aerosols the oils they have been holding inside them. By then, most of the birds and squirrels nearby already know what is coming from the changing barometric pressure, and they are back in their nests. The tree alters the chemicals oozing from its roots, which the mycelial networks underneath transmit across that section of the park. Worms weaving among them feel the moisture and move upward toward the surface, into the rain that others are trying to escape.
Enough families leave that even the picnickers most determined to stay no longer see the point. The thick air and rush of creatures have enveloped what is left of the human activity. Those remaining people now seem isolated and wandering, no longer cohering as a single event like they had just a few minutes earlier. The critical mass that made the place a picnic had gone.
By then word has spread about a group chat. There, they can share photos and find their lost things that others might have hastily gathered up. What was before, at the picnic, an uneven topology of social location and circumstance now becomes an instantaneous ledger of opinion. One phone after another logs in there, lighting up with chatter about whether the picnic should have ended. But this time the youngest people do not have the equipment to add their voices; the eldest tend to have trouble joining. Lightning never came, and before long the rain is gone.
Go back?
We came all that way to get there!
Nah, already packed up.
In the chat, everyone is a speech bubble. There are some side chats among friends, but the main group flattens the textured structures of relationship. Disagreements fly by, but nobody is sure what would be the criteria for a decision or how to signal commitment. The chatter ricochets back and forth. Some who were quiet under the tree feel more free to speak up here. One person complains especially crudely, only to vanish from the chat—removed by the person who started it, whom the software regards as its admin. Factions form and dig in their positions. Notifications announcing messages continue to flash on the remaining people’s phones, until the futility of the debate slows them to an occasional emoji, and then some photos taken earlier, and then no more.
What happened to the picnic when it went online? This is a version of the questions many of us find ourselves asking over and over, as one scene of social life after another migrates to digital networks—our workplaces and markets, our classes and clubs, our money and family, our religion and politics. The answers, as above, are never straightforward. But they are increasingly consequential.
“Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life”
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This is a book about the politics of everyday life, and everyday online life in particular—among the internet-borne social spaces where people see each other and interact through digital tools. I contend that the most quotidian kinds of online politics, such as those in the tale above, affect the flows of power at the largest scales. The ways people can and cannot collectively self-govern in daily online life, furthermore, have been constrained in dominant social networks. I will argue that the constraints on governance in online spaces have contributed to the peril of democratic politics in general. It is not enough to merely defend existing governmental institutions; healthy democracy depends on enabling creative new forms of self-governance, especially on networks.
Several proposals flow from those claims. One is the need for online communities themselves to self-consciously cultivate democratic practices. These practices can serve as the basis for a social-media design paradigm that invites diverse kinds of community governance to emerge and flourish. But community-scale democracy will remain only marginal within antidemocratic infrastructures. A further paradigm is therefore necessary for the policies encoded in law and technical systems that organize online life—self-governance, rather than top-down authority, as the basis for problem-solving. Such a paradigm would make networks home to new jurisdictions—enabled by but not always reducible to the jurisdictions of geographical territories.
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 in a 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.
Any precise meaning of self-governance is necessarily contextual, depending on who is involved and what kinds of say they seek. Likewise, I claim no fixed definition for democracy. I understand it as always a horizon, a longing for power shared equitably among participants, a destination that moves depending on where one stands. An orchestra permits hierarchies intolerable to a punk band, but the people in each may still see themselves as living toward democracy. If democracy is the horizon, self-governance is a plausible practice for moving in that direction. Governable spaces, then, are where democratic self-governance can happen.
The story of the picnic included different kinds of spaces and, among them, missed opportunities. What if other picnickers had heard those only comfortable speaking up online? What if the group chat had included tools for steering debate into decision? What if the picnickers had been more skilled at making decisions online because they were used to having and using real power?
The online networks that are the subject of this book are a kind of wilderness. They are evolving biomes, host to a polyphony of people and machines. The networks are not fully apart from the governments that claim to rule the world, but not entirely subject to them either. What happens online is terrible and wonderful; I love my favorite online haunts. If I criticize our networks as they are, it is because I see glimpses of the governable spaces they could become. Our networks are spaces we have still only begun to co-create and self-govern and thus to make our own.
It is by now a truism that democracy is in decline around the world. Political scientists have diagnosed the “erosion” or “deconsolidation” of democratic institutions among governments, as well as in global opinion polls, which exhibit collapsing affection for democratic ideals. Countries such as the United States, the world’s longest-running constitutional democracy, and India, the world’s largest, have voted into power regimes with autocratic tendencies. Other countries of diverse kinds, from Hungary to the Philippines, have both led and followed. According to one analysis, between 2011 and 2021, “toxic polarization” dividing political factions spread from five countries to thirty-two; the number of countries with worsening freedom of expression went from five to thirty-five; and the share of the world’s population living in autocracies increased from 49 percent to 70 percent. The situation means trouble for those who regard democratic government as an intrinsic good, to be sure. It also bears other dangers, threatening a self-reinforcing spiral of authoritarianism, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction, especially as leaders seem to regard protecting ecological and social health as an unacceptable constraint on their mandates to achieve national greatness.
Blame for democratic erosion falls in many directions, from intersecting inequalities and climate-induced migration to widespread corruption and insufficiently civic-minded elites. But it is hard to avoid laying blame on the absorbing, distracting, glowing presence that has reconfigured public and private life for so many of us in recent decades: online social media. Scholars and journalists have argued that social networks have worsened polarization, provided mouthpieces for authoritarians, enabled violent extremists to organize, and undermined trust in institutions. Additionally, mounting evidence suggests that users perceive online platforms themselves as unaccountable polities, resulting from experiences of arbitrary rule enforcement, a lack of due process, and an absence of sensitivity to context. The diagnoses, in turn, produce calls for a response. Proposals typically take the form of fresh impositions of consolidated power, whether through governmental regulation of platform companies, takeovers by billionaires aspiring to be saviors, or the fiat of platform companies themselves.
Meanwhile, social-media-savvy protest movements have set out to reinvent democracy with viral mobilizations, denouncing old regimes and experimenting with self-governance in the streets. The year 2011 saw a wave of uprisings spread from the Middle East, across Europe, to Wall Street, and then around the world again. Protesters often eschewed representative democracy and modeled forms more responsive, creative, and direct. But in the years since, hardly any gains from that period have stuck, and in most cases the authoritarians have only tightened their grip. Civil wars with their roots in those protests—in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—are still smoldering. Movements have succeeded in using online tools to spread their messages and cause fleeting disruptions, but those achievements have not translated into lasting democratic blocs that have shifted power in meaningful ways.
Even if the Internet is neither a complete nor satisfying explanation for eroding democratic norms, there is reason enough to believe that aspects of networked life have contributed to aspects of democratic erosion. The growing ubiquity of online networks seems to have roughly preceded the rise of the new aspiring dictators. Those figures, more than trying to restrict and censor social networks, have embraced them as their own. Social algorithms often privilege the kinds of polarizing, abusive messages that undermine civil discourse. And rising levels of app-fueled anxiety might leave people more susceptible to promises of autocratic certainty.
This book will add one more accusation to the pile: the design of online social spaces has contributed to the atrophy of everyday democratic skills. The diagnosis also bears remedies. More than other explanations of democratic erosion, this account suggests that the future of democracy can begin at the level of ordinary community, wherever we find ourselves together, where each of us has the chance to make a difference.
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab. His most recent book is “Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.”
