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.”
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?
Schneider: The need for this book crystallized for me in conversations with my mother. She is a member of a garden club of women in her neighborhood — a very conventional, ordinary club like so many others in so many communities across the United States.
As she talked about the politics of her club, I thought about my challenges managing a large email list that, like so many of our online spaces, was suffering from some problematic behavior. And I started to envy her. The club has clear rules, which even the president is subject to. There are bylaws and procedures. There are elections. And I realized that almost no online space I had been part of had that kind of basic democracy in place.
The book explores why the practice of everyday democracy is so rare in online life, through a history going back to the earliest social media. Then I argue that this actually matters a great deal, and that a lack of democracy in our everyday politics may be contributing to the erosion of democratic culture in society more broadly. Then I go further: I argue that this insight is also an invitation to rethink how we govern and regulate the internet — and to explore how to solve problems from the bottom up rather than the top down.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Schneider: This book comes, in some ways, out of the work of my previous book, “Everything for Everyone,” which is about the cooperative business movement. And the one before that, “Thank You, Anarchy,” about the Occupy protests. In each of these, I am obsessed with what it could mean to bring democracy and self-governance more deeply into everyday life — in the economy, in politics, and in all the stuff we do on the internet. That obsession with democracy started for me at a young age, when I had some really wonderful experiences with democracy actually working in my local community. Now, I hope to enable more people to have those kinds of experiences too.
I also wrote this book in ongoing conversation with a network of researchers and builders called Metagov. A few of us built it out of a collaboration to write a paper, and before long we had a Slack community with almost a thousand people. I have learned so much from them, and in some ways this book is one big tribute to that particular online community.
Finally, I drew a lot of inspiration from the Media Archaeology Lab on CU Boulder’s campus, a basement full of working old machines. It is an incredible place for research and play, and I hope anyone interested in exploring these living histories will come visit.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Schneider: In the course of writing, I came to realize that the subject was actually bigger than I initially thought. At first I thought it was just a book about the internet. But the more I wrote, I realized it was also about political theory—about the possibilities we have for organizing ourselves and sharing power. At the end, I gesture toward the idea that if we become democratic citizens in online spaces, it could radically change our relationship to our other forms of citizenship, like our citizenship in countries.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Schneider: I had written three books before this, but this was my first formally academic book. I was a journalist before becoming a professor at CU Boulder. So with this book I had to be careful in a new kind of way. Journalism has its own kind of rigor—with facts, with moods, with storytelling. But academic writing requires a kind of attention to citation and qualification that I had not had to wrestle with before. I have sought to do that work while also honoring readers of all kinds.
“Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life”
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One important piece of help I had in making the book accessible was that of the illustrator, Darija Medić. She is an extraordinary artist and thinker, and her images make the pages come alive in ways I couldn’t do with words alone.
SunLit: What’s the most important thing — a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers should take from this book?
Schneider: I hope the book leaves people with a craving for more democratic practice in their lives—and with a deeper recognition that democracy is not a fixed set of existing institutions to defend but a tradition that must always be evolving, always reinventing itself. I hope others can feel a bit of the thrill I experience when I am among people who allow themselves to do that reinvention for themselves.
SunLit: Walk us through your writing process: Where and how do you write?
Schneider: I have small kids, and I often write at night after putting them to bed. Or when I can find a spare hour here and there between classes and meetings. I do not wait for inspiration; I just do it, even if it hurts a bit. For better or worse, if I go more than a few days without writing, I start to feel less myself, so it has a kind of grounding quality for me.
Perhaps it is relevant to the book also to note that I love writing with tools created through communities. I do most of my writing in Emacs, a text editor that was first developed by hackers in the 1970s, and continues to be developed as a fundamentally volunteer effort. My computers all run Linux-based operating systems that are largely non-commercial and developed through collaborative processes. I also rely on a tool called Pandoc, which converts text to various formats; its development is led by a philosophy professor in his spare time. It feels fitting to me, if I am going to write about community governance, to also use tools governed through communities.
SunLit: How does this book help us think differently about the internet?
Schneider: Too often, we think of the internet and democracy as two separate things. We worry about what the internet is doing to democracy or what democratic governments should do to reign in the internet. I think that approach no longer holds in a world where the internet is so enmeshed in our lives and societies.
Instead, we need to start practicing democracy on the internet, with the internet and beyond. This is an opportunity to explore wide open possibilities of how a network-enabled democracy could meet people’s needs in far better ways than the 18th-century technology of ballot boxes does. And we can even think about the internet as itself a kind of country—a commons that we co-govern.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Schneider: I have another book in the works that should come out within a year. It’s called “Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation.” While “Governable Spaces” was in many respects a solitary project, “Beautiful Solutions” has been an intensely collaborative one, with three other editors and dozens of writers from around the world.
It is an effort to share visions of how to build a solidarity economy—an economy built for the flourishing of all people rather than to serve corporations and private wealth. I have been grateful to be able to work on these two very, very different books together.
A few more quick questions
SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing?
Schneider: I enjoy writing more, but editing is where the writing actually becomes readable.
SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?
Schneider: I wrote a thesis in college about evolution-creationism debates. It was my first project that approached in the length of a book, and it was profoundly hard, but it also taught me how to piece together a whole spread of ideas into a semi-coherent whole. Having that confidence early on was incredibly helpful for me.
SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing?
Schneider: Sappho, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ursula K. Le Guin
SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?
Schneider: “Clarify your position” — from Henry Miller to a young writer who understood himself as a misunderstood genius. I think that’s a beautiful statement of humility. If people don’t understand what you’re saying, it’s your job to say it better.
SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?
Schneider: Mostly that I now read ebooks almost entirely, and nearly all my physical books are from when I was interested in entirely different things.
SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?
Schneider: Silence is a precious commons, as Ivan Illich put it.
SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment?
Schneider: When nobody is home I listen to the music I wrote as a teenager and in other angst-y years, as a reminder of how difficult phases of life can always pass away.
SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?
Schneider: At about 15 or 16 it became weirdly clear to me, so I went out and bought an old typewriter.
SunLit: Greatest writing fear?
Schneider: Wasting someone’s time and attention.
SunLit:Greatest writing satisfaction?
Schneider: When round after round of edits actually succeeds in turning what felt like a complete mess into something readable.