 So it's great to see so many people here for today's BKC lunch event. So today we're going to be chatting with Joanne Chung about a very important topic, the governance of privately owned public spaces like Facebook and Twitter. And we're going to examine this topic through the lens of a paper that Joanne recently published. If you did the pre-reading for today's event, like I'm sure that you did, then you already know that the paper is called Real Estate Politique, a Democracy in the Financialization of Social Networks. So I'll be the moderator for today. Hello, everyone. My name is James Mickens, and I'm a faculty co-director for BKC's Institute for Rebooting Social Media. On this slide, you see a little blurb from our website. It describes how the Institute is a three-year research initiative for addressing social media's most urgent problems, like misinformation and content governance. And so we try to work with academia, industry, and the public with the goal of promoting and creating healthier online ecosystems. So if you go to our website, you'll see that we've already started to do some cool work. So for example, off to the left, you see that we've announced our cohort of visiting scholars for the next academic year. These folks will be working with us on specific research projects like, for example, studying election misinformation in Brazil, looking at ways that we can redesign computer processors to strengthen online privacy, and so on and so forth. So we're really excited about those visiting scholars. And as you can see to the right of the slide, Joanne is actually one of the strategy advisors for the Institute, and we've had a great time working with her. So without further ado, let's focus our conversation today on one of the topics that Joanne is really passionate about, which is this idea of public spaces. So what is a public space? A public space is a space for the public. Sometimes, technologies can be helpful. Public spaces first came about in the physical world. So think about places like town squares and parks and beaches. These are places where people can assemble and talk to their friends and family. They're places where sometimes new connections get made between people who used to be strangers to each other. And so these public spaces play an important role in the operation of society. In the operation of democracy because they encourage the exchange of ideas of complaints, of suggestions for how to improve the world. Now, of course, in the modern day, a lot of our public spaces are online. So Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and so on. We spend a lot of time in these online public spaces, sometimes too much time. And I can see that this image has resonated with some of the people out there after the event will put you in contact with a support group. That's just a PKC difference. Anyways, the point is, is that increasingly social media platforms are functioning as the modern day equivalent of the town square or the public park. And this is interesting because if you look at platforms like Facebook or Twitter, they're these privately owned public spaces. You know, they have shareholders, but these shareholders are not the community at large. They have executive leadership, but those people are not elected by the community at large. And so how should we think about governing such spaces? Well, in the physical world, we also have these privately owned public spaces. So, for example, you know, looking at an example from Joanne's paper, we have a Zuccotti Park that was in New York City. It's open to the public, but it's not publicly owned. So how did that come about? Well, you know, as those of you who did the pre-reading know, it's a privately owned public space made in 1972. It was built alongside this totally private one Liberty Plaza building. So the park is public space, even though it's privately owned. And then the one Liberty Plaza building is totally private. And so this collection, this park plus the building, they leverage a regulation known as the floor area bonus for a plaza regulation. It's very fun regulation, named to say I do it in my spare time. So this regulation stated that a developer could get an extra 10 square feet of private space in exchange for building a one foot square foot of open publicly accessible space. And so like with this kind of regulation, it might seem like everyone is a winner. Private developers can build more private stuff. And the developers also get incentivized to build public stuff for the community at large. So no problems, right? Well, as with all things in life, it's actually more complicated than that. So for example, this privately owned public space was the site of massive Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. And so there's this tension here, right? What happens if, for example, the private owners don't believe in the protest or they want those protests to be smaller? So in the specific case of these protests, the owners of the space, this public space that's privately owned, they did things like ban tents. They banned sleeping bags. They did other things to make protesting more difficult. So we see this tension here in the governance model for a privately owned public space. The desires of the owners may be different than the desires of the public. And we see this governance challenge elsewhere. As those of you who pay attention to the news might know, our world is basically on fire right now. And one reason is that our companies are on fire. In particular, our social media platforms are on fire. We haven't find the right governance models for these things. So we see things like misinformation, super spreaders, seeding false election theories. We see stuff like Facebook failing to tackle COVID-19 misinformation. We see things like online hate speech growing more prevalent during the pandemic. And so these are public crises that are spreading on privately owned spaces. And so there are a bunch of other problems besides just disinformation and hate speech. So for example, consider this observation from the most trusted advice animal. You guess that it's the mighty bald eagle, the bald eagle. This beacon of freedom tells us that free online services aren't really free. These services, they monetize your data. They look at what you post, what you like, what you browse. Later on, they turn that data to advertisers to sell it. And then later on, you see these creepy targeted ads for a weirdly specific shirt that mentions my birth month and is vaguely threatening for no reason. But we actually know the reason. I'm whispering because we