Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley – Democracy and Design – Six Silberman

This paper, from the Design Fictions track at ACM GROUP 2016, is a review of a non-existent book, Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley: Exploring Institutional Diversity on the Internet, edited by a non-existent researcher named Kieran X. Yuval and published in 2021 (a date, at time of writing, decidedly in the future) by NJU Press, a non- existent academic press. In contrast to the fictitious nature of the editor, book, and press, Elinor Ostrom was a real person and everything described about her and her work in the paper is, to the best of the author’s knowledge, true.

Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley is a collection of empirical and theoretical contributions from researchers in the “traditional” social sciences, economics, human-centered computing (HCC), and science and technology studies (STS) that explores four major contemporary “information soci- ety” developments—the “on-demand economy,” online ac- cess to scholarly publications, online harassment, and “plat- form cooperativism”—from a perspective that integrates the sociotechnical and the political-economic. The contribu- tions to the volume consider the phenomena under study through the lens of the Institutional Analysis and Devel- opment (IAD) framework, developed over four decades by the political economist Elinor Ostrom—the first woman and first non-economist to win the Nobel Prize in economics (in 2009)—and her colleagues at the Workshop on Political The- ory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.