The End of the Public Cyber-Square

It's time to let go of the idea that the internet will provide some sort of public square.

The latest wake-up call came from Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that Meta's already barely-existent and largely ineffective moderation system would be scaled back to even less (best coverage of the day-- The Guardian researching the watch he was wearing). There are still some standards in place, sort of, but mostly Zuck has signaled that he wants to be part of the anti-fact MAGA world.

Mostly folks are missing that this flap is another sign of how far Facebook has strayed from its original promise. My Facebook days go all the way back to the era when you could only get an account as a student or parent of certain universities, so I can tell tales of the days when Facebook allowed you to stay in contact with friends and family. It was ingenious. You told Facebook whose posts you wanted to see, and Facebook showed them to you.

It was an internet public square of sorts, a place you could go and be assured you'd see people you knew and wanted to stay connected to. You could find old friends and, in the case of teachers, former students.

But that didn't last. Instead of simply showing you what you asked to see, Facebook started shoving other stuff at you, showing you what someone else wanted to see. The public square started to grow a thousand billboards and snake oil salesmen. Enshittification set in as Facebook tested its limits. How many people will leave if we tweak this feature? How much will people pay us to have their content shoved in front of everyone's eyeballs? How much violation of privacy will people tolerate as we mine their profiles in order to make our advertising sales better targeted?

And so now we have the Facebook that we only sort of use, a stream of spam and ads that can't be trusted because nobody vets them, interspersed every ten posts or so by the stuff we actually want to see. If you use Facebook much at all, your reaction to the Meta announcement is a bit meh, because chances are you've had a post taken down for no discernable reason even as you scroll past blatant lies.

Twitter, the other contender for a public square designation, has become President Musk's private playground. I love Bluesky, but it's not going to be the new Twitter, and it's the best in a long line of sad, failed attempts to create a new internet public square (Google Plus, anyone?). And let's not even start on social media accounts of people who are not actually people; AI is going to make us nostalgic for old-fashioned sock puppets; at least those fake people were real people.

It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release.

There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win.

Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have. This is part of wearing your big boy and big girl pants in the grown up world-- most of the tools and services available to do your work involve dealing with sub-optimal people and companies. You have to make your choices and decide which compromises you can live with. Does the benefit you get outweigh the problematic nature of the tool you're using? Corporations will give us what they want to give us; it has always been up to us to sift through that for the things we can use.

I can scroll past the baloney on Facebook to keep in touch with people who matter to me. This blog is published on blogspot (owned by Google) and also on Substack, both of which are in some ways problematic. But it lets me do part of my work and be part of a network that, sitting here in a small town, I would never have otherwise connected with. On the other hand, I won't use AI images to spruce up the blog because the environmental, ethical, and reality-eroding costs are not worth making the blog marginally more pretty. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, which is its own little pang, because those calculations will hasten the break-up of the public space as people peel off to their separate new places.

It sucks that enshittification has been accelerated by a second Trump administration. It can feel like community is breaking down just as we need it, that our ability to build a consensus reality based on, you know, reality, is being broken down at the exact same moment that people who want to attack it are coming to power. It sucks, but there it is. Sometimes you wake up in Interesting Times and there's nothing really for it except to suck it up and do the work.

Teachers are especially well-prepared to deal with these sorts of times. It's pretty standard operating procedure for classroom teachers to find ways to do their jobs despite a lack of support from the people who are supposed to support them. For most of my career, I called teaching a guerilla job, a job in which you have to work around your administration and, increasingly, around the state and federal bureaucrats and politicians who seem to devote far more energy to making your job harder than helping you do it.

Many states have been hostile territory for public education for years; now, the whole country will become more hostile. But there was never a golden age when national politics were noted for boosting and supporting public education.

So find your support network. I notice that many folks are patching one together out of several platforms, and that makes sense-- social media diversification protects you from the sudden collapse of any one platform (hasta la vista, Cafe Utne). But in the meantime, it's probably time to let go of the dream of some social media platform where everyone gets together, asshats are muted, and all the communicating you want to do can be done freely and safely at one URL. No corporation was ever going to be a reliable arbiter of the truth, and now they've at least said out loud that they don't intend to try. Let's get on with it.