Too many of us think it doesn’t matter when a platform like X/Twitter has a single, all-powerful owner. Most of our online worlds are simply run by what we hope are benevolent dictators. After all, we figure, if we don’t like what they’re doing or allowing, we can just leave, right? But in most cases we’re just jumping from one rich dude’s idea for how the world should be to another rich dude’s idea for how the world should be.

And while governance is something I don’t like to think about (I’m sure the topic isn’t high on most of your favorite-things-to-figure-out-in-your-spare-time lists) it actually matters. The more easily we submit to the logic of dictatorial control in our online spaces, the more easily we come to accept it in real world civics and governance as well. And the more our social media spaces get confused with civic discourse, the more it matters.

Sussing all this out isn’t easy, but my long time friend and ally Nathan Schneider has the patience and fortitude most of us lack. He’s identified a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism’ - the bias to build our online and real communities as fiefdoms, and how this has made us more tolerant of similarly autocratic CEOs and politicians. He’s even optimistic and energetic enough to see how the blockchain could be employed to distribute governance in a more democratic fashion.

Here’s my conversation with Nathan Schneider, about his new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.

Douglas Rushkoff: The earliest bulletin board services I ever used were necessarily autocratic. The hardware dictated it: one kid owned the computer that we all dialed into. So he was in charge of what happened, by default.

Nathan Schneider: It’s amazing to hear those early testimonies of the people who are those sysadmins of the early systems. And because the thing is plugged into their wall, right? The computer everybody’s talking on is plugged into their wall. They are the host on a good day. You’re a visitor in their house. And this is the origin point of what I end up calling, to use a very ahistorical term, “implicit feudalism.” This idea that while calling ourselves democratic, we’re actually practicing what self-understood enlightenment, French people thought the Middle Ages did, which was this rigid, structured, hierarchical and antique way of organizing.

The Middle Ages were actually much more interesting than that but nevertheless, we end up with this system of a kind of astonishing rigidity where the admins and mods of an online space are essentially in absolute control and they exercise their power through censorship and exile. And we’ve ended up developing these by default and then adopting these practices into the design of online systems. Since then we’ve come to treat it as if this is okay. We have come to treat this kind of structure as if it’s normal and that there’s no other way we might organize.

Douglas Rushkoff: But it’s not necessarily all bad, right? First off, the kid who’s running the BBS, who’s the sysop, is probably someone who’s been teased and ostracized his whole life — and I’m saying him because they were almost all boys, except for Stacy Horn, who did it for EchoNYC, which was a very different kind of network — it was some poor little nerd kid who’s never been in charge of anything, and now it’s his.

Second, because they’re a lot of strangers, sometimes it was good to know who is in charge. If you’re going to a party your mom’s gonna say, “whose house is it? Whose parents are there? Who is that? That’s not a good kid. You’re not going to his house on Friday night.” You’re going and you know the behavior is going to be moderated.

I remember Howard Rheingold, one of the original virtual community pioneers, tried a bunch of things. Finally, Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms was his bulletin board. And he said, “look, this is my living room. If you do something I think is wrong, I’m kicking you out.”

Boom. And we all trusted Howard. He’s not going to kick you out if you’re trying to not be an asshole or if you’re an inadvertent asshole. But if you’re a dick he’s going to say goodbye. And that approach is not bad there, but maybe on Twitter, when it’s Elon Musk, having that feudal sysop control changes…

Nathan Schneider: It changes as soon as it no longer becomes a living room, right? As soon as it becomes something that starts to seem like a commons, something that people rely on. It’s the logic of a living room. You can always go to somebody else’s living room, but there are increasingly these online spaces are places that we don’t have the option to leave. We depend on them for our livelihood, for our ability to participate in what we need for our survival. They become places where we form peer-to-peer relationships — separate from the relationship with the admin — they become more than just a living room.

And at that point, that structure is really inadequate. But it’s been very hard to move out of that structure, in part because of culture. It does come to the question of, we didn’t think of it, right? That goes back to a famous essay by Jo Freeman about the social movements of the 60s, a tyranny of structurelessness. The way in which people with a certain kind of privilege often do have the tendency to not think about governance structure, just assuming everything will turn out okay because it will turn out okay for them because they get the power by default and other people are cut out and they don’t even have to think about that and notice that. And so it’s cultural on one side is this desire to say, “Oh, let’s have a world without politics. Let’s have a world in which like ideas flow freely and there’s a meritocracy of people and ideas that’ll work out great for us.” Jo Freeman back in the early-seventies pointed out, no, this actually doesn’t work great for a lot of us.

There are limitations that culture, but then it’s also a technical thing, independent of that culture. The structure of the early-internet, developed as a tool for research institutions, funded by the Pentagon to talk to each other, depended on this logic of servers. And servers are always plugged into somebody’s wall, and there’s always a kind of single point of failure, and there were a bunch of experiments in the early internet where people did try to do democratic decision making. I look, for instance, at LambdaMoo, this kind of crazy online game that had a famous case of virtual sexual assault and, The WELL is another case

I know a guy here in Colorado who ran a BBS network that was a kind of democracy and they actually voted him out. But by and large, what people discovered was, hey, wait a second, at the end of the day, I own the server. I can unplug it when I want. I have the legal liability for the server sitting in my house. I really need to have that control. And so all the technical systems were built to reinforce that idea that the norm should be one person or entity has absolute control. And this technical bias, plus the cultural bias, plus, then eventually, hey, we can make a lot of money off of this idea of central control over servers.