(Image — Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation)

By Rashid Owoyele (with love for the common good)

February 14, 2025 

Why the view of Big Tech on Governance Must Die

Commons are resources that are shared by groups of people, partially because they are hard to privatize, and partially because their shared nature creates the most value for the network of actors whose relationship to the resource is one of stewardship instead of stakeholder-ship. Stakeholders, depending on how they are classified, have rigid roles and unspoken rules that apply to their rights within a given system — institution, organization, urban or rural environment, etc. The shared governance of these systems requires some deeply researched qualities, thanks to the life-long commitment of the Ostroms, in particular, the Nobel Prize Winning Elinor Ostrom. Coincidentally, their Ostrom Workshop is situated in the state and university where I started my journey in higher learning — Indiana University (Bloomington, thought I studied at the Indianapolis Campus). 

This body of work on complex systems, game theory, organizational design, and other complex thematics ties together a really beautiful and optimistic view of the current moment. In 2025, we find ourselves in the Year of The Cooperative as declared by the UN General Assembly. We are at the start of an interesting shift where the establishment and global systems are in a state of disrepair, but our capacity for retiring these systems is growing stronger every single day. The urge to leave behind aspects of the reality we have constructed — around legacies of conquest, harm, and disregard through narratives of domination, supremacy, and entitlement — continues to grow as distrust in “the establishment” manifests. 

Audre Lorde was Right — abandon the master’s tools

For centuries now, the rules have created games which have benefited the already powerful and privileged. Despite the fact of the minuscule volume of that group of individuals, their chokehold on the imagination of a better world has been unrelenting. Institutions with harmful structures like nation-states have long been the de-facto authorities over what is real and what is possible. In my youth, during the 90’s there was a sense that the emergence of exponentially more advanced technology was going to save us. That is for sure a possibility, but not if the environment that shapes how that technology is distributed, produced, and where it evolves towards is not one of distributed and equitable stories/futures/narratives/visions/goals/outcomes (you pick the term that sounds better).

In the end, it all comes down to rules. There are rules that govern our material world, natural systems, our own bodies, and those systems which emerge from anthropogenesis — those which are man-made. The gag here is, since the so-called renaissance or enlightenment, an attempt to unify knowledge towards universal truths has actually led to a biased an imbalanced view of the world which serves the needs of the political economy, the global corporate actors, the oligarchs, and ignores the signs that in the current age we are surrounded only by systems of which have their current state as a result of the relationship that humans have embedded in them. As I studied Environmental Science in the early 2000’s, I was exposed to the possibility that the majority of the contiguous United States had been shaped by human action. It wouldn’t be until the 2020’s before academia would be distributing the knowledge that, actually, the story about the Americas and their “untouched and pristine lands” was false, and these landscapes had actually already been carefully curated anthropogenic systems. (The more indigenous knowledge you know *shooting star rainbow gif*)

We have a tendency to let rules fester and outlive their usefulness or effectiveness in the pursuit of efficiency. Why?

It turns out that the scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the attempt to bend the world to the will of those with the most dominant position was not the most EFFECTIVE system. That the systems of classification and differentiation have their limits of purposefulness, and when they reach the boundaries of their purpose, they do not die and wither like natural systems appears to be a result of hubris. They persist. They become part of the problems that they claim to be addressing. This is a crisis of knowledge (and I will continue to argue throughout my career this is also a crisis of Design Culture), and it can only be resolved by allowing the cell-walls of disciplines to burst. A Transdisciplinary, Regenerative, Systemic, and VUCA informed future is the only one in which the available knowledge we have can be mobilized for a better world. Not that quantum AI chips won’t be a good tool, but we do not have to wait for technology to save us. In fact, without us, the current systems will ensure that the limits of tech maintain a status quo which cannot, must not, persist at the cost of “healthy” or “beneficial” outcomes.

The existing limitations on democracy must be shattered — our workspaces should also be imbued with democratic power dynamics, and our institutions must embrace technological advances to include democracy across global systems and breakdown silos of knowledge production. Digital and Data Sovereignty must be established, and a much much more complex and equitable (in the equity of ownership sense) system of infrastructures must be adopted. The algorithms used to exploit us and our productive online behaviors should be replaced with those who drive beneficial outcomes, those for which we have the power to shape — not through dark patterns and the need to opt-out, but by default. I know, I know… you want to know how we do that. No one person is going to have all those answers, it is going to take many-many actors attempting different things in different contexts to find right-fit solutions. Dead will be the days of universality, and long will live the emergent pluriversal designs needed to address our wicked problems. The only intention to scale is that of self-determination and automatic attribution. No value by us, without us. We will be forced to reclaim our data and privacy rights and recapture the value that we produce through online consumption. The future must be facilitated by the acceptance of complexity and the facilitation of productive and effective redundancies and cooperative principles.

The time for civility and conviviality is drawing to a close; Citizen Control is the target — Thank you, Sherry Arnstein.