know the reason. We feel threatened because we feel like our privacy is being violated. But what's a better way to fund these privately operated public spaces? It's not clear because if there's one thing we know about this world is that people love stuff that's free, even if it's only ostensibly free. So with that set up, it is my honor to hand the mic over to Joanne who's going to walk us through some of the key ideas in her paper. And as a reminder, this session is being recorded, but your video thumbnails won't show up. And also the chat function has been disabled in Zoom. So if you have a question, just type it into the Q&A box and we'll get to those questions during the Q&A session after Joanne's presentation. All right, so with that, I will stop sharing and hand it over to Joanne. All right. Hi, everyone. So thanks, Megan, for that introduction. So first, before I start, I wanted to just share a little bit about me and where my perspective comes from. So my background is in architecture and urban planning and I practice human-centered design and industry with city governments with philanthropic foundations. And I have a strong interest in public interest technology. And the paper, this talk is based on, came about when I was a Berkman Fellow back in 2017 and 2018, working community with the ethical tech working group. So it's been a long time coming and it's a delight to bring these ideas back to the Berkman community. So James touched on the scale of problems with social media, but it's a complex issue and I think to approach the issue, we have to first see what kind of space social media really is. In 2017, when I was a BKC Fellow, I was researching the future of town halls, public spaces and also the relationships between physical and digital spaces. And I learned of a Supreme Court case, Packingham versus North Carolina. The case held that a North Carolina statute prohibiting sex offenders from accessing social media had violated the First Amendment. And in the holdings of the case, Justice Kennedy drew an analogy between access to online communication and access to public space, describing social media as the modern public square. So here we have social media as the modern public square. Now, a couple years later in 2021, after Trump had blocked a couple of users from his Twitter account, Nides Institute versus Trump ruled that doing that, Trump had violated the First Amendment because common threads on Twitter constitute a public forum. But then the case was later rendered moot after his own Twitter access was terminated. And in his opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, we will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms, modern public square, privately owned information infrastructure. So on the one hand, we have highly concentrated private and on the other hand, a modern public square. And I think social media's problems have to do with exactly how it's both at the same time. The structural misalignment between the public and the private, which actually the term social media itself obscures. Social media focuses the attention on the public facing side. So on user actions, content, their consequences and behavioral inner implications of interface design, such as dark patterns. And these designs are more on the facade level. It's kind of what you experience is what you see. It's the equivalent of if you're hanging out in the party park in a park. But a lot of the business facing decisions on the other side. And that's the stuff that's harder to look at is behind the facade. Similarly, social networking platform. Another term used to talk about social media is equally problematic because it collapses this distance between the business side facing the platform and the social network side, which is the public facing side. And what happens there is that it collapses this distance also between the side of authority where governments, governance decisions are being made and then the side of extraction of where people's data are being extracted. And so the business facing dimension of the platform becomes concealed behind this facade of public facing social issues. And this talk, what I really want to do is look at the structures of the platform, look into the platforms, looking to believe some mechanisms that shape the platforms and really get behind that facade. So this talk has three parts. In the first part, I would like to tell you about the origin story of two parks, Central Park and Zuccotti Park, which Mickens has mentioned and the interplay between the public and private in these parks. In the second part, which is the bulk of the talk, I'll focus on the financialization of land and the tension, looking at the analogies between land use and all social media. And I'll look inward into the platform business model, how it shapes roles, incentives and responsibilities. And finally, I'll look into other practices from land use that might inspire the future of the digital realm, such as urban planning, community land trust and indigenous land stewardship. All right. So first, the story of two parks that we have Central Park. So this is Central Park. Must be familiar to everyone here. It welcomes 42 million annual visitors. It was completed in 1873 following the Central Park Act, which is when the state legislature removed 843 acres from the real estate market and designated a public space. So just for you to kind of get a sense of how big that is, that's about six percent of all of Manhattan. And at the time, this was first of this class. There's no public parks weren't really a thing in cities. And if there were any parks, they were mostly enclosed or private, like Gramercy Park downtown. You needed a key to access if you lived around there. Or you went to cemeteries like the Greenwood Cemetery here for a picnic. So this is the equivalent of the public park. Other than that, there is nothing. So Central Park really embodied this progressive idea of the time. It really set a precedent. Fridja Clark Olmsted, who is one of the designers of Central Park, had great aspirations imbued in this design. He believed that they were a democratic development of the highest significance and that they created this shared metropolitan culture that both acknowledged and overcame the profound cultural and economic differences that marked life in New York City. Central Park is owned by the New York City Parks and Rec. And it's maintained by a private nonprofit called Central Park Conservancy and, of course, the uses for the public. Central Park has played host to many iconic events in the history, such as many beings