NN Ep:7 Meta-Politics: Designing Digital Environments for Civic Power with Audrey & Nathan Schneider

New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐

In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer speak with Audrey Tang, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, and Nathan Schneider, professor and author of Governable Spaces. Together they explore Meta-Politics — the foundational design of digital infrastructures that shape how civil society governs itself online.

Audrey and Nathan discuss how platforms today constrain collective action, how democratic protocols like alignment assemblies can counter online harms, and why new governance substrates must embed values such as plurality, civic care, interoperability, and entanglement. They also examine decentralized identities, freedom of movement, DAOs, religion as governance, and how network-native communities can evolve into political actors.

A powerful conversation about the next layer of digital democracy — and what it takes to build civic technologies that empower global communities.

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00:00 – Cold start 02:18 – Introducing Audrey Tang & Nathan Schneider 03:07 – Nathan: "Why I worry about the word meta" 05:10 – Nation-states as fragile historical accidents 06:15 – Self-governing online networks as new politics 08:16 – How today's platforms limit civic life 10:22 – Blockchains break the server–client power structure 12:17 – Nation-states reacting to decentralized governance 14:33 – Audrey: Democracy as a "social technology" 16:37 – Deepfakes, alignment assemblies & Taiwan's model 18:33 – Crowdsourced policymaking at national scale 20:49 – Freedom of movement & interoperability design 22:48 – What Network Nation aims to build 24:52 – Audrey's "Six-Pack of Care" 27:13 – Embedding civic care into protocols 29:21 – Bridging systems & depolarization 31:33 – What values can — and cannot — be encoded 33:28 – Forking, polycentric governance & metastability 35:52 – Norms vs code: where power really lives 37:41 – How decentralized tech forces governance innovation 39:51 – Why cooperatives aren't enough for politics 42:13 – Religion as a governance model for network nations 45:17 – Open movements & global political power 47:15 – Civil society as a political actor 49:40 – Verifiable credentials & protecting deliberation 51:52 – Avoiding dystopia & VC-dominated "network states" 54:17 – Funding, incentives & getting there first 56:43 – Poison pills & preventing bad governance 58:39 – Scaling across vs scaling up 01:00:44 – Fractal scaling & mutualization 01:02:53 – Naming as the first political act 01:05:59 – Different starting points for network nations 01:08:15 – Diversity, plurality & collective action 01:10:29 – Making conflict fun through bridging 01:12:41 – Innovation amnesia & protecting past wins 01:14:42 – Values vs opinions in political communities 01:16:37 – Civic care vs individual virtue ethics 01:19:00 – Entanglement as cohesion 01:21:11 – Building a narrative that reaches real people 01:23:25 – Applying meta-politics to global crises 01:25:46 – Everyday tools already enabling the future 01:26:51 – Closing