Dorothy's Place

For well over a decade, Nathan Schneider has been as perceptive a journalist-observer of the intersections between politics, digital life and media culture as you could hope to find. At just under 200 pages, his new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, is brief but packed with insights into authors from Tocqueville to Cadwell Turnbull, Johan Huizinga to Mariame Kaba, Allen Ginsberg to Lani Grenier. If you weren’t aware of the “Californian ideology,” he’s got a great analysis of where it came from how it (still) works.The main thrust of the book is his timely reflections on the very tricky business of designing democratic spaces—i.e., the organizations and groups most of us inhabit most of the time. The critical thing is to design them so that they’re truly democratic, not just more instances of what Schneider calls the “implicit feudalism” of most digital life. Mentioned in our conversation, two earlier books by Nathan:* Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the