Reading Group Restart - Governable Spaces

dawn · May 7, 2025, 5:52am

Governable Spaces, Session 2

Hi all, pulling together some questions and scattered thoughts for our session tomorrow –

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2. Homesteading on a Superhighway: How the Politics of No-Politics Aided an Authoritarian Revival, Profile: A People’s History of Twitter

This chapter explores “homestead” as a cloistered place on the internet, does that match your (earlier) experiences online? Has it changed? When?
Are there other metaphors of the early internet that stand out to you?
The Californian ideology (a politics of no-politics, or a form of reactionary modernism that fuses parts of traditionally left and right political projects) was first developed in 1995, does it in some ways speak to our present? How so?
- Á la Adam Curtis: “The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”
What are the ways that you see your everyday experiences online reflected in larger political economic formations?
- Schneider uses the conceptul tools of fractals (adrienne marie down) and lattices (Agre) to connect the micro and the macro.

3. Democratic Mediums: Case Studies in Political Imagination, Profile: Excavations

Focuses on crypto economics and transformative justice / abolitionist thinkers to explore “remedies” to this moment. How do those two strains of thought hang together for you?
What do you think is key in the shift from scalability (the ability to expand without rethinking basic elements according to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing) to subsidiarity (a principles that prioritizes local control wherever possible within a larger system according to Schneider)?
… an attention to social trust and coordination mechanisms the key insight from cryptoeconomics as all the “actually existing crypto” plays out at odds with the stated goals of democratization.
… Huzinga on the need for play and crypto economics “LARPing” the future into the present.