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.

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.

This month I have a new title—I’m an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, on tenure track. It’s not fully clear to me how this departure from the precariat happened, except that it involved a move across the country with my family, astonishingly supportive colleagues, patient students, and an opportunity to do some good that I hope I can live up to.

All this has gotten me reading about the origins of universities in self-governing medieval guilds and remembering my grandfathers—one a state-university professor and one who never made it to college because of a hail storm.

I wrote about them in America.

“a better internet is possible”

The enemy isn’t supposed to be this nice, but somehow Wired magazine chose Ours to Hack and to Own, the book I co-edited with Trebor Scholz, as one of the “best tech books of 2017.”

Buy it in bitcoin or dollars from OR Books.

I’ve also been getting kind of worked up lately about the potential for co-op and municipal broadband, especially in the wake of the FCC net neutrality decision. I’ve been writing on this for Quartz and The Guardian, and my congressman, Rep. Jared Polis, had me on a webinar to discuss it. Scientific American quoted me on the subject, too.

More to come. I’m currently (or currently should be) hard at work on edits for my next book, which will be out in time for Co-op Month from Nation Books.

Works not cited

Back in 1895, Hastings Randall was worrying about a lot of what university people today worry about when he wrote his hefty history of the medieval university.

Johann Hari thinks that worker co-ops might be at least as effective against depression as meds.

Kaya Oakes writes beautifully about middle age and the medieval women helping her embrace it.

Harvard says it so it must be true: community broadband is better.

I’ve been hearing from Kiera Feldman for years about her reporting among trash collectors, but what she published in ProPublica blew me (and lots of other people) away.

My kid isn’t that into Matt de la Pe?a’s Love, but I am.

Stops

• 2018.02.17: Denver, CO – ETHDenver panel on the crypto-economy
• 2018.02.23: Logan, UT – Talks on platform cooperativism and open research at Utah State University
• 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – Platform cooperativism discussion at Harvard Law School
• 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – Mount Holyoke College
• 2018.03.10: Austin, TX – “Platform Co-Ops: Competitive Edge, Social Purpose” at South by Southwest
• 2018.04.14: East Lansing, MI – MSU Student Housing Cooperative

If you can come to just one part of it, come to our free, open-to-the-public Friday night event, “What Happened to the Future,” at 7 p.m. on November 10. It will include:

• Alicia Garza, founder of #BlackLivesMatter
• Yochai Benkler, Harvard University
• Alicia Wong, Roosevelt Institute
• Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
  

Learn about the Friday event here, and register for the full conference here. A million thanks to my co-organizers, Camille Kerr, Trebor Scholz, and Palak Shah.

Study and hone

I’m now in my third year of helping to create CU Boulder’s MA in Media and Public Engagement. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because of the busyness of doing it, but now I feel like I should. My colleagues and I have worked hard to create a space where creators of diverse backgrounds can come and study together the crafts of media and social change—activists, social entrepreneurs, narrative hackers, solutions journalists, future academics who want to get their hands dirty, and more.

Maybe this is something you need. Maybe it’s something your community needs. We need you.

Please consider sharing this program with anyone you think might be interested. Let me know if you have questions. The application deadline for this year is January 10. It’s a lot of time and it isn’t.

Bibliography

This fantastic story of a weekend inside a black women’s secret society is just scratching the surface of the much, much bigger story Jessica Gordon Nembhard tells (h/t Phil Klay).

My Study Circle teammate Caroline Savery just published an epic on the Trumpocalypse via the young platform co-op Cosmos.

Bourdieu is useful for analyzing online reputation systems.

This is one of the better Zuckerberg think-pieces lately, but this one takes us to some solutions.

Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is helping me sleep.

Travels

• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. John’s University
• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. Joseph’s College
• 2017.11.10-11: New York, NY – The People’s Disruption #platformcoop conference at The New School
• 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – Platform cooperativism discussion at Harvard Law School
• 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – Mount Holyoke College
• 2018.03.10: East Lansing, MI – MSU Student Housing Cooperative

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

Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become the latest outgrowth of the platform co-op movement that’s the subject of my new book with Trebor Scholz (and 60+ contributors), Ours to Hack and to Own, available for preorder from OR Books.

Articles

• As an editorial for the current issue of The Nation, I’ve proposed that platform cooperativism is on the rise, backing the claim up with the stories of two very different platform co-ops: Stocksy United and Green Taxi.
• Want to learn about economic democracy in business school? Good luck. In The Chronicle of Higher Education (available here for a month before getting paywalled), I consider how and why it’s virtually impossible to study this sizeable chunk of the economy in the United States.
• In addition to the stuff I wrote, I’m featured in two recent articles in Shareable —one on art co-ops and one on gig economies—plus an interview with Grand Rapids community radio and a report that includes my agitating around platform co-ops in Australia over the summer.

