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GlenWeyl committed Mar 18, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -71,7 +71,7 @@ But purely public spaces have important limitations: they do not allow groups to

### Establishing context

To the extent parks and squares are the site of protest and collective action, we might well search for a digital public square, a function many [platforms](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-town-square/) have purported to serve.[^PariserMusk] Sites on the original World Wide Web offered unprecedented opportunities for a range of people to make their messages available. But as Economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon [famously observed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy), this deluge of information created a paucity of attention.[^Simon] Soon it became hard to know if, who and how one was reaching an audience with a website and proprietary search systems like Google and proprietary social networks like Facebook and Twitter became the platforms of choice for digital communication. The digital public square had become a private concession, with the CEO of these companies proudly declaring themselves the [public utility](https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html) or public square of the digital age while surveilling and monetizing user interactions through targeted advertising.[^utility]
To the extent parks and squares are the site of protest and collective action, we might well search for a digital public square, a function many [platforms](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-town-square/) have purported to serve.[^PariserMusk] Sites on the original World Wide Web offered unprecedented opportunities for a range of people to make their messages available. But as Economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon [famously observed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy), this deluge of information created a paucity of attention.[^Simon] Soon it became hard to know if, who and how one was reaching an audience with a website and proprietary search systems like Google. Proprietary social networks like Facebook and Twitter became the platforms of choice for digital communication, but only partly addressed the issue as they had limited (and usually pay-for) affordances for understanding audiences. The digital public square had become a private concession, with the CEO of these companies proudly declaring themselves the [public utility](https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html) or public square of the digital age while surveilling and monetizing user interactions through targeted advertising.[^utility]

[^PariserMusk]: Eli Pariser, "Musk’s Twitter Will Not Be the Town Square the World Needs", *WIRED* October 28, 2022 at https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-town-square/.
[^Simon]: Herbert Simon, *Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World* (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971): pp. 37-52.
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