Once upon a time, tech platforms were the thing upon which politics happened. They were the stages, the soapboxes, the ad markets, the open field for whatever users brought. They have always played host to politics. But with the second election of Donald Trump, the relationship has entered a new phase. The figure of the politician is converging with that of the server admin.

The server is the basic unit of power on the internet. The earliest “sysadmins” were the people who ran bulletin-board systems on their handmade computers, starting in the late 1970s, well before the internet itself was publicly available. Running these online communities in their homes, connected to local users by phone lines, the admins treated their users like houseguests. And like good hosts, the admins were in charge. They were the arbiters of what was acceptable and not, and they had the power to enforce their rules. If you didn’t like the rules, you could leave and go somewhere else.

Over time, these servers became more sophisticated. The norms of the early admins became hard-coded into the software and culture of social media. The result is a regime that still reigns. In my book Governable Spaces I call this regime “implicit feudalism.” Just as “feudalism” was a later caricature for what the complex governance of the Middle Ages never was, this was a caricature of how to run a healthy community. All power resides with the server admin and whomever else they designate. Communities exist as distinct fiefdoms, under the absolute rule of their local admins. The punishment for anything is censorship and exile. Some admins have adopted the only-sort-of-joking title “benevolent dictator for life.”

As social media moved from bedrooms to data centers, the norm of implicit feudalism didn’t go away. It merged with the “Californian ideology” of 1990s Silicon Valley, a belief that technology could serve as a replacement for the inconveniences of politics. In lieu of the messy elections, boards, and bylaws of offline organizations, online communities have relied almost entirely on their software-supported admins. This is true at the level of corporate CEOs as much as for the Steve Kornacki Fan Club Facebook page.

Platforms have always been political—whether you consider the many underground, gay-friendly servers in the early bulletin-board days or Google’s close ties to the Obama administration. But politics and platform administration have still seemed like two different things.

That changed when Donald Trump rose to the top of the GOP ticket—not by holding a succession of lower offices, and winning over party leaders, but by tweeting. He wasn’t an admin (yet), but he realized that platform power could short-circuit party power.

As his first term wound down, the QAnon movement stoked conspiracies among his supporters thanks to the prophecies posted by the admin of the anonymous platform where they appeared. He was apparently in touch with the White House. Admin power and political power were converging.

It was only fitting that, after leaving office, Donald Trump turned his attention not to a presidential library but to a platform. He became the major owner and user-in-chief of Truth Social, a Twitter clone built for the MAGA faithful. Then, in 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X. Soon it became clear that his intent was not to run a money-making business but to promote his politics, which more and more converged with Trumpism. The Trump family, meanwhile, has announced World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform for them to admin.

The eminent philosopher of admin-ism is Curtis Yarvin, a entrepreneur-influencer who makes implicit feudalism explicit: Since CEOs and benevolent dictators seem to work pretty well online, why not just put one on charge of the government? This kind of admin monarchism seems finally in reach thanks to Trump’s government-wide victory. But it has been a long time coming.

We have been practicing for this in our daily deference to admins online, and in being admins ourselves. To accept the regime of the admin means trading democratic norms for software-aided autocracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed when he wrote home to France about the United States in the 1830s, the health of democracy at large scales depends on using it at small scales, too. As much as any constitution or court, the best safeguard against tyranny is infusing democracy into everyday life.

More recently, the activist-philosopher adrienne maree brown put the point this way: “Until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.” For many of us, the closest thing we have to the local are the online spaces we share.

Given the choice between defending a broken democracy and electing an admin, American voters chose the admin. But unlike in an online community, if the admin of a country doesn’t suit us, we can’t just click away to a different one.

It has long been common practice to worry about “campaign finance.” But even since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision further unleashed dark money, that kind of finance was relatively straightforward: contributions to support the costs of campaigning. But something different is happening here: campaign financialization. The election is becoming swallowed into a far more bewildering mix of speculative financial instruments. Their purpose is not simply to funnel money into campaigning but to turn campaigns and politics into a mere asset class.

