Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Professor of Political Communication in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture and the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University
Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt
C.W. Anderson
Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization
Jessica L. Beyer
If . . . Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics
Taina Bucher
The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power
Andrew Chadwick
The Only Constant Is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation Over Time
Ben Epstein
Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics
Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner
When the Nerds Go Marching In: How Digital Technology Moved from the Margins to the Mainstream of Political Campaigns
Rachel K. Gibson
Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism
Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch
Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring
Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain
The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam
Philip N. Howard
Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy
David Karpf
The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy
David Karpf
Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy
Daniel Kreiss
Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama
Daniel Kreiss
Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era: The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong
Francis L.F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan
Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication
Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood
Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop
Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight
Back Against Rape Culture
Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller
Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity
Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and William W. Franko
Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere
Sarah Oates
Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age
Taylor Owen
Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics
Zizi Papacharissi
Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Decentralisation
Jack Parkin
The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age
Joel Penney
Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter
Annelise Russell
The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times
Joshua M. Scacco and Kevin Coe
China’s Digital Nationalism
Florian Schneider
Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy
Sarah Sobieraj
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age
Jennifer Stromer-Galley
News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century
David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg
Outside the Bubble: Social Media and Political Participation in Western Democracies
Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani
The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies
Nils B. Weidmann and Espen Geelmuyden Rød
The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Networked Age
Chris Wells
Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media
Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard
Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia
Mohamed Zayani
Designing for Democracy
HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS
JENNIFER FORESTAL
1
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Names: Forestal, Jennifer, author.
Title: Designing for democracy : how to build community in digital environments / Jennifer Forestal.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2022. | Series: Oxford studies in digital politics series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022693 (print) | LCCN 2021022694 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197568767 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197568750 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197568798 | ISBN 9780197568774 | ISBN 9780197568781 (epub)
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Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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Acknowledgments vii
1. Digital Technologies and the Problem of Democracy 1
2. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Facebook, Boundaries, and Forming Communities 31
3. Sustaining Democracy: Durability, Attachment, and Twitter 65
4. r/democracy: Flexible Spaces, Experimental Habits, and the Problem of Self-Segregation 97
5. Democracy for Profit?: Control, Community, and the Role of Algorithms 137
6. “Make No Little Plans”: Designing the Future of Democracy 177
References 195 Index 217
Acknowledgments
This book, like all products of intellectual labor, was not crafted in isolation. And, as a book about building communities, it seems only appropriate to start off by acknowledging some of the many (many) people in mine who made it possible. My “meet-cute” with political theory happened at The Ohio State University. Clarissa Hayward’s course, “Power and Resistance” (my first exposure to political theory!) introduced me to the power of the built environment. Mike Neblo and, especially, Eric MacGilvray taught me how to read closely and craft arguments carefully; they also introduced me to democratic theory and pragmatism. Looking back now, the combination of Dewey, democracy, and architecture that forms the theoretical heart of this book—and my thinking, more generally—has its roots in Columbus.
I began working through the book’s main premise—that we should think of digital technologies architecturally—while at Northwestern. I am grateful to Jim Farr, Mary Dietz, and Ben Page for pushing me beyond my early and uncritical optimism regarding the democratic promises of digital technologies; their incisive questions and gentle skepticism have made the resulting argument much more compelling. Thanks also to my amazing grad student colleagues, who made each of my six years at Northwestern more enjoyable than the year before. Ross Carroll and Doug Thompson, as organizers of the graduate student Political Theory Workshop—and, crucially, the post-workshop drinks!—created a vibrant, friendly, and fun intellectual environment. Our Friday afternoon meetings were more than just a venue to share works-in-progress; ultimately, the Workshop was a space where I learned to think with others. I am indebted to the friends and fellow theorists who made those meetings my favorite part of grad school and who have continued to think with me even after we left: Doug, Ross, Nick Dorzweiler, Boris Litvin, Lexi Neame, Menaka Philips, Alison Rane, Chris Sardo, Anna Terwiel, and Désirée Weber—thanks to you all. At Northwestern, I was also fortunate to take advantage of the Northwestern Center for Civic
Engagement’s Graduate Engagement Opportunities (GEO) Community Practicum. This program—which, IMHO, all grad programs should emulate— is one in which grad students are able to take a (funded!) quarter-long internship and connected seminar focused on Chicago, community organizing, and public scholarship. GEO provided space for me to explore the city in a way I otherwise would not have. And it is no exaggeration to say that this book owes its existence to my experiences with Chicago; the city’s unparalleled architectural achievements and rich history of democratic activism ultimately inspired the research agenda I’m still pursuing today.
The bulk of this book was written while at Stockton University. I will forever be grateful to the Stockton POLS program for taking a chance on a young ABD and to the Stockton faculty, generally, for teaching me so much about good pedagogy, great colleagues, and the irreplaceable value—politically, economically, and socially—of a strong union. But a special thanks goes to my fellow junior POLS comrades: Dan Mallinson, Lauren Balasco, and, especially, Claire Abernathy, who made my first four years on the tenure track not just bearable but a true joy.
An additional highlight of my time in New Jersey was the Tri-Co Theory Workshop, organized by Joel Schlosser and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. Joel and Paulina went out of their way to welcome me into their community of theorists; watching the Tri-Co regulars—among them, Joel, Paulina, Craig Borowiak, Tom Donahue, Jeremy Elkins, and Danielle Hanley—engage with new worksin-progress as generous interlocutors, helping to sharpen arguments and land publications, has improved both my thinking and my writing.
