Seth Frey studies how communities govern themselves. He’s a cognitive and computational social scientist at UC Davis. His work looks at online communities like subreddits and Minecraft servers as model systems for governing a commons. Before academia he organized cooperative housing in Berkeley where he had his political awakening.
We talk about why so many online communities settle into what Nathan Schneider calls “implicit feudalism,” why hierarchy is a cheap way to get accountability when people haven’t learned to govern together and wokeism as reverse dominance.
This is the first episode recorded in my new podcast studio at the Foresight Institute Berlin Node.
0:00 Introduction
3:24 Seth’s Political Awakening
8:36 Tocqueville and Consensus
15:00 Game Theory and Implicit Feudalism
21:03 Fixing Benevolent Dictatorship
23:02 Reverse Dominance and Redistribution
27:20 Democracy Is a Type of Person
