Ro Khanna makes the case for digital public space

The fact that we’re even having to ask that question shows the problem: unlike in the newspaper business and in the broadcast business, social media has no separate sphere that’s divorced from profit maximization.

what we need to do is rethink this sense of unfettered capitalism in an age of globalization and say, no, we still have to value community, we still have to value place, and we need to have a capitalist system that allows for enough state intervention, that helps places survive and thrive.

How can we make the case for publicness in a culture that’s very used to private companies?

we underappreciated people’s attachment to place. We underappreciated the necessity of community. I think now we’re suffering the consequence of that with a lot of communities destroyed—many of them now feeling they don’t have a place in a modern economy, and don’t have a sense of identity.

I would argue that what you need is a mix of the public and the private. You need more digital public spheres—both local governments could create it; nonprofits could create it.

If you look at (German philosopher Jürgen) Habermas’ ideal speech community, everyone has to be equals, and everyone has to have good intentions. This is the sense of an ideal public speech that then at its best leads to moral truths and legal legitimacy. But he realizes in his later works, Between Facts and Norms, that democracy is messy and you’r... See more

it’s hard for Silicon Valley platform people to remember that different places have different characters and qualities

So what we have to do, in my view, is to make the participation of the digital sphere more active, more empowering. There are many ways you could do that, but I’m thinking of a site that’s a bit more formal and inclusive of everyone, discussing issues affecting the community.

One of the advantages of a plurality of places is the sense that if America is going to be a composite nation—what Frederick Douglass said is sort of a composite of all different cultures at any given time, with all of us working in a democratic way to create it—that it works better if there are also spaces in such a democracy to allow for thicker ... See more

the amount of time people spend on Twitter and Facebook and like and share and comment is partly a function of not having any other way of having a voice in government, a sense of disaffection.