The book was finished at Loyola University Chicago, which is in many ways my dream job. Back in Chicago(!), I’ve found a department full of gracious and supportive colleagues who have been nothing but encouraging in what was, truly, a very strange first couple years (thanks, COVID). I am especially grateful to Claudio Katz and Rob Mayer, who together have reminded me how wonderful it is to have theory colleagues. And it has been a delight to collaborate (scheme?) with Abe Singer on all sorts of endeavors. Conversations with my students in PLSC 300b: “Social Media & Democracy” during Fall 2019 shaped the book’s fifth chapter; more generally, being in the classroom with my Loyola students (like their Stockton peers before them) is one of my favorite parts of this job.
Thanks also to those people and institutions who provided material resources and support to write and improve the project. I spent the summer of 2018 as a scholar-in-residence at New York University, sponsored by the Faculty Resource Network; during that time, I drafted an early version of chapter 3. The book was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Stockton University and Loyola University Chicago also provided material support as I drafted various chapters. A version of chapter 2 was presented at APT, while versions of chapter 4 were presented at APT, APSA,
John McGuire’s “Doing Democracy Differently” conference at McMaster, and Northwestern’s “Up the Street” workshop; I benefited greatly from all of the feedback from discussants, audiences, and fellow panelists. I presented the book’s main argument at the “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere” colloquium at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values; the resulting conversation informed the book’s conclusion.
I am grateful especially to Melissa Schwartzberg for her generosity of time and resources, both in convening a book manuscript workshop for me in May 2019, as well as in her advice and mentorship at key career decision-points afterward. A huge thanks also to Elizabeth Cohen, Henry Farrell, and Jack Knight for their close reading, thoughtful comments, and lively conversation during the workshop—hopefully they will see their feedback reflected in this final product. Thank you to Paul Apostolias for comments on how to improve the book proposal (as part of APT’s Book Proposal Workshop), which in turn clarified my thinking about the book’s argument and how to frame it. Thank you also to Meghan Condon, Danielle Hanley, Boris Litvin, and Lexi Neame, who have each read chapters in their various incarnations; Menaka Philips has, I believe, read them all at multiple stages. Any remaining errors are, of course, all mine.
Angela Chnapko at Oxford has been an excellent guide and sound advicegiver at the various stages of publication, from finishing the manuscript and responding to reviewers, to sourcing images and securing permissions. Thanks also to Timothy DeWerff for thorough copyediting and to Derek Gottlieb for indexing. Emily Davidson (talented painter and good friend!) helped me to find the perfect cover art; thank you to Melissa Brown for granting permission to use her painting Bridge (2020) in that capacity.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my friends—both within academia and outside of it. I met Jennie Ikuta at APT in 2016 and have enjoyed talking political theory, binge-worthy TV, and Twitter drama with her ever since. Befriending Danielle Hanley was one of the best things I did while living in Philly. Rachel Moskowitz has been my favorite officemate to date; I miss our Jersey “work sessions.” Thanks also to those who make Chicago home (even if you no longer live here): Tyler and Scott, Mike and Sarah, Lauren and Patrick, Stacy and Erik, Erin, Schraedly, Kate and Lauren (and Tim), Alison and Max, Christophe, Emily and John, Josh and Emily, Khairunnisa, Menaka, and Thomas. I will forever sing Ohio’s praise with Laura, Kelly, JJ, Lauren, Schraedly, and Joe; you are all a testament to the ways in which clearly bounded shared space—in this case, the Nosker halls—helps cultivate enduring ties of friendship (how firm, indeed).
“The Herd” have been with me even longer—since high school—and though we are spread coast-to-coast these days, I would not be where I am without A, D, Dawn, Kyle, Mike, Sarah, and especially Tyler. Whatever “place attachment” I have to our hometown, I have because of you all.
Menaka Philips deserves her own special thanks for being the kind of friendslash-writing-partner that everyone should wish for. The title “co-author” does not do her justice; who else both improves your thinking and writing and also brings your missing shoe to happy hour? We are so constantly in conversation (via WhatsApp, of course) about all things, both work-related and decidedly not, that at times it seems our brains have simply melded together. I think these acknowledgments are my only published work that she hasn’t read in advance.
But it is family, as Aristotle tells us, that is the foundation of community life. I am deeply thankful to have been born into families that are large, chaotic, generous, supportive, and tightly knit—and whose members thoroughly enjoy one another’s company. To the Dodds and Forestals, thank you for filling my life, from the very beginning, with love and community. And to my first “household”—my parents, Greg and Joyce, and my brother, Rick—I owe many thanks for your unconditional love, for teaching me how to be curious, and for so much else. Rick is the best “little” brother anyone could ask for; I continually try (and fail) to channel his Dude-like chill. It is thanks to Dad that I grew up as a “digital native” with an enthusiasm for deconstructing things, figuring out how they work, and thinking of how to improve them. Conversations with Mom taught me how to appreciate life’s difficult questions, even when you don’t like the answers. It’s been over a decade since I last talked with her, and I miss her more with every day that passes. For all that she gave me and all that she gives still, this book is dedicated to her.
