Engineering and Postmodernism
The following is from my response to a friend’s Facebook post about the value of postmodernism to engineers, and the role that education plays in introducing engineers to postmodernism.
#governance
10 posts
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Code as Contestable Law
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →Last week I gave two short talks as part of the IASC Knowledge Commons conference, one on our ability to contest rules in digital spaces, and another on how, more generally, we can engineer more responsive governance. Those links go to YouTube, where you can watch the talks. (Update: you can now also see the panel discussions for these talks: code as contestable law, engineering responsive governance.)
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Three Governance Case Studies
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →One of my communities is choosing a new governance structure, and in preparation for our first conversation on the topic, I wrote up three governance case studies. I covered DisCOs (Distributed Cooperative Organizations), Enspiral, and Python.
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Facebook's Everything Problem
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →Facebook's 'Oversight Board' recently affirmed Facebook's choice to suspend then-President Donald Trump from its platform the day after the Capitol riots. Although many critics - including myself - support the decision to keep Trump off Facebook, we're not too pleased with the process itself. "[It's] a red herring, substituting a simulacrum of due process in certain high-profile cases for substantive reform," Will Oremus writes in a New York Times op ed. Oremus and others point out that while Facebook has promised to obey the content moderation decisions of the board, it can choose to ignore any policy recommendations. "[Facebook] did not empower the board to watch over its products or systems — only its rules and how it applies them."
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On Digital Disobedience
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →There’s not enough disobedience online. Yes, that’s right, you heard me: there’s not enough space for disobedience online.
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Collective Accountability in Digital Spaces
Read more → More from Duly Noted →Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance,Hello, Governor! I’m still experimenting with format, content, etc, so feel free to give feedback about what you like or what you’d want to see.
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Collective Accountability in Digital Spaces
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →It can be a struggle to hold groups accountable for misbehavior, even when the group is structured through legal forms, with public membership and clear leadership. On social media platforms populated by anonymous accounts, with membership and leadership often informal and invisible, accountability feels like a pipe dream.
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Hello World
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →Hello, and welcome to the very first edition of this newsletter!
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Agency and Trust in a Digital Democracy
Read more → More from Out of Many →Last week I was on a panel about ‘Democracy and the Digital Commons’ at Suffolk University. At the start of the panel, each of us gave a 5-10 minute talk to help frame the discussion. While there’s no transcript of the panel itself, here are my notes for the intro. (Quick context: each of us tied our talk to the Boston Marathon bombing and in particular Reddit’s response to it.)
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A summary of David Ciepley’s “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation”
Read more → More from Out of Many →I recently read David Ciepley’s “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation”. I recommend reading it yourself, but here’s my best attempt to summarize it in my own words.