After Elon Musk went public with his proposed $44 billion purchase of Twitter, he tweeted out “Twitter is the digital town square.”
I would argue that’s the farthest thing from the truth. Twitter could be a digital town square, but to do so, it would have to not be owned by anyone, and certainly not a billionaire like Musk, who, if he buys Twitter, has the opportunity to play God by determining what might be allowed to appear on his version of the digital town square.
In other words, you could call Twitter, if Musk gets his way, “Elon Musk’s digital town square.”
In certain ways, Twitter has served as a digital town square—it’s where we can hear what journalists, politicians, celebrities, and others have to say, along with keeping up on public affairs, news, and all other things that allow you to see what’s going on.
Of course, Twitter also has its bullies, trolls, thugs, and mobs, ready at the drop of a coin to pounce on someone who said something they didn’t like.
A true town square is an aspect of the Commons, a part of life considered a public good and a segment of the public trust. In a town square, people meet to talk, share ideas, and commune—all without any sense of thinking, what’s in it for me, or how can I monetize this?
A public trust serves the community, and is oriented toward the public good, without thinking about the profit motive. In America, that is in short supply.
America doesn’t have much in the way of public goods. There is not a public health care system. Nor retirement system, national public transport system, affordable public university system, or a strong social safety net that protects people when they hit hard times. These are all public goods.
The rest of the developed world and many developing nations, have many of these things. But not America.
Almost a hundred years ago, in 1927, the songwriting team of Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown wrote the lyrics, and Ray Henderson the music, for the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”
The song told us that the best things in life are free and belong to everyone: the moon, the stars, the flowers, the robins that sing, the sunbeams that shine, and the love that can come to everyone.
There is no price you can put on any of these; unfortunately, in our age of commodification, in which everything has a price, the public good has become subservient to the commodification of all.
The U.S., with its lack of public goods, and the assignation of a price tag on everything, is in dire need of reviving the Commons.
The idea of the Commons is that there are natural resources that should be available to everyone—including clean air and water, and a habitable earth—and these are managed for individual and community benefit.
Along with natural resources, there are other domains that are part of the Commons, such as the digital arena—hence some people considering Twitter a digital town square—an intellectual Commons, an urban Commons, and a knowledge Commons.
When the technology age began to take hold in the 1980s with the development of personal computers, it commenced with a certain utopian fervor. At first the mantra was “information wants to be free,” as Stewart Brand famously said at a Hackers Conference in 1984. This current of thought ran through the veins of the open software movement, where no one owned the software and coders developed free programs on top of what others had done before.
Once the internet came into existence, thanks to the team of computer scientists at ARPANET, Tim Berners-Lee, the head of the team and the person credited with inventing the internet, decided to make it a public good.
Berners-Lee considered taking ownership of the internet and monetizing it for his own benefit—he received numerous offers from several major software companies to do so—but ultimately decided against it. “The essence of the Web is that it’s a universe of information,” Berners-Lee said, “and it wouldn’t be universal if it was tied, in any way, to one company.”
How radical a concept, to let the internet be free. Yet, how normal to not attach a dollar sign to it.
Of course, these days, the utopian fervor of the age of technology has become a dystopic nightmare, thanks to the commodification of the internet.
The idea of the Commons dates back to the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD, with what was known as the Public Trust Doctrine. That doctrine stated that government is a trustee over essential natural resources, and the citizens, especially future generations, are the beneficiaries.
The Public Trust Doctrine is the legal defense being used in the case of Juliana v. United States, the case filed on behalf of 21 youth plaintiffs in an effort to force the U.S. government to address the problem of climate change. The plaintiffs assert that the government has knowingly violated their due process rights of life, liberty, and property, as well as neglected the government’s duty to protect public grounds, by encouraging and permitting the combustion of fossil fuels.
Juliana v. United States has been working its way through the court system since 2015, still with no resolution. The documentary feature film, Youth v Gov, is the story of this legal case, and can be seen on Netflix.
The Commons is the key to creating a more open, fair, and egalitarian society, as it gives people the opportunity to prosper and thrive without the barrier of a financial impediment. Whether it’s access to natural resources like clean air, water, and forests, or the ability to access a healthcare or higher education system that doesn’t lead to incurring major debt, these are essential goods that benefit the greater public.
Because the U.S. is so lacking in public goods, its ranking on global surveys such as the World Happiness Report and Social Progress Index are substandard. These reports find the U.S. lacking in measures that enhance citizen well-being, along with lacking in affording people an increased sense of security, stability, and opportunity for advancement in life.
The World Happiness Report, an annual publication of the U.N., looks beyond GDP as a measure of happiness, questioning whether affluence is the proper metric to tell whether people are happy or imbued with a sense of contentment. Instead, social bonds and social cohesion are the important yardsticks.
In writing the Report, the researchers start with a basic premise: “Should we consider some parts of our society to be ‘off-bounds’ to the profit motive, so that we can foster the spirit of cooperation, trust, and community?”
Imagine that: a society in which the profit motive is considered off-bounds for certain segments of that society?
How would that look in the U.S? Health care off-bounds to the profit motive? And the same for education, childcare, housing, public transportation, food, and more? If that were the case, the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free” would be the national anthem.
But that’s not the case, and for that reason the U.S. has repeatedly ranked no higher than 18th in the World Happiness Report’s ratings of nations.
It’s not a coincidence that the nations that rank the highest in the World Happiness Report are the social democracies of the world. These countries recognize the importance of the government playing a central role in the welfare of its citizenry—these nations understand that certain segments of their societies are indeed off-limits to the profit motive.
In the second of the two reports I cited, the Social Progress Index, the U.S. fares even worse, ranking 28th among nations. The Social Progress Index looks at 50 different metrics to ascertain its rankings, looking at such things as a nation’s life expectancy (the U.S. has the lowest among developed nations), poverty rate (the U.S. has the second highest among developed nations), health care expenditures (the U.S. has the highest in the world), child mortality rate (the U.S. has the highest among developed nations), income inequality (the U.S. has the largest gap among developed nations), cost of college (the U.S. has a citizenry that spends the most on college); the list goes on and on.
Out of 163 countries assessed worldwide for the Social Progress Index, only the U.S., Brazil, and Hungary are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary are smaller than America’s.
This gloomy reality led Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index to state, “The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action. It’s like we’re a developing country.”
Why is the U.S. such an outlier among developed nations? Because it’s given up on the Commons. The U.S. is the land of the uncommonness of the Commons. Everything has a price, everything is a commodity.
The victories for the public good, and the town square, are few and far between. As Joni Mitchell once sang, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
But of course, all the trees get taken to a tree museum, where the people pay a dollar and a half just to see them.
I know, I know. It’s good for GDP to put a price tag on everything—it’s how a nation achieves economic growth.
But I’ll tell you this: every time we chop off and parcel out a piece of the Commons, we lose a piece of our soul.
When Elon Musk completes his purchase of Twitter, another piece of our collective soul will go down the drain. It may be to the benefit of Musk, but for the rest of us, not at all.
The best things in life have always been free. We need to peel back the commodification of life so we can listen to the robins that sing, feel the sunbeams that shine, and experience the love that can come to everyone.