@Di4na

So true. I love this quote!

I especially appreciate this in light of @robin's account of web browser financing as a tax on search: darobin.github.io/wise/

We need economy to reflect ontology.

Web Infrastructure Search Endowment (WISE)

Standardizing browser & search public infrastructure.

^{darobin.github.io}

Thanks so much for reviewing this! Yes, I do think I could have worked to make that case a bit more. I own up to that failure a little in the intro. And there's some on "play" at the end of chapter 3.

I do think democracy can be joyful sometimes, but I don't think it needs to be all the time. A recent project of mine has been to argue for right-sizing the expectations it places on us.

For instance, I'm glad not to be involved at all in the democracy of my credit union. I don't have financial skills and don't really want to gain them. But I am grateful it has democratic structures should we need them.

There are other democratic orgs I have chosen to be more actively involved in—some because they are fun, others because they are important, usually a mix of both.

We don't ask authoritarianism to be fun all the time. Democracy shouldn't have to be either.

that makes sense that we don't always have to participate in democratic processes even when have the option, but i think that undercuts the tocquevillian argument i think you are making.

don't we actually have to participate in group decision making in order to learn the skills and habits that will support larger democracy?

you are right that i place to much emphasis on "fun", but i do think there needs to be other benefits of democracy besides a richer set of options in a crisis.

I think it is about having a balanced topology of options.

In many cases, orgs would be operating reasonably accountably to us, and we can mostly ignore them. Highly interested members engage, but most others don't. But the option is always there, in the case of crisis, for more members to exercise their rights.

To exercise those rights well, it helps to be practicing democracy more actively elsewhere.

In other cases, orgs are designed around higher-touch self-governance, perhaps because the governance is designed to be fun or because most members are very interested in its decisions.

For me, my Mastodon instance Social.coop is one of the latter. I engage heavily in governance there because of both the fun and the sensitivity I have to its decision-making.

And of course there should be a wide spectrum in between. Presumably most orgs should be relatively low-touch for most members.

Through this kind of topology, it is possible to get the best of all worlds:

- The daily "schools of democracy" in high-touch governance experiments
- The passive participation but option for engagement in low-touch orgs
- The ability to experience accountability across lots of orgs while reducing one's participation demands to what feels fun and/or important

I think what I'm saying is "high-engagement is necessary to teach us to be democrats" in *some organizations*, *some of the time*.

But yeah, every organization should have to design its governance to engage the people who most need to participate in it. That's not a tall order. That's what corporations and nonprofits and governments have to do today.

The difference is more about changing who the orgs are accountable. But when that happens, of course, it changes the *how* in all kinds of fun ways.

E.g., the annual meeting of a rural electric co-op is very different from that of a publicly traded accounting firm.