This election season, we’re not just watching the speeches, ad buys, and polls. Election junkies are also paying attention to the bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based betting platform that counts Trump donor Peter Thiel as a major investor. They are following the temperamental swings of Trump Media & Technology Group stock—the holding company for the former president’s Truth Social platform. They may even be following the prices of Trump-branded sneakers, bibles, and NFTs. Trump’s family now has its own “decentralized finance” platform in the works, World Liberty Financial, turning them from mere market participants to market-makers.

Something is also changing with the practice of polling and organizing. Partisan polls are aiming less to produce truthful assessments of the electorate than headlines that will seed future declines in institutional trust. Trump-aligned mobilization efforts seem less focused on getting out the vote than producing expectations about what should happen that could set the stage for delegitimizing a loss. Those predictions have the power to remake reality.

We already know how financialization turns human lives into data points and game pieces. This is how Wall Street’s inventiveness meant millions of people losing their homes in the 2008 financial crisis. This is how pandemic-era shortages made the richest billionaires richer.

Watching the lead-up to the election has left me with a case of deja vu. For the past decade, I have been studying the development of governance practices in the realm of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. There, the reigning political ideology goes by the name of “cryptoeconomics”: the belief that a combination of digital cryptography and economic incentives can produce more trustworthy institutions than relying on human judgment or political ideology. Through ever more intricate financial techniques, carried out across unregulated digital networks, self-interested speculators are supposed to produce worthwhile public goods. As a common slogan in this subculture goes, “The casino bootstraps the infra[structure].”

This is not such a new idea, really. Back in the 1990s, a pair of Brits diagnosed the strange “Californian ideology” coming out of Silicon Valley, which sought to discard the messiness of partisan politics with the alleged efficiency of technology and markets. But even while many Big Tech companies have finally invested heavily in Washington politicking, blockchains have given the Californian ideology a new lease on life.

Using cryptoeconomics, people have designed a mirror world of institutions based on cryptoeconomics in place of professionalism, democracy, or mutual trust. Blockchain-based organizations use tradeable tokens to vote on decisions large and small—relying on economics, not legal enforcement, to orchestrate decision making. Blockchain-based courts attempt to resolve disputes with juries who act not out of public duty or virtue but out of economic self-interest. The same logic of a prediction market like Polymarket is used throughout these systems. Betting on future outcomes, and shaping those outcomes through betting, is the replacement for good citizenship.

I have been fascinated by these experiments, and I came to be convinces that they have some virtues. Cryptoeconomics has produced innovative new methods for voting and forming Internet-native organizations. Some of these techniques could contribute to making future institutions more accountable, responsive, and trustworthy. Prediction markets, properly designed, could help produce better policy by focusing decisions more on evidence than ideology. But soon I began warning the crypto community that relying too much on cryptoeconomics presented a profound danger to good governance, limiting the scope of people’s motivation and enabling a race to the bottom. One of the leading acolytes of cryptoeconomics, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, came around and agreed.

This is because, over the years, the perils of financialization have played out in practice in crypto-world. The ecosystem is full of startups peddling complex financial tricks, but very little gets invested in solving real problems for people outside of finance. I have known a lot of well-meaning people in the blockchain community who genuinely want and work toward the common good. But they get drowned out by the speculators. Many retail participants who were sold on the idea of decentralization and economic freedom got burned by scams and grift.

The past decade of financialization in crypto has lessons for the prospect of campaign financialization in politics. When you put speculation in charge, it consumes all other interests. There is no invisible hand that makes it work toward the common good—at least not without strong regulation to set rules and goals. The more you let financialization run amok, the more you end up with a nihilistic culture that values nothing more than the next chance for a bit of upside.

Among all the risks that this election poses to democracy, the slide into financialization seems to be creeping in undetected. In some respects it is ancient; speculation on the future has long been part of political life, going back to ancient Chinese divination with bones and the oracle of Delphi in Greece. But digital networks and financial techniques run the risk of supercharging this old temptation, to the point of washing away what is left of democracy.

In an article such as this, it would be customary at this point to suggest reforms to correct for the situation I have identified. But given the unwillingness of the political class to equip itself for even the last war of campaign finance, I have little confidence that such suggestions would do much good.

