Tech Economics & Governance Reading Group

Ryan and I (and sometimes Kassandra) have been meeting regularly to read and discuss around a set of themes connected to digital tech governance, politics, and economics with a bent towards cooperative/democratic/public interest/pluralistic/progressive themes. I’m hoping to write up some of my notes on these discussions, but for now I’d like to just keep tabs on some of our reading and plans. 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.

Some other things that are on our radar:

• Political Theory of the Digital Age by Risse
• The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by Golumbia
• Various work by Audrey Tang, including the plurality book.
• 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.
• The Descent of Icarus by Ezrahi is something I want to re-read in more depth.
• Metagov projects.
• Zuckerman’s writing on Digital Public Infrastructure (for example)
• More on collective intelligence
• In general, want to strengthen my foundations in political and democratic theory.

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).

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