Building Digital Public Spaces for Good
A Conversation with Eli Pariser, Co-Founder and Co-Director of New_ Public
Today, we’re launching The Exchange, a new interview series with influential thought leaders, organizers, advocates, and others who are shaping the future of civic life. It’s a front-row seat to the people pushing boundaries, challenging norms, and reimagining what meaningful civic participation looks like in America today.
We’re kicking it off with Eli Pariser, Co-Founder and Co-Director of New_ Public, a community and experimentation hub for digital public spaces, and former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, where he helped pioneer the practice of online citizen engagement, in conversation with Murmuration’s Chief Marketing and Operating Officer, Michael Slaby.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Michael Slaby: I’m excited to sit down and talk through all things digital community with you today. To start: you’re a Co-Founder and Co-Director of New_ Public, a community and experimentation hub for digital public space. Can you tell us what you’re building there?
Eli Pariser: New_ Public is a non-profit incubator for digital public spaces. We believe that just like in physical communities, where businesses are great but you still need community centers and libraries and sidewalks that are built for the public, the same is true in digital life. Even if Facebook were run by the very wisest, best person, the structure of being a venture-backed, massive company results in there being some functions that companies like Facebook are not going to take on. At New_ Public, we think through building digital conversation as our North Star. We’ve gotten really interested in local use cases because it’s a place where we hear from people all the time that there are just huge needs that are not met. And for me, that’s very important because if you’ve been around civic tech stuff long enough, you’ve seen a million worthy things come along that nobody actually used.
We’re very focused on local because it’s a place where, actually, in the same way that nobody goes to a library to be part of civic democracy—they go to a library to get a book, get Wi-Fi, or get help with SNAP—there are some first-order needs that people have that are not being met in these spaces. So, we’re piloting a community-first, mission-first local information platform, and we’re trying it out in five towns. People in these towns are super excited, and it’s been great for us to just hear their energy and support.
Michael Slaby: I know so much of the work you’ve done at New_ Public is oriented around taking learnings from healthy physical spaces and adapting them for healthy digital spaces, and thinking through what that means for civic life, community, and healthy democratic culture. Do you have any thoughts about the intersection between physical spaces and information?
Eli Pariser: A lot of our work right now at New_ Public is specifically around geographically local digital public spaces, and we’re fascinated by them because this has become one of the biggest changes in how Americans communicate that is almost completely under the radar. We’ve talked a lot about newspapers going away. What has happened in their place, for better and for worse, is that people are defaulting over to Facebook groups, or to WhatsApp channels, or to email lists, or Nextdoor sometimes, and that’s become the way that a majority of Americans, according to Pew, now get information about their towns and understand what’s going on.
I often think of Benedict Anderson, the sociologist who talked about nations as kind of imagined communities: you’re never in touch with all the other people in your nation. You don’t get to see it. We learn to imagine what our community is like through media. And so these local groups become filters, lenses, funhouses, mirrors that people use to understand what’s going on around them. That has huge implications for how people feel—how safe they feel, how comfortable they feel, how much trust they put in their neighbors, and how much they’re willing to hang out in third spaces with other people.
In the late 20th century, the way that would work is you would turn on your local TV channel, or you would read your local newspaper, and you would hear about what’s going on. That was one lens that people used to help understand what people here are like. Do I need to be afraid when I’m walking down the street? Are people gonna rip me off? Or, are they pretty good? And there were some biases built in there, and sometimes those were biases toward crime. I saw some of that in Murmuration’s recent collaborative post with Deep South Today on the weight local news carries in the Deep South.
But back then, newspapers had these big biases toward reporting on good things that people were doing in the community. Here’s the local teenager who’s going all the way to the Intel Science Fair. And then you switch that whole system out for these local groups, and you get this very different picture, which largely right now is a more chaotic, somewhat darker picture. When you talk to people about how they imagine their neighbors, how do they imagine their community after being in Nextdoor? Half the people out there think people are getting ready to steal stuff from their home or kill them, and the world is scary.
Michael Slaby: You mentioned that if you’ve been in the civic tech space for a while, you’ve seen experiments. Do you see places where building healthy digital spaces is working, even at a small scale?
Eli Pariser: If you imagine kind of the scatterplot of all of the Facebook groups that do local things, there’s a lot of difference between them, and there are some that are organized pretty well and serve their purpose pretty well, and there are some that don’t. The biggest indicator of which ones are working pretty well and which ones aren’t is if there’s a person at the center of them, what we call a steward, that’s not just a moderator. They are the caretaker or convener for the community. And we have some new research coming out that shows this empirically.