From what I can tell, however, only one side in this election has massively invested in campaign financialization. The other seems to be clinging to the notion that politics is still about campaigning, persuasion, and identifying a shared sense of the common good. When political discourse is just an asset class, it becomes easier for wealthy, charismatic figures to accumulate it for themselves. A vote for Donald Trump, among other things, is a vote for the speculative casino as the engine of our political future.

Minus the drones and shady foreigners, that was what happened on December 30 in Boulder County, where I live. I drove my family the long way home around the smoke, rushing from an aborted vacation to gather some things in case the hurricane-force winds turned the fires northward. We meanwhile checked with friends in the evacuation zones, and some would lose everything. From the air or the ground, the scene looked like what we habitually see from abroad: a burning warzone, a dense cityscape dotted with infernos.

The morning after, when the governor and other officials spoke, they danced around the causes. Maybe it was a power line downed by the wind, but they won’t rule anything out. They noted the so-far snowless winter. Wind, dryness, tragedy. Of course, they thanked the first responders. (Seriously, thank you.) But the politicians studiously avoided what might seem like “politicizing” the situation. It’s too early.

What if the drone part were real, though? Would there be any hesitation in saying that we know who is responsible, and we will act, and they will pay? To not name the cause in that situation would be an insult to the innocents who suffered.

The past months have been terrifying to anyone paying attention here. No snow. This is Colorado. Snow normally starts in October. It has been sweater weather since the slow end of summer. The reservoirs have been drying up. More glaciers melted. Pleasant, really, but wrong. It is, simply and precisely, what scientists have warned for decades would happen because of human-induced climate change. That, more than any downed power line or stray spark or arson, is what caused fires to tear through a heavily populated suburb on Thursday. The important cause is clear.

My neighbors lost homes, as so many millions of climate refugees worldwide have before, because our political and economic institutions have failed to respond to a crisis they have long known was coming. Just this month, again, Congress failed to pass even an inadequate piece of climate legislation. Real conspiracies of powerful people exist to ensure inaction persists, because it is profitable. Some are even foreign, though the greatest failure of leadership is right here in the United States. Our democracy, such as it is, has failed this most basic test. That is why Boulder County, along with so many other homes in so many places, burned: the refusal to care for our common home.

Why can’t we name the cause? It is always harder when the cause is partly us. Really, it is mostly not us; most Americans would love to see strong climate action. The challenge, though, is metaphysical as well as political.

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle famously describes “four causes”—four different, often simultaneous, ways of understanding what makes things happen. The easiest kind to grasp is the “efficient” cause: the drone pilots, willfully dropping bombs. But no less relevant are the other kinds. The pilots’ ultimate, conspiratorial objective is the “final” cause; the plan the pilots followed is the “formal” cause; the napalm in the bombs is the “material” cause.

Some causes are more responsible than others. Few will blame the napalm more than the people who used it. The plan on a piece of paper can’t be blamed. The participants’ eventual objective may even seem noble, even if the tactics are repugnant.

In Colorado, what is speakable today is the material cause (the wind and kindling); perhaps, they say, there is an efficient cause (some arsonist), but likely not. Neither of these are as important as the formal and final causes: the changing climate and the economic order that our institutions have privileged above stewardship. Without those causes, a fire like this would be far, far less likely to occur. In their politic, not-finger-pointy sort of way, the authorities say this already:

Why would we so unhesitatingly point fingers at the foreign drones but not at the agents of climate change? Why is it too early to say what must be said? The most important facts in this case are already on hand. There should be no hesitation.

The fires still smoldering in my community are the result of an attack. The causes are human, regardless of how the first spark lit. They must be named and confronted, if we are ever to have a democracy capable of meeting its most basic responsibilities of protection and accountability. As January 6 approaches again, we’ll see a lot about that kind of threat to democracy. But December 30 insists that democracy as we know it has failed already and did so long before the mob.

Surely no oil executive or corrupt politician outright wanted to burn my county. I can only hope they are saddened like the rest of us. But it is not playing politics to recognize that causes are still causes even when they are not caused in that specific way. We already know the cause that matters.

Having gotten to know the city staff members involved in this effort, I’ve been very impressed with the rigor and thoughtfulness that has gone into the process. Boulder will most likely not be in a position to deliver fiber-to-the-home without a municipal energy utility, but I think starting now with a backbone buildout would create the following opportunities:

+ Faster, more affordable service. Over and over around the country, we see that the large ISPs will not provide fast, affordable service without being somehow compelled to do so. A city-operated backbone could enable new competitors to enter the market and raise the bar for all. This will help strengthen our already vibrant tech business community and benefit consumers.

