How to Distinguish Digital Public Squares from Royal Courts

I reminisced the other day about the golden age of Usenet. Admittedly, those days weren’t long in number, but they were good while they lasted. 

In the early 90s, I subscribed to a few Usenet forums (fora, if you insist), including a few related to my favorite bands, sports teams, and technological interests. The sense of community on those discussion groups was strong. On one group, dedicated to a rock band that had more of a cult following than anything approaching mass appeal, I mentioned that I’d attended a concert by one of the former band members at a local nightclub that summer. A member of the discussion group who lived on the other side of the continent reached out to me on email to ask whether I wanted a recording of the performance I attended. Less than a week later, a cassette tape of the performance arrived in my real-world mailbox (as opposed to the email inbox that we have come to call a mailbox these days).

At the risk of falling prey to nostalgia and romanticism, I will go so far as to say similar gestures of generosity and kindness were far from rare on the Usenet groups with which I was familiar. As a participant, one sensed and experienced a genuine community of interests.  

For those of you who weren’t around back then or don’t remember Usenet, it was an online, distributed discussion system that, like the Internet itself, spanned the globe. Unlike bulletin-board systems (BBS) or web discussion boards, which are typically hosted on a centralized server and have a dedicated administrator or hosting provider, Usenet was scattered across news servers that stored and forwarded messages to each other via “news feeds". Applications called newsreaders were used to access content on Usenet groups, though browser-based surfaced later. Usenet still exists, apparently, but few people use it these days.

In hindsight, Usenet seems to have been a prototype of a digital public square. Usenet was not perfect – it became infested with spam, hate, and the sort of anonymous obnoxiousness that is legion online– but, for a while, it was a stimulating and welcoming environment in which to spend a portion of one’s spare time. I found groups of people there who were constructive and knowledgeable on the subjects at hand, and they engaged in mostly civil and respectful discourse. Later, as seems to happen repeatedly in digital realms, a band of barbarians plundered Usenet’s towns and villages and left nearly everything in smoldering ruins.

Fast forward to the present, though, where Elon Musk says Twitter/X can serve as a new and improved digital public square. But is it a digital public square?  

Defining Our Terms

Let’s first consider a dictionary definition of public square:

A public square is an open public space, typically in the shape of a square or rectangle, often found in the heart of a city or town. It is designed for community gatherings, public events, performances, and other social activities. It usually features pedestrian paths, landscaped areas, sculptures, fountains or other art installations, seating and sometimes, commercial establishments on the peripheral. Examples of public squares include city plazas, town greens, and market squares.

With all due respect and apologies to the metaverse and its bondage headgear, many attributes of the real-world public square do not translate easily to the digital sphere. As such, let’s take a look at what the Wikipedia cognoscenti have to say about the digital public square:

A digital public square (DPS) is a user-driven website that relies upon user-generated content (UGC), created by a group of people with a common interest in a specific community. At its most basic, a digital public square represents an evolution in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. Users/content providers share the common goal of informing and becoming more informed about a shared geographic community or a community of ideas.

Modeled after the traditional “public square” where townspeople would gather to exchange views, a digital public square provides a virtual platform for the exploration of issues and the sharing of ideas, creativity and opinions while developing solutions to a community's challenges. A thriving digital public square has a rich content stream that may include video footage of community events and an interactive community record of non-profit news and resources. The DPS offers a platform for dialogue and encourages people to connect in a virtual setting to establish relationships that can effect social change.

It seems a little idyllic, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a worthy goal, and we should aim high, but, in practice, people seem unable to reach those altitudes. In our social media, as in so much else, we usually experience a little more grittiness and grime than the preceding definition is willing to acknowledge.

Now, let’s examine Musk’s claim that Twitter/X meets the definition of a “digital town square.” We’ll even relax our standards a bit and accept imperfections; we’ll compromise on the ideal form. It’s the spirit that counts.

Musk says he’s a proponent of free speech and that Twitter/X exemplifies a commitment to allow all people to express their opinions and engage in discourse that is free of censorship. Musk seems to believe Twitter/X qualifies as a digital public square (or town square) because it offers room for open dialogue, including a liberal (but not that kind of liberal) exchange of views. 

But I’m not entirely sure that Musk accurately captures the essence of today’s Twitter/X.  I know we’re relaxing our standards, but Twitter seems to have gone the Mad Max route since coming under new management. But even putting aside our subjective value judgments, Twitter struggles to check enough boxes for certification as a public square, falling short of the mark in at least one or two critical respects.

X Mars the Spot 

Before we refute Twitter/X’s fitness to serve as a public square, however, let us make a brief digression to indulge my annoyance with the platform’s current moniker. I’m sure I’m not alone in my resistance to calling Twitter “X”, a name that means more to Musk than it does to anybody else. 

Musk is often touted in the business press as a an exceptionally intelligent human being. He knows his limits, though. He said recently that artificial intelligence is poised to relegate him (and, it goes without saying, the rest of us) to the status of idle spectator in the intellectual Olympiad showcasing unparalleled expertise and knowledge. 

Perhaps he’s right about the otherworldly cerebral capacity of AI – we’ll know soon enough, electricity and datacenter infrastructure permitting – but he seems to fail the test as a brand marketer. It’s his company, though, and he is presumably sufficiently free to trash its value. That said, I’m about to do him a favor now, in my decidedly modest corner of the internet, by reverting to calling his company Twitter. He’ll thank me for it. (Actually, he won’t, but you get the gist.) 

Now let’s get back to the debate about whether Twitter qualifies for status as a digital square. 

First off, I challenge the assertion that Twitter is now, under Musk’s guardianship, truly powered by user-generated content. Oh, there are still scores of users on Twitter (though not as many as before), and they generate content, but the algorithms employed by Twitter and the new policies and procedures that boost some content over others obviates the principles of parity and equality that tend to govern the use of public squares, digital or otherwise.

If you go to a real-world public square and peremptorily command people to vacate the speaker’s corner or move from a table that offers a favorable view, they will probably inform you that you do not have the right to tell them what to do or where to go in a public square. In Musk’s digital realm, displacement of the peasantry occurs regularly, usually to the benefit of those who slide a few dollars into the eager hand of the square’s owner. 

There’s no question that Twitter’s algorithm and its pay-to-play priority system favors some content and contributors over others. Everybody can gather in Twitter’s public square, but some get more message amplification and dissemination than others. Speaker’s corner in the Twitterverse often goes to the highest bidder, or to those whose luridness and sensationalism catches the algorithm’s fancy or meets with the lord’s approval. 

All of which brings me to another objection I have against Twitter as a public square: It’s owned and often erratically managed by a billionaire who has become increasingly impulsive, irascible, partisan, strident, and loopy (that’s a technical term) on matters social and political. I do my utmost to be as non-partisan as possible in matters of political import – just trying to live according to the Golden Rule, the ethics of simple reciprocity, is hard enough – so I don’t have a horse in the partisan race, but Musk clearly does. 

Not the Best Marketing Strategy 

Frankly, Musk’s relentless politicking can be a huge turnoff. I’m probably not alone in harboring that sentiment. In fact, if recent surveys and articles are accurate, Musk’s behavior has caused many people to become alienated not only from Twitter, but also from Musk’s other corporate properties, including Tesla. 

Now I realize that Musk is considered a genius by some – and he has legions of zealous followers – but I’m not sure that wilfully antagonizing a significant segment of your customer base sets the gold standard for a prudent marketing strategy. 

At this point, however, I must switch gears, like an automatic and intelligently automated Tesla, and say a word in Elon Musk’s defense.  In my own misguided judgment, I have chosen not to follow Elon Musk on Twitter. To his credit, Musk has noted my mistake and gallantly quashed my decision to remain blithely ignorant of his musings. 

On the decreasing number of occasions that I stray into the bedlam of his digital square, Lord Musk solicitously inserts himself into my feed and declaims his royal proclamations, including attacks on “woke” phantoms who haunt his dreams and live rent free like bats in his belfry. I haven’t volunteered to receive these diatribes, including many from similarly agitated people who share Musk’s obsessions, but I get them anyway. Perhaps I should see them as bonus content.

I suppose I can’t object, because he’s merely attempting to edify the citizenry who flock to the square. It’s obvious that he wants me to remain fully apprised of his provocations and the occasional fart joke. I have to credit his generosity of spirit, even if I sometimes fail to appreciate the rapier wit.  

Still, I wonder if I am a worthy of the intellectual largesse of his digital lordship. There are times, dear reader, when I humbly question Musk’s sagacity. I’m sure the failings are mine and not Musk’s. Perhaps his paroxysms of indignation and rage are facetious and ironic. Perhaps there’s a contrived or performative element that I’m missing entirely, and it’s just Musk’s attempt at agitprop theater; otherwise, I’m left to wonder whether he’s losing the plot, or maybe losing touch with people outside the insular echo chamber he inhabits. 

I am older than Elon Musk, but he often gives the impression of being the stereotypical old man screaming at unruly kids to get off his lawn. A plutocratic lord should be above these petty frays, shouldn’t he? 

More to the point, though, a digital public square should not be owned and arbitrarily administered by a feudal lord. Nor should a public square be run expressly for revenue growth and personal profit – not that Musk is currently seeing any growth or profit, or the future probability of such, from his stewardship of Twitter. If Musk wants to categorize Twitter/X as something other than a public square – perhaps a digital royal court, where pride of place is accorded to obsequious courtiers, digital aristocrats, japing court jesters, and favored cronies – he would be on firmer semantic ground.

But I’m probably being overly logical in an age that favors unrestrained “feels.” I will simply have to resign myself to observing and periodically documenting digital absurdities that almost rival the contradictions and surrealism in today’s physical world.