“I think so much of our experience of venture-driven, mass-scale tools is that none of them stay healthy...The genuine civic value, social value, and public good value start to diminish because of the pressure that the only business models these folks have figured out that work at venture-scale return are essentially an outreach engine.”
Michael Slaby: I think so much of our experience of venture-driven, mass-scale tools is that none of them stay healthy. Even the ones that started as vibrant, almost as soon as they start trying to make money, they start to degrade. The genuine civic value, social value, and public good value start to diminish because of the pressure that the only business models these folks have figured out that work at venture-scale return are essentially an outrage engine.
Eli Pariser: I’m sure you’ve looked at Corey Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. I think he makes a very compelling argument there, which is essentially the way venture startups work is that you use venture money, venture investment, sometimes billions of dollars to get users, and during that period, it’s great.
Michael Slaby: When it’s subsidized, it’s great. As long as that subsidy was good-seeking rather than return-seeking, that might work out, but eventually it changes.
Eli Pariser: Right. So at some point, the growth curve levels off, and then you have this business that’s losing money, and then you have to make it make a lot of money to pay the investors back, and you do that by just jerking the customers around and squeezing every bit of value you can out of it. That’s “enshittification”. So, this is part of why we think there has to be another model of how we’re building these spaces, because that is inevitable.
And yet, we’re seeing things like Wikipedia that are self-sustaining, we’re seeing things in the media world that are self-sustaining. Can we build things in the platform space as the cost of building a platform gets a lot cheaper, that can sustain themselves but not be subject to that venture pressure to yield a 100x outcome?
I want to go back to your question of if there are good places. Because I would say in some ways, it’s a question of scale. I think there are a lot of people who have pretty good experiences at a super hyper-local level with a neighborhood WhatsApp, with an email list, or whatever. And especially if it’s well-moderated, well-stewarded, that can be pretty good. You get to a little bit of a bigger scale, it gets a little harder, and I think we’re used to this question of, can you have a billion people or 100 million people co-occupy the same space? I don’t know the answer to that. I think maybe not. Maybe that’s okay that the answer is no.
I think that makes things a lot simpler, because what is the universal, culturally relevant algorithm? That’s a hard question. Is there one? Or is it not a problem that you can solve at a scale of 8 billion people and however many millions of different community levels? But you can solve it at a local community level, and so that’s kind of part of why New_ Public focused there.
“One of the reasons that I get excited about local information and local spaces is, at the end of the day, it’s a way to feel a sense of agency.”
One of the reasons that I get excited about local information and local spaces is, at the end of the day, it’s a way to feel a sense of agency. A long time ago, when I ran MoveOn and was very focused on getting people involved in national things. I’m proud of lots of stuff that we did then, and it was exciting to figure out how to get people to do stuff on the internet that actually had an impact in politics. But I look at that sometimes, and I feel like focusing on federal politics is a way to feel powerless a lot of the time because there’s less agency.
Michael Slaby: You’re describing this experience of pushing people toward national agency. But in a moment, that was a very different information landscape wise back in the early 2000s, and a really different digital landscape than where we live now. When I talk about the digital organizing we did in 2008 on the first Obama campaign, I often have to remind people that Twitter was like eight months old. It was teeny tiny.
Eli Pariser: In local places, you can move stuff a lot of the time. You can have an idea and make it happen. And it’s not like it’s always that easy, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than me as a citizen trying to persuade Joe Manchin in West Virginia, who’s not even my senator, of something that turns out to be pivotal to the thing I care about federally.
Michael Slaby: I live in a village with 2,000 adults. If you want to get something relatively significant done in this village, you can move things in a really good, genuine, collective way. Not even in a sort of Machiavellian, how hard can we push way—but in a really good, beautiful way. My wife is a village trustee here, and she helped steward this large-scale comprehensive planning process over the last year and a half. More than a thousand people participated in it, which is an incredible percentage of the village. Half of the adults participated in this process. It’s so rich and so representative and so beautiful, and it’s only a thousand people. And that is inspiring because it feels like real agency.
“One of the fundamental drivers of behavior across the political spectrum right now is just feeling like things are out of control and wanting someone to take control.”
Eli Pariser: It is real agency. And it’s collective agency. And that’s the most important thing. One of the fundamental drivers of behavior across the political spectrum right now is just feeling like things are out of control and wanting someone to take control.
Michael Slaby: You recently wrote a piece on LinkedIn highlighting the next wave of AI products that are poised to usher in a new era of hyper-personalized, hyper-addicting media. I mentioned earlier in our conversation about the pressure of discerning reality and that it really is about how synthetic content and bots play into our understanding of self and story and our capacity for creativity and all these other things. In your piece, you used a couple of phrases that I was really curious about. One was the “unholy merger” between Netflix’s capacity to algorithmically define content and the outrage engine.
