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NN Ep:7 Meta-Politics: Designing Digital Environments for Civic Power with Audrey & Nathan Schneider
Season 11 Episode 7
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In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer speak with Audrey Tang, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, and Nathan Schneider, professor and author of Governable Spaces. Together they explore Meta-Politics — the foundational design of digital infrastructures that shape how civil society governs itself online.
Audrey and Nathan discuss how platforms today constrain collective action, how democratic protocols like alignment assemblies can counter online harms, and why new governance substrates must embed values such as plurality, civic care, interoperability, and entanglement. They also examine decentralized identities, freedom of movement, DAOs, religion as governance, and how network-native communities can evolve into political actors.
A powerful conversation about the next layer of digital democracy — and what it takes to build civic technologies that empower global communities.
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00:00 – Cold start
02:18 – Introducing Audrey Tang & Nathan Schneider
03:07 – Nathan: "Why I worry about the word meta"
05:10 – Nation-states as fragile historical accidents
06:15 – Self-governing online networks as new politics
08:16 – How today's platforms limit civic life
10:22 – Blockchains break the server–client power structure
12:17 – Nation-states reacting to decentralized governance
14:33 – Audrey: Democracy as a "social technology"
16:37 – Deepfakes, alignment assemblies & Taiwan's model
18:33 – Crowdsourced policymaking at national scale
20:49 – Freedom of movement & interoperability design
22:48 – What Network Nation aims to build
24:52 – Audrey's "Six-Pack of Care"
27:13 – Embedding civic care into protocols
29:21 – Bridging systems & depolarization
31:33 – What values can — and cannot — be encoded
33:28 – Forking, polycentric governance & metastability
35:52 – Norms vs code: where power really lives
37:41 – How decentralized tech forces governance innovation
39:51 – Why cooperatives aren't enough for politics
42:13 – Religion as a governance model for network nations
45:17 – Open movements & global political power
47:15 – Civil society as a political actor
49:40 – Verifiable credentials & protecting deliberation
51:52 – Avoiding dystopia & VC-dominated "network states"
54:17 – Funding, incentives & getting there first
56:43 – Poison pills & preventing bad governance
58:39 – Scaling across vs scaling up
01:00:44 – Fractal scaling & mutualization
01:02:53 – Naming as the first political act
01:05:59 – Different starting points for network nations
01:08:15 – Diversity, plurality & collective action
01:10:29 – Making conflict fun through bridging
01:12:41 – Innovation amnesia & protecting past wins
01:14:42 – Values vs opinions in political communities
01:16:37 – Civic care vs individual virtue ethics
01:19:00 – Entanglement as cohesion
01:21:11 – Building a narrative that reaches real people
01:23:25 – Applying meta-politics to global crises
01:25:46 – Everyday tools already enabling the future
01:26:51 – Closing
Published on 7 hours ago