Tech Economics & Governance Reading Group

First posted: October 16, 2023.

Ryan and I (and sometimes including Kassandra, Jesse and others) have been meeting regularly to read and discuss around a set of themes connected to digital technology governance, politics, and economics with a bent towards cooperative/democratic/pluralistic themes. In this post, I will keep tabs on some of our reading; I’ll also keep a list of other things I find interesting on these themes.

Some reading we have worked through (to various extents) so far:

• Radical Markets by Weyl & Posner; especially chapters on Harberger taxes and quadratic voting.
• Governing the Commons by Ostrom.
• Code 2.0 by Lessig (Note I have some prior posts from an earlier reading on this site)
• Moloch Ventures whitepaper
• Two Cheers for Anarchism by James Scott. (My Notes)
• Ryan and I were in this IAP class at MIT on “Decentralized Society, Cooperation, and Plurality”, which fit in well with these themes. My notes on various readings from the course are here. Some key readings I will hope to think on more:
  • Decentralized Society paper from Ohlhaver, Weyl, & Buterin.
  • Toward a Connected Society from Allen.
  • On protocols and the Fediverse; on voting systems
• We discussed the recent Epic v. Google decision and related issues (w/Ryan and Jacob).
• The Public and Its Problems by John Dewey (w/ Ryan, Jesse, Jacob and Zach)
  • My notes here.

Some things that are currently in flight:

• Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by Weyl and Tang. (My ongoing notes).
  • This is now organized via Plurality Institute; if you’d like to join, sign up here!

Some other things that are on my radar on these themes:

• Various from Kropotokin, such as Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution and The Conquest of Bread.
• More Jane Jacobs – Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Death and Life and so on.
  • Wes suggested this new book on Jacobs work titled “A City Cannot be a Work of Art”, which is interesting to me.
• Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Acemoglu and Johnson.
• The Descent of Icarus by Ezrahi is something I want to re-read in more depth.
• Political Theory of the Digital Age by Risse
• Various from Danielle Allen including Justice by Means of Democracy.
• Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider
• The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by Golumbia
• Paul Gowder’s book and Elettra’s response
• Various recent work from Elettra (e.g. this)
• Blockchain Radicals by Davila; and other left-wing ideas about Blockchain
• Literature connected to the platform cooperativism movement
• Writing from the collective intelligence project including this paper.
• Metagov projects.
• Zuckerman’s writing on Digital Public Infrastructure (for example)
• More on collective intelligence
• More from Zoe Hitzig; especially her philosophy work.
• In general, want to strengthen my foundations in political and democratic theory.
• Lessons from web 3 white paper.
• Work from bridging systems
• The Narrow Corridor Acemoglu and Robinson.
• Other things from Vitalik like this and lots of other stuff on his blog and elsewhere. (for example, and also, and also; his writing on governance)
• I want to read more from Don Ihde, including Technology and the Lifeworld
• Zach suggested I read Arendt starting with the Human Condition.
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin; Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching (latter recommended by Audrey Tang); in general interested in understanding Daoist anarchism.
• More Jasanoff:
  • Technologies of Humility
  • Traveling Imaginaries of Innovation
  • Constitutional Moments
• Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice
• Various from David Graeber including The Dawn of Everything
• Marc Aidinoff’s work seems interesting – e.g. this piece on the “Jeffersonian Politics of a Decentralized Internet”.
• Democratizing Data: Discovering Data Use and Value for Research and Policy
• Data Feminism and Counting Feminicide.
• Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya by Nanjala Nyabola.
• Complexity and the Art of Public Policy
• Blockchain + Antitrust
• The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Manuel Castells.
• Platform Regulation Syllabus from Daphne Keller.
• The Politics of Platform Regulation - Robert Gorwa
• A Web of Our Own Making by Anton Barba-Kay

I will plan to keep updating this post as we make progress. If you have suggestions or are interested in reading/discussing on these themes as well, please reach out (fossj117 at gmail dot com).

Ryan and I are also interested in reading/thinking/building in a more applied vein on these themes, so that may be a direction going forward.