The fate of democracy depends on our ability to see each other, influence each other, and make meaning with each other. All of that will happen to a large degree in digital spaces.
he prepared to make his offer to buy Twitter, Elon Musk asked on the site whether “a new platform is needed” for “the de facto public town square.” Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s cofounder—and, until recently, its CEO—replied to him privately in a now-public text: “Yes, a new platform is needed,”
Musk is unlikely to listen—especially given the plans he announced Thursday morning to make Twitter the “most respected advertising platform in the world.” Twitter after Musk’s purchase will be loaded with debt; interest alone will be billions of dollars each year. And his alliance with far-right voices , combined with his undercooked ideas about content moderation, make him an unlikely steward for the kind of cohesion and meaning-building digital “town square” democracies need.
Musk’s purchase is the inevitable outcome of a choice we collectively made to cede our public sphere to centralized, advertising-driven companies controlled by a few men. The outcome has been a functionally autocratic digital environment in which you can tweet whatever you want—but to change the dynamics of the platform itself, you need $44 billion.
We start by taking the town square metaphor seriously—not just because town squares are not run for financial gain, but because a meaningful understanding of how public spaces work in healthy communities in the physical world can give us a great deal of insight about how to structure the digital world. In the physical world, we’ve developed a whole host of social affordances and institutions–from park benches and parks to schools to sidewalks to libraries—to help build cohesion and inclusion.