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Tyler Cowen: What I Read

Decisions were made at the advent of the internet about critical things such as security, privacy, user sovereignty et cetera without any form of democracy. As we now know, many of these choices had profound, often irrevocable, consequences that will reverberate throughout the digital world for decades to come.

Piers Kicks • Into The Void

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

Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

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

Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

Emilie Reiser from our team had built an app that let people take photos and GPS readings and combine the two into annotated, illustrated maps that community leaders could show to local government officials, documenting and analyzing what was wrong with local infrastructure.

Ethan Zuckerman • Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them

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Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The megapolitical logic of cyberspace suggests that central command-and-control systems that currently dominate the world’s large-scale infrastructure will have to be replaced by multicentric models of security with distributed capabilities so they cannot be easily captured or blocked by a computer virus.

James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

As I’ve written before, the speed of technology and the hyperconnectivity of society have placed us in a “never-ending now.”Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but never goes anywhere.Even the virtues of information consumption have changed.Mo

Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

Clay Shirky • 30 highlights

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Cover of Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators