The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of 'middleware' and even entertains the pursuit of local 'digital Sabbath' policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we've lost and imagine what we might build in its place.

‘The digital world, Bitton and Sadler contend, has uprooted our social lives and undermined our most important associations. In this remarkable book, they explain how we can transform technology so that it empowers rather than displaces communities. This is a timely manifesto for a disorienting age.’

Jack Balkin - Yale Law School

‘An elegant and powerful indictment of the digital degradation of our shared life, including our politics, and a call to protect and renew associational life where it most matters - offline, not online.’

David Grewal - UC Berkeley Law and author of Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization

‘This crisp and substantial book offers an original and trenchant diagnosis of how digital platforms have come to supplant and even destroy the physical communities that they once promised to complement; and it proposes a practicable path by which our civilization might regain control over the terms of our social life. Social conveniences come at a cost to community-when platforms help us to coordinate more efficiently, they weaken our capacity to self-organize. Where technocrats concede that organic community cannot be recovered, and democrats offer only romantic fantasies, Bitton and Sadler deploy this central insight to chart a pragmatic path towards restoring community, illuminated by the transactional benefits of voluntary membership associations. This combination of diagnosis and cure makes A Bounded Web a genuinely important book.’

Daniel Markovits - Yale Law School