Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • Letter to the Boulder City Council on municipal broadband

    In advance of the meeting tomorrow, I would like to write in support of moving forward on expanding our city-owned broadband resources. Several years of research on municipal and other community-based broadband solutions has made clear to me that communities need to take an active role in ensuring that their internet access is accessible, affordable,…

  • Radical Tradition

    This May Day, this Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, I apologize in advance. But I also don’t. The next few months, I’ll be working hard to spread the word about my new book, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by the good people at Nation Books. The…

  • Serving the State

    This month I have a new title—I’m an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, on tenure track. It’s not fully clear to me how this departure from the precariat happened, except that it involved a move across the country with my family, astonishingly supportive colleagues, patient students, and an opportunity…

  • What Happened to the Future?

    Hi there! We’re just a few weeks away from the third #platformcoop conference at The New School in New York—a celebration and strategy session for a truly democratic internet. It’s called The People’s Disruption, and it runs all day November 10 and 11. If you can come to just one part of it, come to…

  • The People’s Disruption

    Want to help bring democracy to the internet? On the heels of the successful platform co-op conference in Toronto, I’m now working with a mighty team of collaborators to organize November’s conference in New York, The People’s Disruption. It’s all about connecting the resources of the present with ambitious visions of a cooperative future online,…

  • Electricity People

    The big oil and electric companies are largely unaccountable to the communities they power and pollute. But the U.S. power grid has other kinds of companies, too. Seventy-five percent of the landmass of the country gets electricity from electric cooperatives—a wildly successful New Deal program, long maligned as communist, and now little-remembered, even by its…

  • Innovation for Everyone

    Catch it while we still have public radio: This weekend I’ll be on WBGH-Boston’s show Innovation Hub. Listen online or over the air with your local NPR affiliate. I’m talking about Ours to Hack and to Own, the new collective manifesto for a cooperative internet that I co-edited with Trebor Scholz. The book is available…

  • #WeAreTwitter

    Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become…

  • Ours to Hack

    The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a…

  • Free the Land

    What would it take for black lives to matter in America? In this month’s issue of Vice magazine, I take a long look at one answer to that question in Jackson, Mississippi. There, in 2013, voters elected black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as mayor based on promises of direct democracy and cooperative enterprise. Lumumba died unexpectedly…