Finally, I will forever thank my lucky stars—or, more accurately, Toni Greenslade- Smith, who until 2011 made all of OSU’s housing assignments by herself and by hand for placing Craig just down the hall from my freshman dorm room on Nosker’s first floor. For the past sixteen years, he’s been my constant companion, closest confidant, best friend, and true life partner. With our dependents, Tonks and (the new addition!) Oliver, I could not imagine any life better than the one we’ve built together.
1 Digital Technologies and the Problem of Democracy
In December 2019, Buzzfeed News published an article reflecting on the “Digital Revolution” of the 2010s. Its conclusions were bleak. Creating or exacerbating “feelings of powerlessness, estrangement, loneliness, and anger,” wrote reporter Joseph Bernstein, the growing dominance of digital technologies in our daily lives “incentivizes forms of engagement that make Americans feel less empowered and more alone than ever, to the benefit of very few.”1 Contrary to the cheery predictions of techno-optimists from the late 1990s and early 2000s, argued Bernstein, now-ubiquitous technologies like smartphones and social media had turned out to be tools of control rather than liberation. The “digital revolution,” he concluded, “hadn’t tamed politics. It set them berserk. And it hadn’t brought people closer together. It had alienated them.”2
In highlighting the disastrous effects of digital technologies in our social and political lives, the Buzzfeed article echoed a number of prevalent arguments forwarded by scholars and practitioners over the previous decade. Noting how digital technologies exacerbate racial biases,3 spread misinformation,4 amplify hate,5 and radicalize ideological thinking,6 scholars have been quick to point out the
1 Joseph Bernstein, “Alienated, Alone and Angry: What the Digital Revolution Really Did to Us,” BuzzFeed News, December 17, 2019.
2 Bernstein, “Alienated, Alone and Angry.”
3 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
4 Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, and Michelle A. Amazeen, “The Agenda- Setting Power of Fake News: A Big Data Analysis of the Online Media Landscape from 2014 to 2016,” New Media and Society 20, no. 5 (2018): 2028–49.
5 Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
6 Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” New York Times, March 10, 2018.
myriad ways digital technologies are “undermining democracy.”7 In seeking to “move fast and break things,” it seems that digital technologies (and the companies that control them) have broken something important in our collective lives as democratic citizens.
Solutions to the problems posed by digital technologies have varied depending on scholars’ specific focus. Citing platforms’ unprecedented levels of data collection and surveillance, some, like Zeynep Tufekci, have argued in favor of regulating the companies that create and manage these technologies. A “genuine legislative remedy” to counteract the negative effects of these platforms for democracy, Tufekci persuasively argued in a New York Times opinion piece, would involve regulations like opt-in data collection, increased transparency, and oversight around data use.8 By holding accountable the companies that manage digital platforms, so this argument goes, we can ensure they work for the public good.
Others trace the source of the problem to users themselves. Pointing to bots, trolls, and other “bad actors,” as well as the unsuspecting publics they prey upon, scholars, practitioners, and activists have introduced digital literacy programs and called for stricter moderation policies in order to curb the spread of, for example, disinformation, hate speech, and harassment by way of digital media. These efforts, evident in offline workshops,9 digital organizations like HeartMob (which works to “assist victims, educate communities, and stop harassment online”10), and campaigns that pressure platforms like Facebook to alter their moderation policies,11 all seek to train users in how to engage in “productive” exchanges in digital spaces.
Finally, there are calls to give up on digital technologies’ democratic potential altogether. Pointing to the ways that these technologies incentivize undemocratic behavior—such as aggression, polarization, and extremism—scholars like
7 Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media; Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2018).
8 Zeynep Tufekci, “We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves from Facebook,” New York Times, April 9, 2018.
9 Sam Gringlas, “With an Election on the Horizon, Older Adults Get Help Spotting Fake News,” NPR, February 26, 2020.
10 Sarah Kessler, “Meet HeartMob: A Tool for Fighting Online Harassment Designed by People Who Have Been Harassed,” Fast Company, May 14, 2015. See wwww.iheartmob.org for more.
11 Paris Martineau, “Facebook’s New Content Moderation Tools Put Posts in Context,” WIRED, July 3, 2019; Lauren Dudley, “Year in Review: Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms in 2019,” Council on Foreign Relations: Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, December 19, 2019.
Siva Vaidhyanathan argue that we should “put Facebook in its proper place . . . as a source of social and familial contact.”12 A similar logic underlies calls to delete one’s accounts, to boycott platforms like Facebook, and to go offline entirely.13 Despite their variance in both diagnoses and proposed remedies, however, what all of these approaches—regulation, training, and walking away—do is to use formal laws and education, as well as informal social norms, to (re)shape the ways that citizens interact with digital technologies, with the goal of making those interactions more supportive of democratic politics.
These are all important strategies for making digital technologies work for democracy. They may also be quite effective at achieving their stated goals. But they are not my focus in this book, and for two reasons. First, in conceptualizing the democratic effects of digital technologies, these strategies all tend to emphasize the impact of digital tools on existing (offline) political institutions, communities, and forms of participation. But democratic politics, as I will argue, is not confined to the boundaries of states or the formal institutions of governments. Instead, as a form of collective decision-making, democracy is an activity that can, and should, extend to all areas of our lives. And while digital platforms no doubt influence traditional modes of political activity (like social movements or political campaigns), they are also sites where new communities—those with no clear offline counterpart—are mobilizing and thriving. The global fan communities on Tumblr, for example, do not have a direct connection to national bodies politic, legislative agendas, or election results.14 Yet as groups of people gathering together and making decisions that shape their behaviors—both individual and collective—these are nevertheless communities that deserve our attention as potential sites of democratic politics.