+ Opportunities for serving the underserved. Troubling, often disguised inequalities plague the country’s connectivity map, and Boulder is no exception. We already have good evidence that lower-income neighborhoods receive far poorer access opportunities than others. Recognizing this, the school district has been developing programs to use civic networks to serve underserved students. Expanding the city’s backbone would allow us to extend such services and ensure that all of our neighbors have affordable connectivity. We can show other communities what it looks like to treat internet access as the essential infrastructure that it is.

+ Leverage for fairness and neutrality. Today, as I write, net neutrality has officially been repealed on the national level. This is a development that could change the meaning of internet access in fundamental ways. It’s now up to local jurisdictions to protect their citizens’s rights of speech and access. Here, again, Boulder can be a leader. A city-owned backbone network could give the city leverage to negotiate arrangements with ISPs that ensure we are a net neutrality zone. This is an issue of concern to many people in town, and while it could be a difficult fight, it would be a fight your constituents would surely support.

In a sense, it is fitting that your decision to proceed with the broadband expansion comes the day after our federal government significantly relinquishes its regulatory powers over internet service. Tomorrow, we have the opportunity to step up and fill the void. Thank you for your consideration and your attention to this important matter.

The big oil and electric companies are largely unaccountable to the communities they power and pollute. But the U.S. power grid has other kinds of companies, too. Seventy-five percent of the landmass of the country gets electricity from electric cooperatives—a wildly successful New Deal program, long maligned as communist, and now little-remembered, even by its members. These co-ops’ lobby just fought hard to end the Clean Power Plan and elect Donald Trump, but they might also become the cutting edge for a renewable-energy future.

This week in The Nation I report on the contradictory state of electric co-ops, from the promise of distributed, local generation to some of their members’ uphill battle for racial justice.

I hope you’ll consider helping to share this story, for instance by retweeting this, retooting this (if you’re in the fediverse), and liking or sharing this on Facebook.

The future of Twitter

At their annual meeting on May 22, Twitter’s shareholders will be voting on a proposal to consider options for converting the company to some form of democratic user ownership. The proposal is an outgrowth of organizing that began with an article of mine in The Guardian last September, along with the brilliant, determined organizing of friends like Danny Spitzberg and Maira Sutton. With just two weeks to go, we’re doing all we can to spread the idea and persuade shareholders. Read more about us in places like Recode, Vanity Fair, and the Financial Times.

We need your help. Tweet your vision for the future of Twitter and sign our petition today. Or simply retweet this.

If you think the idea is crazy or impossible, tell that to the Associated Press.

More cooperative futures

If you’re not watching Jackson, Mississippi, you should be. In 2015 I went there to report on the life of Chokwe Lumumba, the black-nationalist mayor who died suddenly after just a few months in office. But now his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has just won the Democratic nomination, all but clinching the next election. Antar is riding the same platform of cooperative enterprise and local economy that brought his father to office. We have a new rebel city.

And more. In my first article for Quartz, I wrote about why tech startups need new business models, and how we can build them.

Finally, through the delightful Colorado Co-ops Study Circle, I’m co-hosting a new, monthly community radio show, the Co-op Power Hour. Subscribe to our feed and listen up for shows on Black Lives Matter, co-op education, business conversions, and more.

Near and far

• 2017.05.16: Washington, DC – Community Purchasing Alliance annual meeting address
• 2017.05.18: Boulder, CO – “Startup.coop” session at Boulder Startup Week
• 2017.07.19: Denver, CO – Keynote address at the Association of Cooperative Educators (ACE) Institute at Regis University
• 2017.07.17: Bologna, Italy – “An Internet of Ownership” at the University of Bologna
• 2017.06.09: Padua, Italy – Panelist at Pathways to a Cooperative Market Economy

The book is available now from OR Books, a fine publisher whose model bypasses Amazon’s monopolistic stranglehold on the industry. If you buy books, buy it direct. If you review books—for your blog, Goodreads, The New York Times, whatever—please consider reviewing it (email me for a review copy). If you tweet, retweet my pinned tweet about it. The success of the book and the movement it represents depend on your support.

