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Further Reading

These works shaped the thinking behind the Agora Constitution. They span political philosophy, technology criticism, systems thinking, and civic design — and they don’t all agree with each other. That’s the point.

Books

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835/1840. The original diagnosis of democracy’s strengths and vulnerabilities — including the “soft despotism” of systems that compress and stupefy rather than overtly oppress.

Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Liveright, 2014. A close reading of the Declaration that recovers equality as its central commitment — relevant to any document that claims to extend democratic principles into new territory.

Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019. How systems encode discrimination by design, not just by neglect. A challenge to any project claiming to build fair infrastructure.

Brantly, Aaron. “Utopia Lost — Human Rights in a Digital World.” Applied Cybersecurity and Internet Governance (ACIG), Vol. 1, No. 1, 2022. An examination of how digital systems have eroded the human rights framework that was supposed to protect people within them.

Fleming, David. Surviving the Future. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016. A case for localism, community-scale economics, and resilient institutions as the path through systemic fragility. The civic infrastructure argument applied to everything.

Goldberg, Jonah. Suicide of the West. Crown Forum, 2018. Argues that the liberal democratic order is a historical anomaly that can be lost through complacency — a reminder that the techno-social contract, like any contract, requires active maintenance.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961. The original “desire path” argument — that the people who use systems understand them better than the people who design them. The intellectual ancestor of building from reality rather than theory.

Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build. Basic Books, 2020. Argues that institutions should be formative — shaping the character of the people within them — rather than performative. The question for any system: does it form people or just platform them?

Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. The essential introduction to feedback loops, leverage points, and system dynamics. Technological systems are systems — understanding where power concentrates is the first step to asserting rights within them.

O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown, 2016. How algorithmic decision-making creates opaque, unaccountable, and often discriminatory systems — the empirical case for Articles III, V, and VI.

Pahlka, Jennifer. Recoding America. Metropolitan Books, 2023. Why government technology fails and what it would take to build civic systems that actually serve people. The most practical book on this list.

Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society. Harvard University Press, 2015. The case for transparency in algorithmic systems — when you can’t see how decisions are made, you can’t contest them. Directly supports Article III.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Documents the collapse of civic infrastructure in America. The social context for why technology that strengthens communities matters more than technology that replaces them.

Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge. Brookings Institution Press, 2021. Defends the epistemic institutions — science, journalism, law — that produce shared truth. A parallel constitution to this one, for the information ecosystem rather than the technological one.

Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. The accessible introduction to competing theories of justice — utilitarian, libertarian, communitarian. Essential for understanding what “fairness” means when encoded in systems.

Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Argues that some things should not be commodified. The attention, identity, and access that systems mediate are among them.

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. A critique of meritocratic sorting systems — relevant to any architecture that assigns status, rank, or access based on algorithmic judgment.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, 1998. How large-scale systems simplify and flatten the complexity of human life in order to make it legible and controllable. The cautionary tale for any project that imposes structure on civic reality — including this one.

Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Blond & Briggs, 1973. The foundational argument that technology should be scaled to serve people, not the other way around. The philosophical case for local, human-scale systems.

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Knopf, 1999. Redefines development as the expansion of human capabilities — not GDP, not efficiency, but what people are actually able to do and be. The deepest framework for what “access” in Article VI really means.

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor. University of Chicago Press, 1986. The classic argument that artifacts have politics — that the design of a system embeds values whether the designer intends it or not. The philosophical foundation for “architecture is governance.”

Podcasts & Film

Harris, Tristan and Aza Raskin. Your Undivided Attention (podcast). Center for Humane Technology. https://www.humanetech.com/podcast

Orlowski, Jeff (director). The Social Dilemma (documentary). Netflix, 2020.