The future feels broken. Amidst layoffs, misinformation and global tensions, tech giants have been praising AI as the future of work. It’s left us wondering: what exactly does this “future” entail? Is it one we want to live in? Why do we feel an increasing sense of dread when we think about the future?
My partner and I founded Studio Terranova, a Tokyo-based cooperative, last year as our way of navigating ourselves through these choppy waters. We are two tech freelancers who work on games—we share revenue and use the surplus, plus support from our followers, to self-publish video games. Our clients range from forward-thinking companies like ustwo and Peerdom to non-profits.
When I think about the future, it’s hard not to think about the past—how it has shaped our lives up until now and what we could do to walk a different path.
Promises versus reality
In the mid-00s, I believed technology was the greatest equalizer on earth. With social media, undiscovered artists could go viral. With Kickstarter, niche projects could be funded, and with Uber, anyone could turn their car into extra income.
The promise was that people would get paid for creative work and have free time to focus on what was important to them.
The reality we’re living in is more complicated. Artists can go viral, but it requires either sheer luck or an intimate knowledge of “the algorithm’s” quirks. Niche projects can get funded, but mainly if it is a comic anthology or a dance residency—only 17% of journalism projects are successfully funded. Uber drivers can make extra income, as long as they agree to Uber controlling fare prices, providing no healthcare, and taking a 25% cut of their earnings.
These companies did deliver on their promises, in a way. They gave us more options to be seen, be funded, and work. But the implied promise of “going viral,” and “getting paid for creative work,” and “having free time” was also getting more agency and power. This has materialized for a small percentage of people, but not most.
Around the time I entered the field of design in the mid-00s, the hot topic was who had the authority to implement design decisions. Leadership would make strategy decisions that would affect the design team—say, splitting the business into five separate properties. This would materialize to the design team as a request such as, “put five separate sections, all the same size on the homepage. Make it look nice.” As anyone who has received this request before knows, it’s difficult to cram five disparate pieces of information in one place and “make it look nice,” much less functional. We as designers wanted to change this—to show that design wasn’t just “how it looked” but how it functioned and what it could do with the strategy behind it.
I came into design leadership around the same time I moved to Japan—one of the strongest hierarchical work cultures in the world. I lobbied in English and Japanese to invest in design research and build autonomous teams. This would simplify and make processes more user-friendly, streamlined, seamless and friendlier, I argued.
And I got what I wanted, in a way. The dark side of seamlessness is convenience at a hidden cost. The dark side of friendliness is manipulating people into believing a for-profit business shares their values, when in fact it does not.
Designers, myself included, did not transform the way power was shared; we added another person in the room. It is the same way tech companies did not “empower” people—they simply replaced who was in charge.
Realizing that good design had not upended the status quo made me realize that a system that doesn’t share power will, by design, build products that allow it to hold onto that power for as long as it can, whether that be our wallets, our data, or our attention spans. Holding on tightly to power does not serve our clients, our players, the community, or the world. It is not sustainable nor future-thinking. I wanted something different.
So I started researching how one transforms power to be shared, rather than held indefinitely. This is how I came upon the concept of governance in a very unexpected place.
Learning about power in unexpected places
In order to change how power is shared, I had to learn about governance—that is, the rules, laws and norms that are borne from individuals organizing as a group.
As I researched different types of organizational governance from activists to Fortune 500 companies, I wanted something that balanced clarity and structure with more human elements of our work. I found inspiration in a very unexpected place.
I am an old-school BL (boy’s love) fan. Boy’s love are stories, art, and games featuring male/male romance. I enjoy attending conferences and writing about the meta-fandom—how fans self-organize to write the works they want to see. They have been using the internet to connect and swap stories about hot men since the 80’s.
Technology heavily influences the way they interact with each other and how they create their work, so fans talk about the limitations of software a lot—what you can and can’t do, and how it can be hacked. And hack it they do.
From my article The Birth, Rebirth and Death of Slash:
“Del.icio.us, in its heyday in the 00’s, was an ingenious bookmarking site that allowed users to “tag” websites for faster searching. Fans could also share the tags they made with others. Normal people might make tags like “travel” or “Japan,” but the slash community repurposed tagging in an entirely different way—using tags to cleverly make notes for themselves and for others, such as:
Using del.icio.us, fans could search and tag fan works even if they were published on different sites. This allowed them to expertly search within a single creator or to search for fan work they had lost links to. In 2010, del.icio.us was purchased by the founders of YouTube. As a way of “renewing” the service for new users, they removed many features, one of them being the ability to type the “/” character into the search box. It was clear what the new owners of del.icio.us wanted the site to be and what fans wanted the site to be were at odds with one another.”
There was a mass migration to other sites like Pinboard.in.
Fan works were written making fun of del.icio.us. The owners were deeply confused.
This cycle of destruction and rebirth is ever-present in fan discussions. The continual shutdown of fandom spaces following tech companies going public or bans of explicit material has caused many fan works to be lost and more edgy creators to be pushed to the margins of the web. (i.e. LiveJournal, Tumblr) They were the victims of these sites becoming more seamless. When things like this happened at my work, it was portrayed as the “natural result of progress and innovation,” but to these fans, I was carelessly destroying their homes and livelihoods.
But they were not helpless. Some started to organize to build their own self-hosted communities on the web, which I followed with curiosity.
One such community is BobaBoard. The founder, Ms Boba, started, like I did, from the tech industry and dreamed of making fan space better and more resilient, instead of rebuilding every several years when a platform went down. How could she make a collaborative network of people actively helping one another build better spaces on the web?
Should they rebel against the powers that be?
From her talk, Rebuilding Community on the (Fujo)Web:
“Indie projects are often born as a rebellion against large tech platforms, with the desire to shift the balance of power and put it closer to the users. But shifting who is in power doesn’t change that a hierarchy exists, no matter what intentions the power shift is born with.”
I saw this as a warning: the tools that you have used up until now will not liberate you from this cycle of destruction. Inevitably, if you take on all the power, you’ll be perpetuating the cycle you wished to destroy. The solution is not to watch it give up, though:
“However, when people saw us come forward with our frustration and pain, and express the overwhelming weight of what we were carrying, it made it harder to continue the narrative of us vs them, platform user vs builder, server members vs moderators, person who can’t and person who can. After that discussion, people saw us for who we truly are: members of their same community that, for all their weaknesses and faults, are trying to build something that makes a difference.”
The solution was not to have a “seat at the table”— it was to be vulnerable and open the process up to others.
And this, in essence, is what sociocracy is. It is governance that is consent-based and collaborative. The more I read and practiced sociocracy, the more it resonated with me.
And if fans who use technology can do it, certainly we who design this technology can do it as well.
I realized why we wanted to run Studio Terranova like a cooperative. There comes a point where optimization drains color from our lives instead of adding to it. We could not continue enjoying our lives if what we had to look forward to was black and white. We wanted to re-color the way we did work—to do the hard work to feel passionate and hopeful again.
A tall order for a humble framework.
Into sociocracy we dove.
