Local Digital Social Networks

What replaces it is not yet clear. My students do not appear to be nihilists (which is remarkable to me for reasons I will get into in another essay). They are animated by other things. By place rather than displacement, by community rather than mobility, by the slow and the local rather than the far and the foreign. Whether this is the beginning... See more

Dewey’s faith in the potential of institutions that treat democratic knowledge not as a problem to be managed but as a capacity to be cultivated is harder to carry right now. But the alternative is accepting Lippmann’s premises wholesale, conceding that the only question worth asking is who manages the herd and how.

Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows. To answer the question Habermas never adequately posed: the public sphere, such as it is, functions for those who own it.

The press that Dewey hoped could enable public formation was instead consolidated to prevent it. The newspaper did not become an instrument of inquiry; it manufactured consent for a status quo that prioritized profit at almost any cost and condoned war for almost any reason. The fourth estate never belonged to the public, and it had always been in... See more

The metric for success isn’t a top-performing story — it’s whether the system is more connected and aware of itself than it was before, and whether unlikely collaborations or new alliances are leading to novel insights and useful interventions.

It is worth recalling that the foundations of liberal political thought were laid in part by Hobbes, whose central concern was neither liberty for its own sake nor power for its own sake — it was liberty born from state-enforced peace.

Hobbes argued that without the firm and consistent application of law, society would descend into chaos, violence,... See more