In Chapter 4, we turn to the contemporary manifestations of the managerial approach. To the extent that we view digital technology as a problem, we tend to think of it as a problem with managerial solutions. In other words, we tend to believe that the right experts, in the right institutions, focusing on the right questions, could make the harms of digital technology disappear. Some want to erect new administrative agencies or private “oversight boards” to govern digital life; some want to empower courts to address the “addictive” features of social media; others prefer to use public officials and NGOs to put pressure on technology platforms themselves. In each of these cases, reformers call on private or public managers to resurrect the goods of robust associations without defending associations themselves. We show that seemingly disparate efforts to address “digital addiction,” fight the “loneliness epidemic,” combat “misinformation,” regulate AI development, and reimagine “privacy” all fall into this same trap. These are often misguided attempts to respond to problems better understood and addressed as the consequences of a social order in which intermediary associations lack the three powers.

In Chapter 1, we argue that social associations, to remain functional, ought to retain three core features. First, boundaries – physical, informational or social – enable associations to shield themselves from society at large. Separating members from non-members, associations create a distinct “we” with which to identify. Second, to foster unique experiences, associations develop internal hierarchies, norms, and practices. These are the rules and rituals that define the culture of the association. Third, to emerge and sustain themselves, social associations must serve specific functions: Activities or goods around which people coalesce. We call these three features boundary power, medium power, and agenda power, respectively. We trace the importance of these three “powers” in a variety of contexts: among the earliest settler societies, among Freemasons in pre-liberal societies, in nineteenth century America, and in Habermas’s account of European coffeehouses. We also draw on empirical work to show why these three powers matter. And we point to the specific means of communication that make the exercise of the three powers possible.

In Chapter 3, we trace the origins of the “managerial approach” to technology regulation. In the twentieth century, as mass communication weakened America’s associational life, reformers increasingly entrusted experts and managers with the task of producing social goods such as civility and accurate information. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has increasingly extended robust First Amendment rights to mass media companies, paving the way to an emerging status quo in which digital platforms themselves are “protected speakers” because they “select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products." Radically constraining the scope of technology regulation, courts have strengthened the authority of private managers over the terms of social life. The modern First Amendment, which once protected the autonomy of robust associations in the public sphere, has come to do the exact opposite: protect the forces of homogenization that undermine robust associations. Meanwhile, even private actors risk offending the rights of platforms when they attempt to build third-party applications – known as “middleware” – that interoperate with dominant platforms to empower users to modify platform features.

In Chapter 1, human well-being is defined and compared globally as inherently relational and creative, based on current research, indicating that the impact of technology is causing societal and individual stress, particularly due to social isolation.

In Chapter 2, we argue that the platformization of our social order – the process by which platforms appropriate the infrastructure of our social life – is fueled by three “structural trends.” First, Network Scaling: digital platforms rely on network effects that subsume human activities, imposing opportunity costs on those opting out. Second, Context Collapse: digital platforms appropriate communicative infrastructure at scale, removing the boundaries of membership and information on which intermediary associations depend. Third, Managerial Control: platform managers exercise the competencies that once justified the authority of independent, self-fashioning associations. By itself, none of these “structural trends” need imperil collective action. Our challenge comes from the way in which these structural trends interact with each other, a relationship that we attempt to untangle. We argue that, considered as one, the three structural trends form a self-reinforcing cycle: We let platforms subsume our activities, which undermines our ability to self-organize, which, in turn, makes us outsource more and more activities to digital platforms.

In Chapter 5, we propose an alternative approach to technology regulation that focuses on (re-)building robust associations online and offline. We propose a three-tiered policy agenda. First, we propose measures to change the design of digital platforms to empower users to erect boundaries of information, membership, and authority among themselves. To this end, reformers should legally empower the production of “middleware,” third-party software that interoperates with dominant platforms to let users change the rules of social interaction and content moderation. Second, we propose measures to help intermediary associations assert control over both digital and physical spaces. We consider smartphone bans in schools, a “right to disconnect” outside the workplace, and even subsidies for institutions of art and culture that outlaw the use of technology within their walls. Third, we entertain more radical measures to carve out coordinated times and spaces away from technology. These include local “digital Sabbath” policies that (totally or partially) restrict internet usage for a limited, recurrent period.

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.

