Public Goods

We [also] build our sense of civic identity and opinions about government through social interactions. […] Our social capital — which Putnam defines as the overarching belief about society that facilitates co-operation — diminishes when we lose opportunities to engage with people outside of our regular social networks.

We want nothing less than entire communities aping into a redefinition of public concern. The opportunity in front of us is bigger than any one protocol. In today's world, capital is not scarce; ambitious visions for the public's benefit are.

When we think of the public, we should think expansively. This is not to say that we must consider everyone in the world as a part of our public. As we emphasized in our essay on squads, we also celebrate small, self-selective communities and trust-based groups. But by considering the effects (positive and negative) that we might have on groups at

Every one of us is a beneficiary of the public goods of societies past. These grand projects humble us. Cathedrals, great canals, sanitation, the expansion of mass literacy—they tell us that the "goodness" of a public good is also measured in terms of its longevity. To match these great works, we must extend our time horizon. We want to ensure

That private platforms such as Amazon’s Twitch, Twitter and Facebook now constitute the digital equivalents to public spheres is as much a political failure as one of our collective imagination.