Towards Governable Stacks

planted: 26/09/2022last tended: 03/10/2022

Name of Nathan Schneider's presentation at Commons.Hour https://forum.meet.coop/t/signup-commons-hour-session-10/1156/.

https://cloud.meet.coop/s/xaDByCiMkwEQtEL

1. What happened to peer production?

Peer production
- range of activities that include OSS, crowdsourcing, etc
peer production has enabled corporate capture and consolidation of wealth
contributors is depressingly homogenous (white male hegemony)

2. The Tyranny of Structurelessness

The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production?
unintentional structures arise in the absence of intentional structures
corporate capture and white male dominance
- an expression of ToS

3. Social provisioning

hidden forms of labour
human well-being alongside other metrics of wealth
correcting for unequal access to power and agency
asserting the validity and inescapability of ethical judgement
intersecting gender analysis with that of race, class and other forms of identity

4. current state of open source and FOSS communities

"identity politics and vulgar Marxism"
these are actually attempts of social provisioning

5. the ethical challenge

empowering developers
freedom and agency required to ensure it is used for social good
put it in the licenses

6. the economic challenge

(in social provisioning)

trying to have a sustainable business model
and preventing corporate capture
e.g. AWS monetising FOSS hosted on AWS
aspects of social provisioning here again

7. fron tyranny to governable stacks

another approach to social provisioning
a crucial leverage point in peer production
moving from assuming that we don't need to bother with governance
towards toolsets that are designed to be governed
gandhi and the spinning wheel
- appropriate technology capable of being governed at the village level
- pre-digital version of the governable stack

8. govern across the stack

insuregency "entering into conflict with more colonial forces"
how do we make our tech stacks more governable
- to facilitate social provisioning
we don't have the infrastructure to really even think about

9. what kinds of provisioning would we need to govern our stacks?

metagov project
governance layer for the internet
governable spaces is an upcoming book from Nathan

10. Question

Re: insurgency and the original governable stack of the spinning wheel - networked social media was touted (inflatedly) as major tools in supporting the various short-lived uprisings of 2011 (Occupy, Arab Spring, etc). Twitter revolution, Facebook revolution etc. These tools have a distinct lack of self-governance built-in but supposedly helped facilitate revolutions. Would governable stacks have offered something to these movements that big tech didn't? Stopped them from petering out?