This chapter examines the human rights framing for the governance of information from the 1990s to the early 2010s and argues that, overall, it did not fundamentally unsettle two basic logics of neoliberalism, namely, securitization and marketization. In commonplace positive narratives about technology, human rights were presented by policymakers and international technocrats as one benefit of new information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs), to justify the market-driven technological change. By contrast, negative narratives about technology focused on the social harms of new ICTs and invoked human rights to normatively ground technological development. However, human rights struggles in this period suffered from two processes of dilution – firstly, the proceduralization of human rights obligations of the state during the War on Terror years and, secondly, the narrowing down of a broad social programme into focusing only on classic civil and political rights in civil society campaigns – and were therefore unable to fundamentally reshape the governance of information towards more equitable distribution of power and wealth.

Television’s historical arc begins with its early years or “network era” when a handful of broadcasting channels and key companies dominated. American TV quickly adapted radio and movie strategies, saturating American homes by the 1960s. It created a shared national culture both through its storytelling and its function as a source of news information. But things in the 1980s shifted during the cable/satellite era when programming or “niche marketing” targeted narrower groups shaped by their interests, language, or social factors across dozens of channels. Television transformed again during the era of the Internet and subscription streaming. Its evolution from mass to micro audiences, from scheduled to on-demand experiences, and from domestic to international viewers has changed what was commercially viable, allowing for greater diversity across sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class lines. Throughout its production and reception changes, though, American TV has been a key cultural storyteller.

Sports and the media first became co-dependent when Thomas Edison made boxing spectacle integral to early cinema’s success. In the 1920s–1930s, sports journalism’s dramatic storytelling made it key for both newspapers’ and radio’s popularity. When 1950s television added a visual dimension, sports industry leaders worried that TV was competition for live attendance. But professional football, a marginal sport, used the medium to create a fan base. ABC-TV developed a dramatic, intimate televisual style exemplified in their 1964 Olympics broadcasts, an unparallelled media spectacle and commercial success. ABC’s major role continued through Monday Night Football, coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, and other events. With cable TV’s arrival in the 1980s, all-sports channels like ESPN made coverage available 24/7, a strategy recently extended by digital platforms that now supply sports entertainment on-demand.

This chapter defines the key techniques of African American poetry invested in digital technology and internet community as "remix" and "sampling," and traces how these techniques derive from a pursuit of liberation that, it argues, has been at the heart of the African American poetic tradition since the first enslaved poets wrote. It identifes how Black digital poetics continues to challenges dominant narratives that diminish the Black body as commodity in the service of nationalist and colonizing practices. It demonstrates how digital poetics uses its techniques to imagine non-hierarchical ways of being and knowing.

This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

The field of drug studies is increasingly challenged by the rapid digitalisation of drug markets, raising the importance of reconsidering how drug laws and policies respond to the role of technologies in the drug trade, and their social impact. This chapter considers the famous case of Maximilian Schmidt, who was accused of setting up Germany’s largest digital drug shop under the alias Shiny Flakes and became the subject of media stories and Netflix TV productions. The case offers an opportunity to explore how the move to digitally mediated drug supply has altered the ways in which phenomena such as the ‘dealer’ and ‘dealing’ are constituted in socio-technical and legal contexts.1 Research shows that digital drug markets pose serious challenges to jurisdictional and regulatory frameworks and governments require costly and laborious police operations to adapt to the rapid development of these markets (EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025, 2021; UNODC, 2022). Following the transition of drug markets and traditional dealer activities to digitally mediated formats, it has become important to consider how drug dealers and dealing are constituted and handled in law, and whether the technological means of dealing are reshaping how questions of responsibility, ‘harm’ and entrepreneurship are being understood.

For people to effectively share an environment, they usually also must effectively share knowledge about that environment. While seemingly obvious and intuitive, this insight is often overlooked in literature about governing resources as commons. Focusing on the knowledge commons associated with an environmental commons helps to illuminate a host of complex governance dilemmas. This chapter examines the interrelationship between environmental and knowledge commons, weaving together different strands of commons research and practice. Examples discussed include shared pastures, forests, road systems, computer servers, social media platforms, living rooms, and antimicrobial effectiveness/resistance.

The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreign investment. The private sector was constrained by regulation. After 1991 Indian economic policy shifted sharply, deregulating and becoming more open to the global economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan moved in the same direction, but less sharply, partly because they were less statist to begin with. Other factors mattered besides government policy: the Internet boom and the service exports it facilitated; substantial remittances by migrants to the Middle East; and the protests of workers, women and other marginalized groups. In this chapter we highlight key elements of these narratives and flag the chapters that discuss them.