More radio to come! The Colorado Co-ops Study Circle that I co-founded will begin our monthly radio show, The Co-op Power Hour on KGNU, a Denver-Boulder community radio station.

Anarchy Under Trump

We all have thoughts and feelings about things these days. I made a suggestion in YES! Magazine for how Trump’s infrastructure plan might benefit someone other than the rich. But then I tanked my chances for a place in the new administration by defending the anarchists who protested his inauguration in America. Besides, I’m not enough of an elite-insider for his taste.

Anyway, as the Financial Times reports, we’re one step closer to buying and cooperativizing Twitter out from under him.

Want more anarchy? I once wrote a book on it, plus the intro to Noam Chomsky’s collection on the subject.

Roadshow

• 2017.02.23: Denver, CO – “Social Worship,” Regis University
• 2017.03.09: Online – Transform Finance webinar on platform cooperativism
• 2017.03.15: Madison, WI – “An Internet of Ownership” lecture
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Read the article in The New Republic here. To help spread the word about it, retweet this, share or like this, and upvote this.

Has the Time Come for Universal Basic Income?

Across the political spectrum, the idea of a no-questions-asked payout for everyone is gaining momentum. I’ve written about how Silicon Valley is getting behind the concept as an antidote for what automation is doing to the job market. Libertarians want it as a replacement for means-tested welfare programs, while socialists see it as a step toward abolishing the wage system. It seems like a crazy, impossible idea, but it may not be for long.

On May 26 at Civic Hall in New York City, I’m going to be part of a discussion about the prospects of universal basic income with progressive entrepreneur and activist Peter Barnes. Barnes’ proposal for a “citizen’s dividend” based on carbon emissions is an ingenious way of both mitigating climate change and strengthening the economy. We’ll be joined by scholar and basic-income advocate Michael Lewis, as well as Institute for the Future fellow Natalie Foster. RSVP on Facebook and Eventbrite here.

To learn more about universal basic income, listen to recent podcasts on the subject from my friends at Belabored and Disorderly Conduct.

If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like?

Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just represent the future of work altogether. Now, still in hiding because of his heist, Duran is orchestrating his next utopia, a cryptocurrency-infused global financial system. In this month’s issue of VICE magazine, I go face-to-face with Duran and on a tour of his remarkable undertakings.

Read the article VICE‘s website or look through the print version. While you’re at it, retweet this.

In other news

I had a great time speaking about God in Proof at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada. I talked about cooperativism on Majority Report with Sam Seder and at Civic Hall with a panel of sagely organizers and thinkers. I upset some white people and prayed the Angelus.

Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why?

This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey with the Wisdom Hackers—a group of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and activists exploring elemental questions together. I traveled to Paris, Berlin, southern Italy, to Ecuador, and Silicon Valley, and wound up at a hacker congress in New York. This week, my chapter appears as part of our serial digital book. For just a few bucks, you can read my essay in your browser or in a dedicated app, along with Anna Stothard in defense of hoarding objects, Brett Scott on the creepy ecology of smart cities, Tom Kenning on festival temporality, Lee-Sean Huang on the thinking body, Alnoor Ladha on mystic anarchism, and our instigator Alexa Clay on being the Amish Futurist. And more.

Read a short teaser of my 7,000-word chapter, just published in Vice—”Our Generation of Hackers.” But don’t let that keep you long from subscribing to the book today. Spread the word about it if you can, too.

I’ll also be discussing my chapter on Twitter this Thursday morning at 8:30 am EST / 13:30 GMT (the Europeans set the time!). Join us on the hashtag #wisdomhackers.

Other odds and ends

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, I profiled Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian of struggles for shorter working hours and the dream of leisure. His latest book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, is a must-read (and would make a lovely holiday gift).

As part of ongoing reporting on efforts to build a more cooperative, just economy, I wrote in Al Jazeera America about a historic conference on the commons, and published columns in the Catholic weekly America on the commons and cooperatives—oh, and a guide to the recent election with Simone Weil.

My books on God and Occupy are also no less available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist?Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.

More at Al Jazeera America.