A Bounded Web: Platforms and the Crisis of Social Life - Hardcover

Bitton, Mathis L.; Sadler, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009838067 ISBN 13: 9781009838061

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2026

Synopsis

The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of 'middleware' and even entertains the pursuit of local 'digital Sabbath' policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we've lost and imagine what we might build in its place.

About this title

About the Authors

Mathis L. Bitton is a PhD candidate in the Government Department at Harvard  University. His work focuses on the philosophy and history of technology. His academic writings have been published in the European Journal of Political Theory, Contemporary  Political Theory, and Critical Inquiry, among others.

Jack Sadler is a lawyer in New York City and a Corresponding Fellow at the Yale Law School Center for Private Law. His academic work focuses on associational life, technology, and the law. Jack graduated from Yale Law School, after which he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009838067
• ISBN 13: 9781009838061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 230