Part 3 of 3 The first piece in this series described what has happened to public conversation: the shared room has fragmented, the incentives that govern public talk have shifted away from good reasoning, and the architecture of online discourse reliably sorts people into rooms where they encounter only weak versions of what other people [...]

Part 2 of 3 The previous piece argued that public conversation has gotten harder for structural reasons — fragmented information, attention-driven incentives, algorithms that sort us into rooms with people who already agree. That diagnosis sets up a question. What is genuine public conversation actually for? And what conditions does it need to work? Plenty [...]

Part 1 of 3 There used to be a room. Not literally, but functionally — a shared space where people who disagreed about important things could still talk to each other and be talked back to. A claim made in public was a claim that other people, reading the same paper or watching the same [...]