Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

The bylaws of the garden club and the associations Tocqueville admired would not translate straightforwardly online. Too much is different in online spaces: the ease of joining and leaving, the cultural and geographic diversity, the speed, the anonymity, the metrics of reputation, and on and on. And yet his basic insight has remained salient: a syn

“Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to macro level.”

“they sense the general sentiment and act on that.”

crypto projects are reinventing them through fee-funded treasuries and donor grant pools.

the instrumental power to change something,

and self-governing people would become ungovernable to colonizers.

Any user, in principle, can ascend the ranks of influence and position—holding such roles as “administrator,” “steward,” and “bureaucrat.” Users are elected to these roles by their peers.

Albert O. Hirschman between the signals of “exit” and “voice” in organizational life.10 Exit is the capacity to depart, such as by quitting a job or shopping with a competitor; voice is the capacity to make change from within, such as by lobbying one’s city council for a local policy change or filing a complaint about a defective product.

implicit feudalism, the dominant design pattern for online spaces, in which all power derives from founders and admins, and most users lack opportunities for direct, instrumental effective voice.