Second, framing discussions of digital technologies and democracy in terms of laws and norms cannot fully account for the differences between these new digital communities and the platforms that house them. Facebook, for example, looks and feels quite different from Twitter, which is unlike Reddit, which is
12 Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media
13 David Nield, “Social Media Is Making You Miserable. Here’s How to Delete Your Accounts,” Popular Science, January 20, 2018; Nicola Slawson, “Faceblock Campaign Urges Users to Boycott Facebook for a Day,” The Guardian, April 7, 2018.
14 This is not to say that the two never intersect. There is a rich history of fan communities— including online fandoms—engaging in traditional “offline” political activities. The Harry Potter Alliance, for example, famously mobilizes fans of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to participate in campaigns around issues like human rights, literacy, and immigration (among others). See Henry Jenkins, “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance,” Transformative Works and Culture 10 (2012).
distinct from Wikipedia.15 Each of these platforms hosts a distinctive community, characterized by unique patterns of user behavior and interpersonal relations. And while these patterns are, of course, influenced by laws and norms, these cannot fully explain the rich variety found among them: users living in the same legal and (offline) social context, for example, will nevertheless act differently on Facebook than they will on Wikipedia. This is because users’ experiences as part of these online communities are also profoundly shaped by the design of the platforms in question. Platform design, in other words, works alongside laws and norms to help structure user behaviors in ways that can facilitate the formation of digital democratic communities—or else fail to do so.
In this book, then, I make the case that we should tackle the problems posed by digital technologies by studying the role of the built environment in structuring our activity, shaping our attitudes, and thus supporting—or not—the kinds of relationships and behaviors that democracy requires of citizens, whether online or offline. There are good reasons for my emphasis on the built environment—on questions of design—instead of the laws and norms that (of course) also influence our behavior. For one, the importance of design on user behavior is a common denominator in much of the empirical literature on the effects of digital technologies; it is also a widely recognized relationship in physical environments, as evident from decades of research in urban design, architecture, environmental psychology, and, yes, political theory. In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, then, I am building on these existing bodies of work to argue that we should evaluate the democratic potential of digital technologies by focusing on how they are designed— whether they are built in ways that facilitate essential democratic practices.
Ultimately, I argue that “democratic spaces”—built environments that support democratic politics—must provide three requisite democratic affordances. These are three fundamental civic practices, or activities necessary for democratic politics: citizens must (1) recognize themselves as members of communities, (2) form attachments to those communities, and (3) work collaboratively to experiment with and improve them. In order to provide these affordances—of recognition, attachment, and experimentalism—democratic spaces must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Happily, when we examine digital platforms through the lens of democratic space, with its attendant democratic affordances, we find evidence that these technologies are perhaps not as ruinous for democracy as the 2019 Buzzfeed article
15 Interestingly, there has been a shift in recent years toward greater convergence in platform design and user experience as major companies attempt to mimic their competitors’ successes. Recently, for example, Twitter introduced “Fleets”—tweets that disappear after 24 hours, set apart from users’ normal feeds and located at the top of their screens—which function much like Instagram’s successful “Stories” function (which itself is modeled after Snapchat). See Nick Statt, “Twitter’s Disappearing Tweets, Called Fleets, Are Now Available for Everyone,” The Verge, November 17, 2020.
may have us believe. Wikipedia, for example, is a two-decade-long success story of collective decision-making and collaborative experimentation.16 Likewise, video game platforms like World of Warcraft regularly host community gatherings and collective action.17 Even Facebook, though its cumulative effects for democracy may be troubling, nevertheless hosts robust communities (discussed in chapter 2) that engage in cooperative activity—including mutual aid, emotional support, and information exchange. Using the theoretical framework of democratic space, in other words, we can more clearly identify what we are already doing “right.” More specifically, the concept of democratic space can help us tease out the why and how of these success stories; it can explain, as I demonstrate in chapter 4, why Reddit’s subreddits host thriving communities of interest, whose members often demonstrate long-standing attachments and habits of experimentation, when we do not see similar dynamics on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
But the vocabulary of democratic affordances that I outline in this book can do more than simply help us “think what we are doing.”18 It also highlights what we are not doing—what is missing from our current efforts. While much ink has (rightly) been spilled unpacking the ways that algorithms powering Twitter and Facebook have contributed to the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and extremism, for example, the framework of democratic space reveals additional—and perhaps more fundamental—challenges posed by these platforms. As I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, Facebook largely fails to facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition, while Twitter fails to afford attachment. In both cases, the threat to democratic politics is not simply in the content users disseminate on these platforms. It is, rather, in the ways these spaces facilitate (or not, as the case may be) the community ties upon which democracy depends.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the framework of democratic space can help us identify potentially negative (and unintended) consequences caused by common interventions intended to “fix” digital technologies for democracy. These efforts often work by first identifying discrete problems with digital
16 Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman, “Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia,” in Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work— GROUP ’05, (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2005), 1–10; Howard T. Welser, et al. “Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia,” in Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (Seattle, WA: ACM, 2011), 122–29.