Eli Pariser: I think there’s something very specific about calling it unholy because I think there’s a really important moral component to it. What I mean by that is that we often talk about misinformation and disinformation, and we often get lost in the distinction between right and wrong and trust and false.
Michael Slaby: And calling it unholy is calling it bad. Morally bad. I think that’s actually a really important distinction: that we’re talking about a choice, we’re talking about what we want to be good and true in society as being under pressure.
I’ve talked a lot about how, in the early days of social media, we never clearly defined what we wanted these platforms to do for our civic life. We just assumed they were going to be good for us. We had this cyber utopian naivety, and some people warned us, including you, that we were headed down some dangerous paths if we as a society weren’t more explicit about the roles of these tools in civic life. And, what does good mean in the context of these tools and in these spaces? I don’t know that we have done enough to articulate that yet.
“We had this cyber utopian naivety, and some people warned us, including you, that we were headed down some dangerous paths if we as a society weren’t more explicit about the roles of these tools in civic life.”
Eli Pariser: I have lots of thoughts on that. This isn’t my religious tradition, but the new Pope is deeply engaged in this set of questions, too. He named himself Pope Leo because he saw AI as similar to the Industrial Revolution under the last Pope Leo, so I think there really is this moral tenor to it that we have to be thinking about. For me, that goes to what is holy, what is great about being a human being? And then how do we serve full humans with the digital environments that we have?
That sounds very “tisk tisk” and no fun. But I think having fun and being entertained and vegging out or whatever are joyous. Just watching crappy TV serves some really important needs, too. What I worry about is that we have this kind of vicious combination of the incentives of capitalism to keep people engaged in things that can persuade them or sell them things and hyper-persuasive, hyper-engaging, hyper-entertaining technology. That seems like a recipe for not good things. And again, it comes back to this question of how do we build? But I think it absolutely is what will happen as long as we have the kind of top-level incentives that we have.
I think about this a lot with regard to chatbots. What we’ve seen so far is that they’re fed a bunch of language into some neural networks. You can talk to it and have it predict what the right response would be. But it really is not optimized for becoming your best friend.
Michael Slaby: It’s choosing the most likely response, not the right response.
Eli Pariser: 100 percent. If you were to say, okay, now let’s optimize ChatGPT for deep emotional connection, where it has some persistent memory of you, and it’s going, “Hey, Michael, how was your day? That seemed like a long day. How are you doing?”, it will start to provide—and drug analogies are always dangerous, but Maia Szalavitz who writes a lot about drug stuff had this great essay in her book Unbroken Brain where she was trying to explain what heroin feels like and she said heroin feels like is being loved—if you have technologies that can give that feeling that is an very strong pull.
And we’re not even there yet, but we’re going there, right? And once you have that relationship with someone, then we know already that these technologies can be incredibly persuasive and hold people’s attention and sell them stuff. That all exists already.
Michael Slaby: Thank you for taking the time to be part of the Exchange and sharing your wisdom and thoughts. These kinds of intersections are really generative. The ways in which people are interconnected and derive value from being in relationships are increasingly important to how we can be useful in the world. So I appreciate you being willing to share here.
Eli Pariser: Thank you so much for having me.
About Eli Pariser
Eli Pariser is Co-Founder and Co-Director of New_ Public, a community and experimentation hub for digital public spaces. He’s been an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. In 2004, at 23, he became Executive Director of MoveOn.org, where he helped pioneer the practice of online citizen engagement. In 2006, he co-founded Avaaz, now the world’s largest citizen’s organization. His bestselling 2011 book The Filter Bubble introduced the term to the lexicon. And Upworthy, the media startup he co-founded in 2012, reached hundreds of millions of visitors with civically important content. Now his work is focused on bringing together community entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, and designers to envision, architect and scale digital public spaces.
About Michael Slaby
Michael Slaby is a leader in how values, systems, strategy, and technology drive movements and organizations. At Murmuration, he leads marketing, fundraising, network engagement, and culture. Before joining Murmuration, he was a senior strategist and head of community at Harmony Labs where he worked on accelerating media reform and transformation. He founded and was head of mission of Timshel, a social impact technology company, and was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Michael helped lead the Obama for America campaign as chief integration and innovation officer in 2012 where he oversaw all technology and analytics and as deputy digital director and chief technology officer in 2008.
Murmuration is a nonprofit working to transform America into a nation where everyone can thrive. We organize a network of community-focused partners and equip them with the insights, tools, and services they need to help communities build and activate power more effectively. murmuration.org