through the sixties and seventies in protest of the Vietnam War and a lot of kind of big social assemblies that manifested what people wanted of a greater social to the betterment of society. So here's the on the one hand, we have Central Park. Now, a hundred years later, after Central Park opened, Zocati Park opened in the financial district of Manhattan downtown. So it was completed in 1972 alongside Liberty Plaza. And Liberty Plaza is an office tower. And the current value of that is about one and a half billion dollars. Zocati Park, as James has mentioned, was created through this floor area bonus for a plaza regulation, no one's incentive zoning. So notice that in this term, public park or park was not mentioned, but plaza was mentioned. And that's kind of a way to distinguish between a park and a plaza. So a plaza, people have association with parks being more public, but plaza, even though it has some of the affordances of the park, it's still different. So there's a there's a reason behind this choice of a word of plaza. So this incentive zoning incentivized the creation of open spaces by giving developers ten more square feet of built space in exchange for one square foot of an open area that's accessible to the public at all times. So this is what was the definition of a plaza was. So beyond the Clotty Park, there are about five hundred public, privately owned public spaces around New York City and many across many cities in the US. So you might be familiar with some of these in Boston, as well as in San Francisco. And some cities have a big catalog of these. So you can kind of go look for them. And sometimes they might not be where you expect. Now, both one Liberty Plaza, the office tower and Zuccotti Park are owned by Brookfield Office Properties. So in fact, Zuccotti Park is actually named after a company chairman, John Zuccotti. And Brookfield Office Properties is itself a subsidiary of a commercial real estate company called Brookfield Property Partners, which itself is a subsidiary of one of the world's largest alternative asset management companies, which manages over six hundred twenty five billion dollars of assets. So just to get a sense of this kind of onion of ownership, you have with, of course, names that are more or less indistinguishable from each other and the ownership structure is extremely complex compared to parks and rec zoning Central Park. Privately owned public spaces like Zuccotti Park exist not because of this direct investment in public space, but actually they're byproducts of high profit skyscrapers developed during a real estate market boom, especially when highly speculative value of the building soars above the material value of the land. Which is as historian Carol Willis says, form follows finance the shape of the buildings determined by the financial structures behind it. And the incentive behind the creation of the park lies precisely in this maximization of profit. And this implication, this origin story has profound implications for the park's social affordance. So as we know, the government structure of the Coddy Park was exposed during all KPI Wall Street when Brookfield Office partners changed the park's code of conduct banning tents and sleeping bags and lying down, which then was used to evict the protesters. So this was a moment when this plaza really is not park. So just as Zuccotti Park, social media is also a privately owned public space. Although users may experience them as a modern public square, their underlying economic incentive and legal construct are much closer to that of a real estate developer. And how social media serves its owners versus how social media serves its users. That's inherently dissonant. So social media is both the tower and the park in one package. And this hybrid package. Of being both the tower and the park is also what makes the platform business model work. In the next part, I'll dive into some of the beliefs and mechanisms that shape how platforms work. Platforms are multi-sided marketplaces. So what that means is rather than generating revenue on a linear supply chain, it does so by connecting multiple groups and brokering exchanges between them. So there are three principle layers of exchange. This first one is between users and their social groups or friends. Second one is between the individual user and the platform. And this third one between platforms and their clients. So for the most part, third-party advertisers and the terms of exchange across all three are not all equal. So in this user-facing layer, the exchange center is on everyday communication. On this client-facing side, the exchange center is on conversion, which is which means the moment when the viewer of an ad does something that the advertiser does something that the advertiser does. Desired, such as discovering or buying a product. So the platform's objective here is to reduce the time it takes to convert and also to increase the number of people converted. And now the second layer of exchange between users and the platform is the most opaque. By positioning itself as a free service whose purpose is to enable users to build and connect with the community, connect with their friends. Platforms turn these non-financial exchanges into financial ones. So in other words, the platform financializes everyday communication into sellable data for clients in order to serve a conversion, turning these social relationships between users and their friends into marketing channels and most importantly turns people into consumers. And all the while this happens, it's obscuring the terms of that exchange. So it's like an office tower that's pretending it's a public park. This pattern of exchange of extraction isn't entirely new. If we look to the history of land use, the financialization of attention repeats colonial beliefs that have been historically used to justify the financialization of land. And I'll talk about two of them. The first is the pristine myth, which is the belief that before land was colonized, that land had existed in this pristine state untouched by humans. And this pristine myth helped justify the dispossession of indigenous populations and also normalized the exploitation of land for cash crops. Platforms similarly assume that people's attention like land is this unprocessed data ready to be converted into an exchange as financial assets. And this is manifesting in this parallel growth of both the digital detox industry and social media fueling so much outrage. So on the one hand, you have meditation apps and even features like screen time that's turning into huge businesses. And