17 Thomas W. Brignall III and Thomas L. Van Valey, “An Online Community as a New Tribalism: The World of Warcraft,” in Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE, 2007), 179b–179b; Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris, “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” in CSCW 2006: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2006), 149–58.
18 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5.
technologies—like filter bubbles, hate speech, and privacy concerns—trying to address them in isolation from one another, and assuming the cumulative results will benefit democracy. This is an understandable approach, and certainly a laudable goal. But, as I show in chapter 5, it can often “backfire” as these piecemeal changes end up canceling each other out—or, worse, exacerbating the undemocratic effects of the platforms they are trying to fix, thereby undermining their stated goals.
Instead of starting with individual problems associated with digital technologies, then, the approach I outline in this book—the framework of democratic space—begins with the question of what democracy requires and evaluates digital technologies accordingly. As a result, it gives us a more comprehensive account of not just the challenges digital technologies pose for democratic politics, but also their promise and possibilities. As digital platforms continue to (re)structure our interpersonal relationships and patterns of collective behavior—not just in traditional offline political arenas, but in online communities as well—it becomes ever more critical for us to ensure they are designed and built to support the work of democratic politics and the affordances it requires. The theoretical framework of democratic space I provide in this book is intended to help us do just that.
Democratic Foundations
What kind of built environment does democracy require? That is the question I take up in this book. Democracy, as I understand it, is the collective management of common affairs. As opposed to other forms of decision-making—the use of force, say, or reliance on experts—democratic politics seeks to involve all the members of a community in the collaborative work of identifying, discussing, and making decisions about the things they hold in common. Democracy is, in other words, more than a system of government. Instead, we should understand democracy as a method of collective problem-solving. It is, as twentiethcentury American philosopher John Dewey wrote, a set of practices through which we share information, test ideas, discuss results, and work cooperatively and intelligently toward our collective goals.19 In short, democratic politics is the process through which community members are directly involved in making the decisions that affect their communities—communities that range from the
19 For more on Dewey’s democratic theory, see John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946); John Dewey, “Creative Democracy— The Task Before Us,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, Vol. 14, 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 224–30. See also chapter 4 of this book.
small and intimate, like families, all the way up to larger and more impersonal associations like the state. In all of these communities, despite their differences in structure and aims, members have an equal claim to participate in decisionmaking because the resulting decisions will ultimately shape their lives and behavior, both individual and collective.
This is, of course, not the only way to understand democracy. But “participatory democracy,” as this model is sometimes called, is particularly well suited to help us understand the collective engagements that accompany digital technologies. “[F]or a democratic polity to exist,” argues Carol Pateman, “it is necessary for a participatory society to exist, i.e. a society where all political systems have been democratized and socialization through participation can take place in all areas.”20 Taking a participatory approach to democracy, in other words, compels us to apply the same level of scrutiny to all the other spheres of our lives as we traditionally do to the institutions of the state and the formal arenas of governing. Because it expands the scope of democratic politics beyond these traditional formal institutions, participatory democracy underscores the stakes of designing everyday spaces in ways that support maximum participation in the work of collective problem-solving for the communities they host.
It is for this reason that I use the term “citizen” throughout this book to refer not to a specific formal legal status, but instead as a generic term for a member of a given community. A “citizen,” in this sense, is one who inhabits a space, shares the consequences of conjoint activity, and therefore has a part in the work of managing them. The term “citizen,” as I use it here, thus includes a normative claim: that all denizens of a space, if they are affected by the consequences of a decision, should be treated as full members of the community with an equal role in the decision-making process—even if they currently are not. Taking a participatory approach to democracy, then, means that we are tasked with the work of “democratizing” the spaces in which citizens find themselves. We must work to provide, as Pateman puts it, “opportunities for individuals to participate in decision-making in their everyday lives as well as in the wider political system”21 and we must create those opportunities if they do not currently exist.
As sites where billions of users gather daily, it is clear that the spaces and communities created by digital technologies should be subject to this project of democratization. Digital technologies are, as we will soon see, designed to induce their users to act in ways they otherwise might not. And because digital technologies have such a wide-ranging influence on both our individual
20 Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 43.
and our collective lives, users of digital technologies—as citizens of digital communities—rightly have a claim to participate in the processes of decisionmaking about those technologies and their effects on the communities they host. In order to democratize digital technologies, then, we must design them in ways that facilitate opportunities for collective decision-making by the communities that exist within the new spaces they create.22
In order to make possible the kind of participation in collective decisionmaking that characterizes participatory democratic politics, however, there are three core conditions that must be met. As a collective enterprise, democracy requires the existence of communities; communities must therefore form before democratic politics can take place. And because democracy is a forward-looking activity, it also presumes these communities are not temporary; thus, communities must also sustain themselves over time in order to support the long-term work of collective decision-making. Finally, because democracy is the work of collective problem-solving—and because this work will never be finished (there will always be new problems, after all)—these communities must strive to be self-correcting, to improve their decisions and decision-making capacities in order to best meet the ever-changing needs of their members.
