Towards Governable Stacks

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

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)

[[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

[[Social provisioning]]

⥅ [[Towards_Governable_Stacks/2022-09-26_18-14-55_screenshot.png]]

• 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

current state of open source and FOSS communities

⥅ [[Towards_Governable_Stacks/2022-09-26_18-16-21_screenshot.png]]

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

the ethical challenge

⥅ [[Towards_Governable_Stacks/2022-09-26_18-18-21_screenshot.png]]

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

the economic challenge

(in social provisioning)

⥅ [[Towards_Governable_Stacks/2022-09-26_18-20-16_screenshot.png]]

• 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

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

govern across the stack

⥅ [[Towards_Governable_Stacks/2022-09-26_18-23-51_screenshot.png]]

• 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

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

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?