on digital town squares

Hi friends.

You last heard from me (on this platform) a couple of months ago. Since then, there have been a fair number of exciting / daunting changes in my professional, research and personal lives (and I’ll tell you about them soon, I promise).

Since then, there have also been a few changes around the Interwebs. The social network formerly known as Twitter is now the bird-less X, Meta has expanded its empire to include Threads, and the fediverse has undergone a new wave of growth. Whilst none of these developments have significantly altered my incessant habit of doomscrolling (yet), they have given me pause: as a Gen Z who found community in online fandoms as a teen, a policy nerd who cares a lot about democracy, and a writer and reader who really likes to know what other humans are thinking about.

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About a year and a half ago, the richest man on this planet decided to purchase what he described as the “digital town square” — a platform vital to “free speech, […] the bedrock of a functioning democracy”. At first glance, his move to secure ownership of Twitter-now-X was yet another episode in the shenanigans of the kooky, comic-book-villain descendant of slave-owners. In hindsight now, and upon closer inspection: Musk’s takeover was, and continues to be, a sign of dangerous times.

I’m finding myself grappling with new questions now: about corporate governance in the tech industry; and the impacts of capitalist interests on the free press and the marketplace of ideas. In this digital age, I want to know how concerned we should be, that public discourse can be under the control and oversight of private owners and their algorithms. I am wondering about what it means to build communities of resistance and solidarity in increasingly unsafe online environments. And, as I watch power both shift, become entrenched and further concentrated, and manifest in new ways: I am rethinking what it means be an ethical consumer, when the products we’re consuming are social media platforms now fundamental to political and social participation.

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I haven’t worked out the answers yet, but I might come back to them one day, and share once I’ve done a bit more unravelling my thoughts. In the meantime, though, I wanted to signal these qualms I’m having, on a platform that itself has been roundly critiqued for — amongst other issues — harbouring (and empowering) anti-trans rhetoric. As I work out whether I’d like to continue having a presence here, I hope it’s clear that this is rhetoric that I don’t subscribe to, and that I absolutely consider Substack as a platform as having at least some responsibility over the content its users create.

After all, as we’ve learned from Twitter’s demise: the design of our town squares matter.