on the other hand, social media and all of its problems amplifying. So like this false dichotomy of land, that's either pristine wilderness or a side of extraction, seeing people's attention as either protected or exploited, ultimately distracts from the structural disempowerment that's at the ground, at the heart of all of this. The second myth, the productivity myth, the assumption that certain uses of land is more valuable than others with productivity defined as the ability to generate profit. So this myth is alive and well very much at play today in just typical practice and commercial real estate through this framework. That's called highest and best use. So it's created to help developers appraise the potential profit of a piece of property and to decide on how it might be used. It was created by an economist by the name of Irving Fisher and the framework assesses land use based on these four criteria. So it needs to be legally permissible, physically possible, financially feasible. And it's very curious last one, maximally productive, which means that the chosen use for the land should prioritize a type of use that would just generate maximum profit over any other goal, such as social mixing or public health, those things are not factored in on social media through the integration of. So even though the integration of diverse perspectives is foundational to a healthy social sphere, it ultimately is at odds with platforms exclusive focus on productivity. If we're defining product productivity as maximizing coercion for the client facing side of the platforms. So if social media is the tower, pretending to be a park, then what are the implications when this tower is experienced as a park by people who use it? I'll look at this across three dimensions, roles. So who's doing the work incentives, what motivates them, and responsibilities, why? So the first, we'll talk about roles. Platforms exploit the intersection between surveillance capitalism and identity politics. So authentic self expressions affirm a user's a person's connections to their social group, but these expressions are also key inputs into the process. These expressions are also key inputs into platforms mechanisms for increasing conversion, which then influences their purchasing and political decisions. So here's the where the extraction happens using the authenticity of an individual's role as a member of their social group to categorize and predict their role as a consumer of commercial products. So these two roles that individuals has to play on a platform are not equally consensual. To individual user, the platform markets itself as a provider of information of communication infrastructure, but not as an advertising channel personalized based on their data. So in blurring these two roles, the extent to which an individual's behavior in their first role as a member of their social group is influenced by their second role as a consumer becomes obscured. By turning people into consumers, there's also another level of role conflation at work. Roles that are otherwise distinct on a supply chain are conflated. So users are not only consumers, they're also producers and their distributors. These roles are typically separate on a linear supply chain. By separating them, it typically enables the term of transaction across all of them to be transparent. But by encouraging all three to happen the same time, the terms of the exchange between them becomes hidden. So while the perceived distance between these activities becomes reduced, actually the psychological distance between the actions of their consequences are increased. And this leads me to the second, second effect, which has to do with incentives. These forms turn incentives and motivate social interactions into token currencies, and this is in the form of likes or shares, similar to how in a casino you turn cash into gambling chips. The management scientist and economist Drazen Platt-Prillick says that token currencies act as a buffer between conception and its moral cost. With token currency, the consumer doesn't need to specify how it will be used. And when the consumer spends the token currency, they don't feel the need to evaluate the implications of the transaction as carefully as they would with the cash transaction. Similarly, posts on social media are by default broadcast to a user's entire social network and the user has very little choice in specifying how their messages will be transmitted. By removing choice in one's audience, you have this increased psychological distance between the social cost of an action and action itself. So the third, responsibilities. Discriminary values can become encoded in technical implications through things like proxy metrics. So in the history of cities, building density has been used as an example of a proxy metric that encodes racial discrimination in what's called single-family zoning organisms. So in fact, where I am right now in Elmwood Berkeley, 100 years ago, this is one of the first examples of single-family zoning. When a civil state developer here wanted to keep out a black dance hall in Chinese long trees out of the neighborhood and proposed that only single-family housing could be built. So the side effect of that is you basically price out everything else besides single-family homes. And you have a financial segregation that recreates racial segregation. And this happened repeatedly through the history of land use, through even things like exclusionary zoning in mid-century. And on social media, relevance is an example of a proxy metric. So instead of proactively integrating different perspectives, platforms by default, rank messages based on how relevant they are to a user. And the ranking prioritizes messages that support one's pre-existing beliefs and excluding ones that may challenge those beliefs. So you have to make sure to change the sorting method, such as changing it to chronological sorting, that's something you have to manually select. But you have no power to meaningfully change the exclusionary ranking mechanism that determines and assigns value for what you see. By conflating roles, creating a psychological distance between actions and consequences and abstracting away social responsibilities, social media's public interests become subsumed by the private interest. Public space, as a privately in public space, public space is serving private profit. In liberalism and social action, John Dewey writes, the method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where there's special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged in light of more inclusive interests that are represented by either of them separately. If social networks are to exist and serve as more than profit, then platforms will need to proactively create the conditions for that pluralism to make it possible and desirable to reconcile differences, rather than obscuring them. So so far I've talked to, I've talked about how the history of land use has illuminated some of the problems with social media. And now I want to touch on some examples to show ideas for the future and hopefully end on a more positive note. And show some bright spots where roles and incentives and responsibilities are configured in ways that actually align with the public interest. Urban planning can be a way to clarify public interest roles, community land trusts can be this organizational model that differentiates between public and private interests and indigenous land stewardship could be a way to think about collective social responsibility. In practice, urban planning and real estate development are distinct completely separate fields with distinct duties and ethics. In order to receive licensure to practice, urban planners have to follow ethical principles set by the American Institute of Certified Planners. But unlike urban planners, commercial real estate developers have no professional association nor explicit ethical principles. How come codes of ethics are often found a fiduciary duty defined relationships, which obligates a practitioner to act solely in the interest of their clients so for example a doctor and patient. But real estate developers, on the other hand, don't have a fiduciary duty towards users of the buildings they developed. Instead, they act in accordance with the profit motives of their investors. In the absence of social media in absence of an equivalent field of urban planning, dedicated to the public interest platforms are driven exclusively as commercial real estate development. So you don't really have any of that balance that you have an urban space. So as a thought experiment, what if platforms adopted the ethical principles based on one set forth by the American Planning Association. Social networks need a public interest profession with fiduciary duty that aligns with their social responsibilities. And given the similarities and challenges between urban planners and stewards of social networks. These ethical principles seem amily applicable. If attention can be exploited like land, what could it look like to steward it like land, as what the community activist Robert Swan said who pioneered community land trusts. So current debates around individual data ownership, apply property rights to address inequities and monetization of data but I think that this approach is limited, because focusing on individual data ownership shifts the burden to individuals without addressing the financialization of their attention in the first place. For example, community land trusts are nonprofit organizations that own and hold the land of perpetuity in the permanent benefit of the communities they serve. They remove the land from the commodity market, buffering it from the booms and bust the real estate market cycles. Community land trust differentiates between incentives of ownership and the incentives of use. So ownership is maintained in the public interest while use allows for private interest through these 99 year ground leases, which are the longest possible terms of lease on the real estate property. The community ownership of land aligns the incentives of users and the owners. So users have long term access to affordable space, and the trust has a strong legal position to serve its mission to preserve affordability. Finally, as inspiration for thinking about social responsibility. Indigenous land stewardship. We can go in and out of the digital world's an assumption of infinite mobility of infinite discovery is a false choice that turns people into tourists rather than stewards. So interestingly, the wilderness act has a quote that says man himself as a visitor and not remain. Indigenous land stewardship views social responsibility to care for the land and care for oneself is one of the same. And this concept reverts this pristine myth that we talked about earlier, that sees attention as either conserved or exploited and rather sees it as something to be collectively careful. So it's a very fundamental change in how, how we use the world and use ourselves. I talked about Zuccotti Park I talked about privately owned public spaces, how the financialization of retention mirrors the financialization of land, and their effects on their roles incentives and social responsibilities. So in closing, I would like us to return to Central Park. After serving as a superintendent to Central Park, Olmstead went on to work for the United States Sanitary Commission, which is the precursor to the American Red Cross. Olmstead had conceived Central Park as the lungs of the city. And he said it is desired that people should benefit by the sanitary advantage of breathing. So at the time, health of the populace was not only about physical health and wellness included. It was a very expansive definition that also included social connection social cohesion the health of democracy. That was all a part of the aspiration of Central Park. So given that expansive view, the question I will leave all of us is if Central Park was conceived as a lungs of the city then what could be equivalent for a digital sphere. What is our Central Park. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much for that that fantastic presentation so if people have questions they can drop those questions into the Q&A function of zoom and then we will address those as they come up. I see that we already have one question in there so let me ask that one now. The question is, how would you see the metaverse through this lens. I think that the metaverse will change anything with respect to your conceptualization of this relationship between these public spaces the private owners and the community at large. It's a curious question because I think whenever I hear bandwagon term like a metaverse I'm unclear what that's exactly referring to. Are we referring to the science fiction idea of the metaverse which you know let's let's talk about that. Are we referring to privately funded like VC capital fields startups that have certain growth expectations for their investors that's another thing. Are we thinking about the connections between physical and digital spaces that have existed for a long time that might be evolving and changing in the future, independent of this very specific kind of business model that's another thing we could talk about. I guess what I would say is a lot of the, a lot of my interest is that seeing patterns and problems but also the potential of the relationship between physical and digital space as something that has resonates with a lot of patterns that have happened historically so not being blind to some of that, but also being creative and honest with some of the things that really work. So, I guess what I would say about. I don't know which metaverse metaverse we might be talking about, but I am optimistic, and I think it's a natural extension of like I was saying earlier, we can't really see the digital world as something we can go in and out of that only. So I think it really abdicates some of our duties to steward it, just like land by if you were to go into a national park and leave and then kind of think about nature as bound that way where the planet is really not bound by national park fences exactly. So maybe I would encourage that we can bring this mindset of thinking about stewarding things that aren't kind of boxed in in that way. But yeah, and think about things more holistically so if I if I take the question to mean how do we think about the relationship, the relationship between the physical and digital in a more holistic way than absolutely, but not so sure that this is an assessment on a specific business model to, to make that happen. And that's super interesting question the the the questioner had sort of set a follow up that they were referring to like the Facebook or Microsoft versions of the metaverse. But as someone who's sort of following this metaverse stuff with a combination of like intrigue and like slight scorn perhaps because it's so vague, even when I look at sort of like these more quote unquote fleshed out versions in the metaverse. I don't necessarily see what the, the sort of singular vision is besides just sort of like more it's more immersive than what we have now. It's sort of more engrossing. And I think that it's interesting too to think about when we start looking at these new platforms, are we building in certain notions or certain ethos from the beginning. And one of the big problems I think we see with a lot of online platform today, is that they've encoded so much of this financialization of attention, for example, that even if well intentioned engineers wanted to sort of change something, this requires sort of like this massive from first principles reimagining of things. And so to the extent that I think the metaverse is a good idea at least personally, I think that would be great to sort of have some of these more public centered principles come in at the beginning to make sure that we're building on a foundation of these things as opposed to trying to graph them on later. Yeah, I think we've. I think it was Neil postman who talked about how the definition of community has changed recent or not recently but through technology in a sense that community in the physical world used to mean a place that you lived. It's a community with other people and they might be very different from you you just happen to be defined by the same similar physical locale versus community in all of the marketing language of tech companies it's more like special interest groups it's like oh we like share the same ideas we're in community with each other. And that's a huge difference. When you say that well let's connect and build community what that means is just the reinforcement of what you had already received. And I think when that's defined in a very vague way. So, building community but for what purpose when you don't define for what purpose, then you know you have this kind of more and more but for what. Okay, I, I'm very endeared by. There are these kinds of small pockets where some of that for what is clearly defined. So for example there's some reddit where people go on to identify plants. So, you know, like, you would have all these landscape archetypes can't getting really excited about like identifying plants or like hey not another classic example like specifically on the term of the exchange every transparent like these communities where what people are there for and the goals they have and what they share is very defined and so somehow the norms and. Yeah the norms and the context for their exchanges. So if you have a transparent versus if you have connection for connection sake I don't know what that means anymore right. It's kind of like, yeah just a bit like a zoo animal being spectated upon. Right. Yeah I can either confirm nor deny that I went deep into the reddit plant community. This previous summer. It's very friendly community, if I got deep into it which once again I'm not confirming or denying anyways moving on from that. I see another question. It's about how do you imagine a digital public space being funded. And this is sort of a question that I know you're interested in I'm very interested in this too. You know if we look at like a public park, then like, you know the first approximation is funded through taxes, you know taxes that the public pays. And you know you've talked about the financialization of attention, and how that in essence is kind of like the tax that users pay to use Facebook even though it's not always clear to them. So do you have ideas about sort of a better way to fund a digital privately owned public space. I think community land trusts and conservation land trusts are good examples. I wonder if it's because of the scale of social media now it seems daunting to imagine, like how could we possibly build something that's this expensive. You know, where where could you possibly raise the kinds of funds to do that but actually, if you actually think about what it's for and the things that it does best. It may not have to be that way I think it has a lot in it that's serving the more business side of the interest rather than the use by the community. So I, I'm a big believer in community funded on a smaller scale and platforms that could differentiate between, you know, this place versus that place, rather than something totalizing that could scale across the entire world. So it's that scaling that increases the cost. But so we don't necessarily need to build the equivalent of a multi billion dollar tower but we could build our things on a more community and neighborhood scale that are more community funded that's entirely possible. And some of the good examples I see here in East Bay California are, for example there's an organization called the East Bay permanent real estate trust. So, and also a quite a few community land trust in the area. So some of them are more focused on indigenous stewardship and some of them are more community ownership by people who live there. So we pull capital together to create intention around the piece of land, even in this really completely crazy real estate market, it's still possible. Right. So I wonder if some of our aspirations might be falsely blinded by the state that, you know, the Facebook's and the Twitter's are now. Like if you really think about what they are. They're, I think, yeah, they don't have to be the form, the form factor doesn't have to be the same. I think it's the yeah I think it's the form factor and also the scale I mean that's a very interesting sort of observation that yes it would be difficult to sort of crowd source funding for Facebook as it is now. But if you do things more locally, then maybe it becomes more feasible. This feeds into another question that someone said they wanted you to talk more about the trust model for the ownership for the public space. And basically, they say how can we use this trust model without making the governance turn into quote, a melee of some sort, or at least you know the government being pulled in a lot of different directions. I think you may have already spoken a little bit to that with respect to the scale thing which might make governance. Yeah, I think the scale is one thing. And I think what's really cool about the trust model is that every trust is different, but I think the thing they have in common is that they all have community representation so they all, they all have people who live in proximate to it and having very direct decision making but not not exclusive. It's kind of balanced with others too. So, if you imagine I mean the equivalent of social media if you have users being sitting on the board for example like it's unimaginable right but that's literally what the trust model forwards. And because it's always bound by place it has kind of natural boundaries, which I think are healthy, rather than imagining the whole planet being one, one big room for conversation. Right. Yeah, I think that's that's super important because I think, like to a certain extent some of the problems we're dealing with right now with these online spaces like they're these problems of late stage capitalism sort of, you know, writ large like what do we actually want to have like people's representatives sitting on the boards of these companies would they even be amenable to that do we even think there's going to be like a will and the government to pass laws that would force that. So, starting at the more local level, you might be able to sidestep some of those issues. And this is actually related to another great question that came up and person says what if there can't be an equivalent of Central Park in the digital sphere, because physical proximity is required for people to act decently. What if there can't be a Central Park and it. So I think the question sort of poking at this idea that like, what if, like, what if there's something intrinsic about the fact that I go to an online network. I might be anonymous or pseudo anonymous. I'm talking to people who are physically distant from me, or maybe physically close to me but I don't know who they are. Yeah, and like maybe just that sort of modality of interaction somehow means that you know we as humanity were just not optimized for being. Yeah, I think I mean, this is kind of my hunch is that. So the plant subreddit for example, I think people there who are there know what they're there for you see this plan you want it to be identified and you kind of want to bring trust of the community of people who share that interest and knowledge. You could perfectly be anonymous. And in fact, everybody could be anonymous, but you have a very clear goal. And you have a very clear definition of the things being learned and exchanged. I think for digital spaces where you have both anonymity and no goals. I think that's where it gets chaotic. Right. I think with public parks like Central Park and other public parks. It might be more implicit but people tend to also share certain goals of going to the park. So you never really have the extent of. Yeah, people could be anonymous but you have more or less shared goals versus, I think in the digital sphere it's really when we have both of those anonymity plus just unclear intentions that a lot of the problems arise. Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I think it feeds into another questions like these, these questioners they're just, this is so great just hand in glove. So another question says that physical public spaces, they force mixing. You know if you want to inhabit a space you have to do so cooperatively with other people. So however an online space like the platforms that I may or may not have been deeply engaged in, they can be customized to an individual like it's easier to set up sort of like these in group dynamics. And so on the question says you know are you suggesting that a public online space should be designed to remove some of these intentional walls, so that it looks more like physical public space. So I guess you're new thing on that I mean one thing I can sort of observe is like back in the early days of the internet, I'm dating myself a little bit here but like, you know, that was one of the fun things to do, like you would go on one of these early bullets and boards or things like that. And you just chat with just like random people. And it was like a simpler time then to be clear but like that was funny I made a bunch of friends you know and I was a teenager that lived across America lived different places in the world. And in part because there were such few barriers, and in part because you know, it's actually smaller and more open and you didn't really have the option of just you know doing a rat hole into the Reddit subgroup of your particular interest. So, so do you think you know what do you think about that tension between sort of the mixing that you get in physical spaces versus maybe this. And in fact it might be easier to be civil in smaller communities. I think it's impossible to suddenly have 10s of thousands of friends within a very short period of time that feels socially unnatural I'm sure there's research behind this I don't know but humans don't create anything social that way. Period. I think for some of the communities that you mentioned against I mean that comes from that evolves over time at the speed of relationships and trust. And also the speed of will also with the intention of people