Certainly, laws and norms can help communities form, sustain, and improve themselves over time. But so, too, can the built environment—which often, as we will see, works in subtle and even invisible ways to thwart or support these democratic goals of forming, sustaining, and improving communities. As I argue in this book, if we are to construct a built environment that facilitates democratic politics—what I call here a “democratic space”—it must have three characteristics: it must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Clearly bounded spaces facilitate the recognition of what we share and with whom we share it; they help us form communities. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to the communities they house and other members within them; they help us sustain
22 In making this claim, I am arguing in this book that digital technologies (can) host democratic communities and that, as such, they are themselves sites of democratic politics. For many participatory democrats, however, the benefits of participation extend beyond one’s immediate involvement in collective decision-making within a single community; democratic participation in, say, workplaces can also be a way for citizens to practice skills that they can then carry over to participation in more formal arenas of politics like the state. The same logic holds true for digital spaces: while members of digital communities have a claim to participate in decision-making around these spaces and the technologies that create them, this participation likely also builds important political skills and invites experimentation with democratic processes that can be imported to other (non-digital) spaces. These experiential and pedagogical effects of digital democratic participation fall outside the scope of my discussion here. But for more on how digital spaces not only host democratic engagements themselves, but also act as “schools” and “labs” for democracy elsewhere, see Cathy J. Cohen et al., “Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action” (Oakland, CA: Youth and Participatory Research Network, 2012).
communities. And flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habit required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. This is, as I will show, as true in digital environments like Facebook or Twitter as it is for physical spaces like streets, parks, and town halls.
Over the next three chapters, I explain each of these characteristics in more detail. In the remainder of this chapter, I articulate why I take the particular methodological approach of exploring the democratic potential of digital technologies through the lens of the built environment. Ultimately, the reason is one of power—the built environment exerts considerable power over us, though it does so in often-invisible ways. Insofar as democracy requires citizen participation in the decisions that shape their lives, it is clear that citizens should be as involved in decisions over the built environment as they are with any other shared object or exercise of power. In order to effectively do this work, however, we need a shared vocabulary with which to explain, evaluate, and improve the built environment for democracy. Providing that vocabulary, and thus suggesting ways we might begin to democratize the design of digital environments, is the project of this book.
Democracy, Affordances, and the Power of the Built Environment
While digital technologies introduce new spaces and new dynamics to the practice of democratic politics, the anxieties often expressed over their destructive potential are, in fact, not unique. Indeed, democratic theorists, particularly those working in the participatory mode, have long been concerned with the question of how to ensure that citizens engage in the civic practices required for democratic politics—and the consequences for democracy if they fail to do so. Some argue that the most effective way to shape citizens’ behaviors is through formal institutions, like laws and local governments.23 Others invest more significance in education—and particularly public education—as a mechanism that would help train citizens to regularly engage in the requisite civic practices of recognition, attachment, and experimentalism.24 Still others turn to informal social norms, like those of friendship or neighborliness, to inculcate the proper
23 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Carnes Lord, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 1969).
24 John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, Vol. 9, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1916).
practices in democratic citizens.25 And, as is also the case with the contemporary iterations we see at play in discussions around digital technologies, these turns to formal and informal institutions as strategies of civic improvement can be effective. In this book, however, I take a different approach to the problem of cultivating democratic practices by focusing instead on the role of the built environment.
In turning to the built environment, I am drawing from much existing, multidisciplinary work. For one, there is a long, though often overlooked, tradition in the history of political thought that recognizes the power of the physical environment in shaping political behavior.26 Classic thinkers like Aristotle and Machiavelli, for example, note the importance of a city’s physical placement and layout for its longterm success;27 Rousseau and Montesquieu both discuss how geography might influence the internal dynamics of a political community.28 Likewise, Tocqueville connects the “pronounced physiognomy” of the American township with the feelings of affection and obligation between neighbors,29 just as Dewey argues that the spaces of the American frontier and local neighborhood were crucial in developing democratic habits in their residents.30
More recently, scholars have turned in more detail to chronicle the ways the built environment, as Margaret Kohn puts it, “orchestrate[s] social behavior by providing scripts for encounters and assembly.”31 Drawing on his “spatial obsessions,”32 for example, Michel Foucault famously showed how the physical spaces of the prison, school, and hospital were sites of disciplinary power that scripted and trained individuals into socially desirable behaviors.33 And decades of
25 Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since “Brown v. Board of Education” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Nancy L. Rosenblum, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
26 For another discussion of this “Topian tradition,” and in particular its connection to one’s ethical and political obligations, see Paulina Ochoa Espejo, On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
27 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics; Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner Press, 1994).
29 Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
30 Jennifer Forestal, “The Architecture of Political Spaces: Trolls, Digital Media, and Deweyan Democracy,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2017): 149–61.
31 Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3.
32 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 69.
33 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
research in environmental psychology supports his observations, showing how the design of the built environment influences not only our behaviors, but also our attitudes and perceptions as well. The spaces in which we live, work, and play, it turns out, profoundly shape the ways we develop our friendships, our feelings of trust and safety, our perceptions of different identity groups, and our sense of civic efficacy.34
And this disciplining effect of the built environment is often wielded consciously by those in power to achieve certain ends. As James C. Scott notes, it was through “modernizing schemes,” like Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris in the nineteenth century and Le Corbusier and the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)’s high modernism of the twentieth, that states utilized the built environment in order to render their populations more legible and their cities “more governable, prosperous, healthy, and architecturally imposing.”35 Likewise, as Susan Bickford argues, the design of suburbs and, especially, gated communities “enact[s] deep forms of segregation” and surveillance, fostering (unrealistic) goals of safety and purity in residents.36 By “reinforcing relatively stable cues about correct behavior,”37 in other words, the built environment has often been used intentionally as a powerful disciplinary force—a way to impose order on a disorderly world, clarify and regulate human relationships, and implement principles of beauty and harmony that would (supposedly) take the “mess” out of political life.
