Sublime

Yes, institutional calcification is a real phenomenon, and leaders who come from outside and aren’t afraid to shake things up can be incredibly generative (as long as “shaking things up” isn’t just a euphemism for privatizing, downsizing, etc.). But when the whole business of “changing the world” reflexively demeans career experts and specialists a

Andreas Hepp’s formulation of “deep mediatization” points a further way out of determinism. Under this condition, Hepp writes, “all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures.”28 If society has become so thoroughly mediated, how could we expect democracy to emerge in not-especially-dem

Design scoping processes that exclude structural problems, large institutional actors, or the state from the field of analysis convert design into an antipolitics machine. Design narratives too frequently invisibilize the matrix of domination and set the boundaries of the imagination to exclude already existing, community-led solutions,

experimenting with self-governance in the streets.

In 1999 Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. It was Das Kapital for Smart America. In Friedman’s account, globalization is the organizing system of the post–Cold War era, but, unlike the Cold War, it is the result of technological advances and blind economic forces, not government policies. Rejecting

the networked “signal” of movements can be self-defeating without “capacity” to translate it into durable, adaptable organizations that can wield leverage long enough to achieve shared goals.

Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS)