The Public Square Is Not Online
Social Media and the Decline of Civic Life
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Elon Musk has referred to social media, and X-née-Twitter, as the “global town square,” so I decided to go on a world tour. In one of these town squares, badge-wearing speakers shouted at each other through megaphones, while random guys replied to everything they said. Occasionally, they all turned on a passerby to explain why he was wrong, but most of the crowd lingered in the shadows. In the next square, everyone was frantically checking everyone else’s credentials and arguing about who had a right to be there at all. In another, a loud and angry man stood on a platform taller than everyone else’s, proclaiming truths into the wee hours of the night. I moved on to another, where I found an army of name-tagged professionals in business casual taking turns at a podium, each explaining how honored they were to receive a niche award and how humbled they were by their own success. Finally—and really, I’d seen enough—I stopped by a square where distant elderly relatives were stitching their political views into needlepoints while people I hadn’t seen since high school reminded me why I haven’t attended a reunion.
If these social media platforms actually existed as real places, most of us would cross the street to avoid them. But the fact that they look nothing like real town squares—and that nobody behaves normally in them—is telling: they are not town squares, and they never were.
The town square was never primarily a place for speech. It was a place for daily life—for commerce, for errands, for the ordinary transactions that brought people together whether they chose each other or not. Civic life, political discourse, even revolution, emerged from that daily friction as a byproduct of people having to be in specific places. Social media attempts to replicate the positive externality without its source.
Speech was the exhaust, not the engine.
Everywhere they have existed, town squares began as markets. The Greeks did not design the agora so that Socrates could engage in philosophical dialogue; they built a market square so that people could buy salted eels from Lake Copais and Corinthian pottery. The Roman Forum began as a central marketplace, and only later was it crowded with civic buildings—because that’s where people already gathered. In the Arab and Islamic worlds, commerce flourished in bazaars and souks that were surrounded by coffeehouses where men shared coffee and tea, ideas and news. In the Americas, Aztec markets like Tlatelolco served both a commercial and civic purpose. Spanish colonial law prescribed central plazas with commercial and civic functions arranged around them, a pattern visible across Latin America and in California’s mission towns. In the United States, New England town greens, California’s Spanish-heritage plazas, and Texas’s courthouse squares placed town halls, courthouses, churches, and meetinghouses around the commerce that gave them life.
Across the world, and across time, people intuited this relationship and built accordingly. The trade in goods preceded the trade in ideas—and it was from the physical market square that the very concept of a “marketplace of ideas” eventually emerged. The civic life of the square was sustained by its commercial life, not the other way around.
Musk was not the first to make this mistake. Everyone from Bill Gates to Hillary Clinton has invoked the town square to describe the social internet, but the confusion runs deeper than metaphor. Consider how differently a physical town square and a social media platform actually function. In the offline town square, you couldn’t choose who you encountered, and everybody who was there was brought there by necessity. That unchosen quality built familiarity across socioeconomic differences and around shared stakes, requiring civility in equal measure. In the real square, you show up as yourself and you interact with real people using your real name—because you would see these people again and again.
Online platforms invert this: people encounter each other algorithmically, then choose who to follow, and your feed reflects your choices back. The result is not a shared space but a multiverse of echo chambers, each mistaking itself for the whole. Often, people hide behind pseudonyms, which makes it easier to behave like an asshole and to treat other people as abstractions. The architecture of the real town square encourages good-faith encounters, accountability, and civility. The architecture of social media rewards outrage, in-group signaling, and attention-whoring. Offline, the whores are more modest.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that platforms built without the engine that makes the exhaust civil are, well, exhausting.
The problem is not that social media is bad at being a town square—it’s that social media is a categorically different thing. Social media platforms are communication tools. The public square is a commercial and civic institution.
By the time people began calling the internet the new town square, America’s actual town squares had long lost their institutional relevance to everyday American life. Mass automobile ownership from the 1920s onward made sprawling suburbs not just possible but, with considerable help from government policy, the dominant form of American development. The home refrigerator reduced the frequency of daily shopping trips, supermarkets overtook local grocers by the 1950s, and the consolidation of retail into national chains removed social and civic anchors from communities. The entry of women into the workforce at scale in the 1970s reorganized households around dual incomes, compressing or eliminating the daily errands and informal exchanges that had sent people repeatedly into local commercial life. Meanwhile, as retail drifted from walkable Main Streets to big-box stroads, the “Town Square” or “Town Center” had become a shopping mall.
Today, we are living in a world of on-demand delivery and remote work. Modern commercial life does not require many of us to leave our homes at all; when we do shop, the encounter is gone, leaving only the transaction. Even in what remains of our historic town squares, we have become more transactional, in the non-commercial sense. The town square has become another venue to be “activated” with First Fridays, yoga on the green, and jazz in the plaza—and “programmed” with holiday fairs for artisanal tchotchkes, food festivals featuring local-to-nowhere mozzarepas, and farmers markets for $15 eggs. These can be valuable community events, but nobody has to go, and so that daily texture of civic life remains out of reach. People can still opt-in, self-sort, and filter out.
Town squares today function more like social media than the reverse.
Our historic town squares are no longer where daily life happens. For many Americans, school pickup and drop-off is one of the last genuinely local rituals left in modern life. Parents wait outside for their kids, temporarily stranded together, in a pattern that repeats over weeks and months and years. The school sidewalk has the potential to be a civic generator because it has the basic ingredients of the historic town square: necessity, recurrence, social mixing, and a defined place. These conditions generate return loops, routines that bring the same people back to the same place, over and over. Even here, we tend to squander the opportunity: parents—or their nannies—wait in their cars at the school pickup lines, and even those who do get out find nowhere to linger once the kids emerge.
What else brings people together day after day? Transit hubs have the necessity and recurrence, but they are mostly for passing through, not lingering. Playgrounds and dog parks are destinations you choose, not rituals you’re bound to. The paucity of examples points to the depth of the problem.
Here is the conundrum: the social and economic forces that brought us to this moment are not reversible. Nobody sane would argue that we should get rid of refrigerators or working women; on-demand delivery and remote work are here to stay; and even in places where it is possible to live car-free, the patterns of commercial life that bolstered our civic life are long gone. In an era of convenience and everything-at-home, good urbanism is not enough to overcome our growing aversion to friction. People have to choose it. Social media is a powerful communication tool, but it is not a substitute for the unchosen, embodied, recurring encounters that once made civic life possible. The “global town square” promises to abolish the frictions of place while simulating the feeling of public life. It cannot.
The internet gives everyone a stage and nobody a town. There’s no algorithm that will change that.
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Thank you Ryan! I never have seen the differences of the plazas as I do now. I've stayed away from the digital ones as they don't have an appeal for me. On the other hand, I have been on a lifetime mission to " figure out what else we can do beshides suburbia", Your post hits at the heart of the challenge we face....how do we want to be humans, now that our old reference points are (have) disappeared? Thank you! What I know is it's nearly impossible to come up with an answer until the question is defined. Onward! into the emerging future!