34 Michelle A. Payton, David C. Fulton, and Dorothy H. Anderson, “Influence of Place Attachment and Trust on Civic Action: A Study at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge,” Society and Natural Resources 18, no. 6 (2005): 511–28; Ryan D. Enos, The Space between Us: Social Geography and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Lisa Wood et al., “The Anatomy of the Safe and Social Suburb: An Exploratory Study of the Built Environment, Social Capital and Residents’ Perceptions of Safety,” Health and Place 14 (2008): 15–31; R. Robert Huckfeldt, “Social Contexts, Social Networks, and Urban Neighborhoods: Environmental Constraints on Friendship Choice,” American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 3 (1983): 651–69.
35 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 59. Haussmann and Le Corbusier were not alone in their attempts to wholly redesign cities to achieve utopian dreams. Many of the most famous architects, including Hippodamus, Vitruvius, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all unveiled grand designs for their ideal cities. And while the actual designs differed—in some cases quite dramatically—they all shared the underlying assumption that designing the “proper” city was the secret to political peace and prosperity. See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914); Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham, Architect, Planner of Cities, Volume 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958); Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (New York: Orion Press, 1967).
36 Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (2000): 356.
37 Kohn, Radical Space, 3.
But the “scripts” provided by the built environment do not only constrain our behavior; they can also empower us. The “public things” of the physical environment, argues Bonnie Honig, are vital for constructing and maintaining democratic publics. “Public things,” she writes, “press us into relations with others. They are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties.”38 The physical objects of the built environment help to shape our perceptions of one another; they “bind citizens into the complicated affective circuitries”39 that help to form the democratic “we.” In other words, as Kohn writes, the built environment “can incite democratic effects when it positions both subject and object together in a shared and contestable world.”40 Moreover, the relative permanence of the built environment can extend these democratic relationships into the future, as its spaces serve as the sites of public memory and remembrance that help democratic communities endure.41
The built environment shapes our individual attitudes and behaviors as well as our perceptions of interpersonal relationships. But it also, as many political theorists have noted, plays an integral role as a physical location for the performance of democratic politics.42 Politics, Hannah Arendt reminds us, requires “spaces of appearances” to manifest.43 Indeed, as John Parkinson argues, “democracy depends to a surprising extent on the availability of physical, public space”;44 the physical environment is both the location of democratic activity as well as, in many cases, its subject.45 It is the importance of publicly accessible spaces for democratic performance, moreover, that has led theorists in the past few decades to lament the privatization of the built environment’s public spaces.46
38 Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 6.
39 Honig, Public Things, 7.
40 Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004), 12.
41 Uri Jacob Matatyaou, “Memory- Space-Politics: Public Memorial and the Problem of Political Judgement” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2008); Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
42 Ali Aslam, “Building the Good Life: Architecture and Politics” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2010); Alexandra Kogl, Strange Places: The Political Potentials and Perils of Everyday Spaces (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
43 Arendt, The Human Condition; Jennifer Forestal, “Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design,” Political Studies 69, no. 1 (2020): 26–44.
44 John Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2.
45 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space, chap. 2.
46 Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods; Benjamin Barber, “Malled, Mauled, and Overhauled: Arresting Suburban Sprawl by Transforming Suburban Malls into Usable Civic Space,” in Public Space and Democracy, ed. Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 201–20.
At stake in this shift, they argue, is the loss of “the people’s” control over their environment—and the accompanying concern is that this loss of control will foreclose the democratic possibilities of the spaces in which we live, encounter, and act with others.47
There is no question, then, that the built environment influences our behavior and that it does so in ways that have effects for the possibilities of democratic politics. As all of this scholarship recognizes, the design of the built environment can profoundly reshape our patterns of thought and action. And because it can be used to change our behavior in these noticeable ways, the built environment is, in the parlance of political science, a manifestation of power. Moreover, the design choices that underlie the built environment can be just as effective at reshaping “user behavior” as more traditional manifestations of power, like laws and social norms. And, as we will see, this remains just as true in digital environments as it is for the more traditional physical ones. As a result, any effort to “fix” digital technologies—to make them more supportive of democratic politics—must account for the design of the built environment, just as much as the formal and informal institutions that currently dominate our imagination.
THE POWER OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Though we may not think of it in these terms, the built environment is an expression of power because it shapes our behavior in important—often invisible— ways. Power, in twentieth-century political scientist Robert A. Dahl’s famous formulation, is the ability to get someone to do something they would not otherwise do.48 Because it influences our behavior by enabling certain actions and constraining others, the effects of the built environment are therefore best understood in terms of power. And one way to explain the power of the built environment is by using the language of “affordances.”
Originally developed by the ecological psychologist James J. Gibson, “affordances” refer to the “action possibilities,” or opportunities for action, that exist due to the specific configuration of one’s environment. “The affordances of the environment,” wrote Gibson, “are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”49 A chair, for example, affords a place to sit; it also
47 Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Public Space and Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
48 Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 201–15.