Speaking

• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.11.17: Denver, CO – “How Platform Co-ops Can Take Community Wealth Building Online“
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Okay, that’s it. Take heart!

Order your copy today!

Momentum is building. Just last week, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a manifesto that explicitly calls for creating platform co-ops. We hope that this book will help show that online democracy is both a live option and a moral necessity.

Cooperative advantages

I’ve been continuing to follow a bunch of different leads along the cutting edge of economic democracy. In The Nation this week, read about Denver’s 800-driver taxi cooperative vying to turn Uber’s disruption into a push for worker ownership. If they keep

Meanwhile, in the September issue of Vice, I return as economics columnist with a report on Enspiral, a remarkable co-working network based in Wellington, New Zealand, which shows how trust can become not only a cooperative advantage, but a competitive one. If you missed it, also, I recently reported for Vice about the latest on ColoradoCare, the controversial ballot proposal poised to bring cooperative, universal medical coverage to all the state’s residents—now, with the help of Bernie Sanders.

Utterances

Upcoming talks and trips:

• 2016.09.29: Alma, MI – Alma College
• 2016.09.30: Grand Rapids, MI – Aquinas College
• 2016.10.06: Omaha, NE – IGNITE at Creighton University
• 2016.10.12: Quebec, Canada – Collaborative economy session at the International Summit of Cooperatives
• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.12.08-09: Cambridge, MA – Harvard Religious Literacy and Journalism Symposium
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Un-branding

You might have noticed that I’m writing from a different email address. Over the past few months I’ve pivoted from a public self-presentation heavily weighed toward modes of transportation: nathanairplane, The Row Boat, etc. As much as I enjoy transportation, I’ve decided to reorient my self-presentation around the name my parents gave me when I was born. So now this is where you can find me and my stuff:

• Website: www.lelandquarterly.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Social media: @ntnsndr

And watch out, because I’m still playing around in various ways, like for instance with a shorter form of the URL; both https://ntnsndr.in and [email protected] work right now but we’ll see if it really seems worth keeping. In the meantime, see y’all there!

Colorado could be on the brink of embracing universal medical coverage. Thanks to an effort in recent months led by a band of doctors and volunteers, a proposal called ColoradoCare is going to be on the ballot, which, if passed, would create a quasi-cooperative healthcare system for everyone in the state. In an article for Vice, I introduce some of the people behind the effort, as well as their delectably Koch-backed detractors.

Meanwhile, a group of Oregonians wants to put a price on carbon and distribute the proceeds to everyone. In YES! Magazine, I interview Camila Thorndike of Oregon Climate, who is leading the effort. As the COP21 talks wind down and Finland considers a basic income policy, the moment seems especially ripe for such adventuresome thinking.

For more on ColoradoCare, too, see my earlier interview in YES! with its chief architect, Irene Aguilar, a physician and state senator.

Platform Cooperativism

Last month, together with Trebor Scholz of the New School, I co-organized a two-day event called “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy.” More than a thousand people from around the world came to help build a new breed of online platforms, with shared ownership and governance baked in—a real sharing economy. To learn more, read our manifestos at Fast Company, The Next System Project, and Pacific Standard. Relatedly, also, in The New Yorker, I reported on a new cooperative, co-working “guild” in New York that sets out to practice “slow entrepreneurship.”

Now, back in Colorado, I’m working with a fearsome team of visionaries and cooperators to strengthen the cooperative ecosystem here. More TK.

#OpenTheseDoors

It’s Advent. As I wrote in my last column for America, the Mother of God is very pregnant right now. It was surprising how many fellow Catholics, who have no trouble contemplating the wounds of Christ-crucified, squirmed at reading about Mary’s stretching skin and discomfort. But whatever. This season is a great time to join the struggle to ensure necessities like paid family leave and access to the means for a safe, minimally invasive birth.

Last week, also, Pope Francis proclaimed a Jubilee of Mercy by opening the Holy Doors of St. Peter’s in Rome. In New York, some friends of mine took the occasion to call for the archdiocese to “Open These Doors” of its shuttered buildings for the city’s tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness. Take part in their Advent calendar here, and read my interview with them at America, as well as Kaya Oakes’ report for Religion Dispatches.

Have a happy new year!