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Comment by desertraven | Hacker News Reader

As obvious as it is, I’d not considered this. Seems quite bizarre when the situation framed like so.

Should some kind of democratic process apply to such organisations?

I've started to experiment with looking at these large social media/communication orgs less as companies and more as countries/nation-states, and when I do, the metaphor illuminates a lot for me. E.g., FB gives its citizens free services as long as it can watch (almost) everything people do and put up advertisements (almost) everywhere. And if someone breaks the laws, the Supreme Court, appointed by the President, interprets those laws. If citizens don't like the laws, they can move to another country. And lastly, if citizens don't like the President, well, there's not much they can do, besides again, maybe move to another country.

> Should some kind of democratic process apply to such organisations?

I've wondered what would be some effective ways to add more user voice in the ownership and governance process of these platforms. Do you have any ideas?

They're also working on creating a New World Order™ so you can't easily move to another country, which, by the way, is a terribly underestimated and underused ability at the moment.

As the EU, a supranational government, strengthened in Europe, it actually made it easier to move to another country. Perhaps if the EU became more and more controlling of its member nations, then it wouldn't feel as if one were moving from another country, because each place would be quite similar in law, I don't agree that supranational governance would necessarily make it more difficult to move to another country.

Also, I think it might be underused right now because it's probably really hard for most people around the world to move to another country for various reasons: financial, social, linguistic, legal, etc.

I agree that moving countries can help people, I think it is currently a huge task for most and ironically, believe that better relationships between countries and an overarching form of governance may make it easier to do.

I meant "virtual countries". Ah, fuck this shit.

ah, my bad, I didn't know what ya meant and just went with my first assumption.

It's a dictatorship, but nonetheless, FB is not an actual country so the "move to another country" part isn't that hard to do. It becomes a problem when you don't agree with something of the country but everyone else does, so choosing to leave does alienate you from those who stayed. Basically, FB's killer product is the other users, not the actual features of FB (although they're necessary for the collective to not leave en-mass).

> Basically, FB's killer product is the other users not the actual features of FB (although they're necessary for the collective to not leave en-mass)

I agree. I think one of the hardest things for most people when moving from one actual country to another is leaving behind the people and has been the hardest thing for me when I've decided to delete FB or stop visiting certain internet communities.

While there are many definitions of a state, I just learned that Max Weber defines it as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" [0]. This makes me think more about what a state would look like if it were a human community organized around a digital territory and what that means for the future (and present).

[0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/

>I've wondered what would be some effective ways to add more user voice in the ownership and governance process of these platforms. Do you have any ideas?

The obvious answer would seem to be structure them as cooperatives.

Allow service users to purchase shares at a nominal value, and restrict voting rights to one member one vote - that is, shareholder votes are not weighted based on how many shares one has, owning more shares would only enable one to earn more interest on the shares' capital.

Alternatively, all shares (or maybe just 50%+1) could be held in trust for the benefit of the users. Trustees would then have responsibility of taking users' needs in to account.

I like both of these suggestions! While I've read a bit about cooperatives and digital ones, I haven't heard too much about the trustee idea. Do you have links to either where I could learn more about how they might work in with digital platforms?

I think the best example (although it's not a digital platform, and the ownership is for the benefit of employees rather than customers) I know of would be the John Lewis Partnership in the UK.

It's incorporated as a public limited company, but all of its shares are owned in trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership

Ostensibly we can vote to make them behave however we want domestically, as long as our government isn't captured. But even ignoring regulatory capture, multinationals are hard to hold to account by any single government. I've seen people saying that where we went wrong was letting any economic entity get bigger than the [democratic] government regulating it. However, that admission (true or not) doesn't present us with any obvious solution.

Yeah, I often see this as a challenge that most governments are based on physical space, and don't seem to know how to regulate digital space. For example, typing on this thread, I could be interacting with all people from the US like me, or people from maybe 20 different countries, all with different geographical law. Yet, we're all in this same digital space at the same time.

I'm curious how governance (not just government, but even governance of orgs and other platforms) adapts to a world that more and more abstracts away physical space.

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