The state of the public sphere today
Dispatches from Issue Seventeen
A strange thing keeps happening. We at The Drift keep publishing pieces that explain what’s wrong with the world and what to do about it, but for some reason, there are still a lot of problems with our society and culture. We asked around, and it turns out we aren’t alone: nearly everyone, it seems, often feels like they’re shouting into the void, whether online, in print, or in the streets. For Issue Seventeen, to examine the state of our collective reasoning — and the maddening feeling of political impotence — we asked a roster of writers, scholars, and podcasters to write about the public sphere today. Dispatches from Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, and Tarpley Hitt are now online for you to read. And a reinvigorated civic life, we presume, is just around the corner.
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
With our billionaire-captured media, algorithmically mediated and intensely surveilled social media feeds, censorious universities, and ever-diminishing cohort of independent publications, does a space for public, democratic consideration of ideas exist? Did it ever?
The most obvious Achilles Heel here is the self-satisfied Seriousness of virtually everyone in this crowd; not a David Sedaris or Jasmine Crockett as far as the eye can see. Exactly the sort of tennis ball
assaults the Trump virus is totally unaffected by. (Almost as bad as magazines who think that occasionally publishing a "satire" piece making fun of Melania's hat is really surfing the edge)
However true most of the points here might be, you guys are utterly unequipped for this battle. Stand back and let Jimmy Kimmel handle this...