49 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986), 127. Italics in original.
affords something to throw, kick, or bump into. What Gibson highlights with the language of affordances are the ways that the characteristics of certain physical spaces—like a classroom or restaurant—work to shape our actions; they afford certain behaviors, like sitting, over others like swimming or basketball. And this is true in digital environments as well; just as a kitchen stove affords the ability to cook hot meals, so too does Microsoft Excel afford the ability to quickly calculate large sums. Whether physical or digital, the affordances of an environment structure the field of possibilities for our actions.50
Crucially, the affordances of the built environment, unlike other manifestations of power like laws or social norms, can place hard restrictions on our activity. A brick wall, for example, makes it physically impossible to pass through or see who is on the other side, while the addition of doors or windows to that wall would make it more permeable. The presence of doorways and windows, then, adds affordances to that environment. And even the distinction between the affordances of a window and those of a doorway—though both might afford sight—is an important one, as anyone who has walked into a sliding glass door can attest.51
And while some affordances are naturally occurring—air, for example, affords us the ability to breathe and to move freely—many more, like the doorways and windows of the previous example, are not. They are instead the result of deliberate design choices made by specific actors. The placement of windows,
50 Importantly, for Gibson, affordances are not themselves agentive; they “do not cause behavior but constrain or control it” (1982, 411). Affordances, in other words, cannot make us take the actions they allow; rather, affordances merely structure the field of possibility for action. Thus, affordances alone—and the physical characteristics of the environment, which create those affordances—cannot entirely explain why individuals take the actions they do. Instead, “concepts like motivation and intention seem needed to explain why animals utilize certain affordances and not others at a certain moment in time” (Withagen et al. 2012, 252). Affordances, while important for constraining or enabling our behavior, are not deterministic. For more, see James J. Gibson, “Notes on Affordances,” in Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson, ed. Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 401–18; Rob Withagen et al., “Affordances Can Invite Behavior: Reconsidering the Relationship between Affordances and Agency,” New Ideas in Psychology 30 (2012): 250–58.
51 Because they are properties of the physical objects themselves, affordances are, according to Gibson, not a matter of perception. Indeed, Gibson argues, “[t]he observer may or may not perceive or attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be perceived. An affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it” (139). We may therefore (mistakenly) perceive a glass door to afford us the ability to pass through it; this does not mean that it will provide that affordance. In cases like this, as Gibson notes, “mistaken perceptions led to inappropriate actions” (142). Yet the affordances of the environment remain unchanged, according to Gibson’s theory. Later work on affordances, however, as I discuss below, takes a more expansive view of the relationship between perception, the environment, and affordances. See Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
doorways, and walls, and the choice of what material to construct them from, is therefore an exercise of power—it is a way to get someone to do something they would not otherwise do. And, again, this is true of digital environments as well. Facebook users cannot see the audience of their posts, for example, because the company’s developers have decided not to provide users that affordance.52
And this exercise of power can be a very effective one. As Don Norman argues in The Design of Everyday Things, a foundational design studies text and a cornerstone of contemporary Human-Computer Interaction design practices, “[w]ith the proper use of physical constraints . . . desired actions can be made obvious, usually by being especially salient.”53 By selecting the “right” configuration of characteristics in the built environment, in other words, designers can encourage users to engage in “desired” behaviors. By erecting walls or other barriers, for example, designers, architects, and builders can direct inhabitants to walk certain paths and not others; by limiting the number and types of user engagement options, software designers can likewise encourage users to share certain kinds of content over others.54
We can see such design strategies at work in grocery stores, which are built to encourage shoppers to buy more products.55 Similar tactics are at work in “defensive architecture” practices, which are intended to reduce “loitering” in public spaces,56 as well as in casinos, which are designed to keep gamblers inside to spend (and lose) more money.57 In digital environments, design choices like the use of “dark patterns”—such as the choice to display an opt-in option more prominently than the opt-out alternative—follow the same strategy.58 In all of these examples, whether physical or digital, the built environment is deliberately
52 We know this is a design choice, and not a technological impossibility, for two reasons. First, there was, at one point in time, a glitch in Facebook that temporarily showed users who viewed their post. Second, Facebook sells this information to advertisers. See, for example, Nick Statt, “Facebook Bug Accidentally Shows You How Popular Your Posts Are,” The Verge, October 15, 2015.
53 Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 125.
54 Amy Chozick, “This Is the Guy Who’s Taking Away the Likes,” New York Times, January 17, 2020.
55 Rebecca Rupp, “Surviving the Sneaky Psychology of Supermarkets,” National Geographic, June 14, 2015; Adam P. Vrechopoulos et al., “Virtual Store Layout: An Experimental Comparison in the Context of Grocery Retail,” Journal of Retailing 80, no. 1 (2004): 13–22.
56 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
57 David Kranes, “Play Grounds,” Journal of Gambling Studies 11, no. 1 (1995): 91–102; Bill Friedman, Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition (Reno, NV: Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, University of Nevada, 2000).
58 Sidney Fussell, “The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet,” The Atlantic, August 2, 2019; Harry Brignull, “Dark Patterns: Inside the Interfaces Designed to Trick You,” The Verge, August 29, 2013.
