Session: Closing Keynote: Eli Pariser
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/keynote-eli-pariserNaam/name Notulist: Sylke van DuijnenDatum/date: 28-06-2023 15:00Sprekersnamen/speaker names:
Shownotes
(mentioned links, books, podcasts, literature, etc.)Live notes (500-750 words)
Please use full sentences and write in the spoken language of the session / Graag volledige zinnen gebruiken en de taal aanhouden van de sessieThe future of digital spaces and democracy.
Lately, there is drama and discontent around power in moderation and stewardship on the internet.
Attention goes to the questions: who holds the power and how should power be shaped/distributed?
To be a Reddit moderator is to work in the digital trenches for free. But it is also about Political Economy.
What is the kind of politics and what is the kind of economy that we want underlying our digital spaces?
Public spaces are important for democracy, because that is where people have 'democratic' experiences.
In the US, but also in Europe, the democratic foundation of formal government and laws, has eroded in the last 50 years. People need to feel a sense of influence and agency, especially when we are moving through a time of rapid change. Otherwise they become vulnerable to authoritarianism.
How can we have our 'democratic' experiences in digital public spaces?
What Public Spaces do best is that they call out our 'citizen' role. When you walk into a library, school or park, you behave differently than when you walk into a mall (role: consumer). Public spaces build citizenship. Public spaces help communities see and shape themselves. They solve people's problems and they solve them joyfully.
The problem of centralisation: Twitter as 'THE town square', but there is no such thing as a global town square. Public spaces are not universal, we need a world where there are a lot of different ones.
How do we bring people in not through a sense of duty but through a sense of joy?
Example: Central Park NY, and generally urban planning, as they think about how to bring strangers together in shared space. There is a gradient from private to public when thinking about spaces in a city. We are starting to be more sophisticated when we think about publicness and the degree of open- or closedness, i.e. PubHubs.
What makes an effective public space?
A suitable built environment - programming - and ownership (people who feel they have a stake).
Translated to the online world: Code & Design - Program - Moderators. Most attention goes to the first.
Three methods of moderation (based on paper by Sarah Gilbert):
-Top-down (empire model), doesn't work because you can't run everything through HQ.
-Community moderation has different shapes:
- - (landed gentry), for example a Mastodon server, this is basically digital feudalism. While decentralised systems are great, they lack some transparency as to what political system you are signing up for.
- - Platform populism isn't actually democratic;
- - Vigilante justice; where a group of similar people takes up a role: similar to Neighbourhood Watch;
-Intersectional moderation: vision and aspiration of democratic moderation.
- Democratic processes are messy and complicated and not as easy as autocracy. What democracy looks like when it is working well is normalcy and some friction when we discuss new ideas.
Moving beyond 'moderation' as a frame towards stewardship. Stewardship is fundamentally sociotechnical.
The tools we have available for moderation online, shapes how people view the role of moderation/stewardship.
The kinds of tools that have been offered call in a certain group of people to be the moderators.
What would it look like to create proactive tools that people need to do good stewardship online and make it thankful.
Well managed and heterogenous (and high access) spaces are critical for a healthy society, but unlikely to be developed by entrepreneurs/investors
Two promising pathways:
1. build open, customisable infrastructures for public spaces
2. support and enable democratic, intersectional stewardship
How can we build digital public spaces people can use at scale?
Build around real needs that are unmet by market forces.
Make the product design attractive and delighful
Leverage growth hacking and community organising strategies
Build partnerships with established public services
Scale horizontally, not vertically (replicable templates)
Why Eli feels hopeful?
Elinor Ostrom and her research into commons management (rebuking the Tragedy of the Commons). Commons management can be (and has been) done well, under a certain set of conditions. There is no cure-all that works for everything. There are some principles we can build on and from there we devolve power to communities.
I care a lot about living in a society where people have different opinions, but work together well.
However, we need to move beyond making just incremental reforms to our existing political structures. they weren't designed for multicultural power-sharing, or modern communication technologies.
We are in a Goldilocks zone for digital public spaces, enough people have enough at stake that they are willing to think about power, governance and stewardship online, while at the same time there is still room for failure.
Then we can also bring back the structures that work online back to our offline public spaces as well.
Question: do you feel like a jazz musician, as in receiving appreciation in Europe and not in the US? Not exactly, because I can also have good conversations about some of these topics with people in the United States.
Question: Should we at Public Spaces focus more on offline spaces as well? A: Let's not forget about the democratic experiences and lessons learned in the past in shaping offline public spaces?
Question: is this a fight that will last forever? A: I don't think it has to be a fight, but it will be a constant development. However, at certain points we also lock in on some institutional templates and have powerful moments of scaling up. What's important, is to build infrastructures that balance usability and customisation.
Question: Ostrom makes a distinction between public goods and common goods, for what kind of problems/situations do you think commons governance is best and what problems need to have public regulation? A: Ostrom was a proponent of polycentric governance and I think this resonates with the society we live in. I want to push against the need to scale and centralise every solution. You are pushing against the need to decentralise everything and I think we can meet somewhere in the middle.
Question: something about governance and feedback loops. A: some governance systems need to be set up beforehand, but at the same time can be responsive to the needs of the users/community.
Question: how do we get to a point where we can accept that there are messy processes and have joy?
They co-exist, but there is also a level of skill to be gained, and attention to aesthetics, and programming.
What works in public space is art, or a festival, or sports facilities. And it does not always have to be contentious, We can soften our intention with public spaces where they dont always have to be a debate forum.
Question: how do you think we can enlarge the awareness between public and private? How can we call on co-responsible citizenship? A; there is increasing realisation that a public space is not public if a billionaire can come along and ruin it (i.e. Elon Musk buying Twitter). Spaces where people have democratic experiences are not always fully public. There is not really one good definition of public space, but rather a cluster of questions/conditions that govern what publicness is. There is a lot to be gained by building citizenship in quasi-public spaces that then can be brought into or help to shape fully public space.