creating things and sharing it with each other, not necessarily kind of doing it in a salesy way. Right, or, or somehow you're doing it. I think you're doing in a more than a neutral space rather than oh, you know on social media or we're actually we're all in a store. Like the things we're being made are being sold we're being sold like that context is doesn't exist. So it's more people visiting each other spaces, and rather than everybody being in a space that's actually defined by sales. I'm not sure that answers the question but there's, there's a certain assumptions I think that have become naturalized through social media. That I think could be reevaluated. And the other thing I want to mention is what social media does is it's, it has professionalized certain behaviors so there's, you know, it's, it's jobs for many people, but it's also not jobs for and doing, whether you see it whether you see using it as a job versus not a job you have very different expectations for how that factors into finances or what money means. So, by conflating that I think what you don't want is the lack of transparency of people working but actually, you know people in their leisure time using it but actually they're, they're working and their labor is just utterly unaccounted for. And I think that's what some of that conflation has happened. Yeah, I think that makes sense we have one question. This is a bit of a call back to some of your discussions about trust, like public trust, and it says, the question says, do you see open source and nonprofit owned cyberspaces as being the equivalent of public spaces and cities. So all the cyberspace where we interact is privately owned, but maybe something like Wikipedia or signal. Like that model might be better. So like do you see like any analogies or inspirations from the open source community with respect to this notion of like privately owned public spaces. I think then again I comes back to intention so wiki is a very specific rate have very specific norms have a very specific thing that's getting built together. I think in that case, that's a more direct analogy I think. So it's not, I guess that the analogy might be you're not only creating. You're not only allocating a piece of land but you're very specific about okay here's a blueprint of something we're building and you know everybody's chipping into build it together. So this is, I think, if there's not that intention, then it's harder to say it has the same problems I think as some of the physical spaces where you don't really have a clear goal. And I think yeah that's also what allows for the anonymity to if you're. If the goal is very specific, then the norms also are more mature, then it. You're more able to have more participation versus. Yeah, in absence of that, then. I think open source might also have some of the tyranny of structuralistness to quote Joe Freeman that you might also have in physical space as well. And I think there and there's also sort of this interesting sort of tension I think between like just the beauty of discovering things that you weren't expecting to discover. So you know like one of the things that I like about wandering through a big city is that you will sometimes just find these really nice places. These really small community gardens that you never would have known were there but you just decide to linger the sidewalk for a while. And I wonder, you know, if we go towards this this model of in a certain sense sort of like smaller more curated communities. And it's like how would we still enable some of this serendipity of you know I was in this this you know, small online space that I heard about this other one and I decided to go there. And, you know, I found something that was really neat and that really changed the way that I think about the world. And the pages probably were like that way back in the day right, but less so maybe your, you know, Twitter profile. Right, right, right. And I also think there's there's sort of this interesting performative aspect in some of the modern like, you know, your profile, I mean Instagram gets a lot of flack for that as well. It's interesting to think about ways that we can sort of address that performativity to sort of make the experiences seem more genuine or more, more direct without totally moving people's ability to sort of post pictures of their cute baby or you know whatever their favorite hobby is or things like that. Yeah, let's see so I think we're only got about two minutes left. So let me find one more question. Okay, we'll go with this one. So with governments coming on social media platforms to engage with citizens. What are the implications for the conceptualization of public spheres with respect to modern digital democracies. I'm getting worried, because I mean, if you imagine town halls not being built in the civic sense anymore but a kind of appropriating existing off the shelf malls as town halls I guess that would be my worry. So I guess some of that has already happened through the use of television and onwards but that is not to say has to be that way. I think civic spaces really need to be intentionally created and they have their furnaces need to be designed for me to be protected and kind of yeah, thought about with a lot of care. It might be tempting to use off the shelf solutions. Because you might imagine that oh I have all the features I need but I think a lot of things might be forgotten right a lot of other more serendipitous things or things on a more structural level like are not designed for so I'm worried about this trend. As much as which is I think also why I think we could talk about access to social media and like access is one vector of a conversation, but the structure is another thing, right like we can talk about people being able to access the party park and use it but structurally what it is and what that represents is a different matter. So if governments can just access and have pages on Facebook or whatever to engage with people. That's fine but what does that mean structurally with the kinds of spaces that governments should be creating for people and what that what that affords so if we only if we don't do that then I think. I'm missing quite a lot from what should be public. That is a great day numa for a great event so thank you so much to answer presenting your work and engaging so thoughtfully with the questions and thank you to everyone else who showed up and ask questions and listen to the presentation, really appreciate it. And, you know until we see you the next time I have a great rest of the day. Thank you everyone.