Someone take these dreams away
In The Fall of Public Man (1977), Richard Sennett argues that modernity has brought about a "confusion ... between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning." Against the idea popularized by David Riesman that American life had become too conformist and "outer-directed," Sennett claims instead that an "intimate vision of society" had taken hold by which "citizens" are led to "measure all social life in terms of personal feeling." People interpret public figures by the standards of private life and expect them to be unique personalities, assessed in terms of their perceived authenticity or individual creativity rather than for the functions they are performing, the roles they are filling, or the ideas they are articulating. (Christopher Lasch would later extrapolate this idea into the "culture of narcissism.") We also come to believe that we can participate in public discourse only on the same terms, that is, at the expense of our privacy.
If the Habermasian "public sphere" is in danger, it is not because people are being forced to be inauthentic or their "free speech" is being curtailed by cancel mobs; it is because authenticity has been made into a value in a realm where it doesn't belong. Social media platforms, from this perspective, don't constitute the public sphere but abolish it. It seems as though they should facilitate Sennett's idea of healthy social practice, allowing strangers to work together toward collective goals without getting into one another's personal business — and in certain moments, when a platform is new or a user is new to it, this might even be how it feels. But persistent connectivity and the design of personalized content feeds work against this, dissolving the boundaries necessary to maintaining distinct public and a private selves. As Ryan Broderick suggests in a recent newsletter, personalized feeds produce not self-satisfaction but a sense of entitlement and rage in their consumers — "I can now recognize that my first impulse when seeing internet content I don’t like or agree entering my feed is to react really violently to it." That violent reaction comes to be the whole point of looking, the way we recognize who we think we are and who we think we aren't. You engage with the "public sphere" to find out about yourself and not the world.
Social media, ironically enough, eliminate that codified space in which public discourse can be conducted in an impersonal manner, constrained by politesse and a mutual respect for the fundamental privacy of others, in which confessional talk is understood as a kind of aggressiveness, a potlatch exhibitionism. On platforms, no one is on the same terrain on the same terms; everyone can speak but no one knows who is listening unless they react. It becomes understood that you are speaking to an algorithm rather than other people, that the possibility of reciprocity has been supplanted by instrumentality (what can I say to get feedback?). Confessions, and authenticity audits, are thereby endlessly incentivized and scored; this, in Sennett's terms, "deflates the objective character of action and inflates the importance of subjective states of feeling of the actors." When someone "acts" by posting, it's understood in the context of social media that it's self-aggrandizement before it is anything else, that the only reason to do anything there really is to build one's personal human capital. It's all market relations.
One of Sennett's points is that the risks of acting in public become too high under the conditions in which all behavior is interpreted as an expression of personality — where people's behavior is constantly being read and decoded for its secret intimations of their "real" or "authentic" character, always defined precisely as what they aren't consciously intending. "The paradox of visibility and isolation which haunts so much of modern public life originated in the right to silence ... Isolation in the midst of visibility to others was a logical consequence of insisting on one's right to be mute when one ventured into this chaotic yet still magnetic realm." (This reminds me I need to read Joanne McNeil's Lurking.)
Social media platforms understand this right as the ongoing requirement of inciting people to waive it, to post against their better instincts, against their revulsion at self-promotion and their fear of vulnerability. Almost all of their methods (often tied to gimmicks or metrics) rely on an appeal to individualistic self-interest — "participate because it will be fun or gratifying or profitable for you personally"; not "participate because one is beholden to perform their civic duty."
Given that social media platforms have nothing necessarily to do with civics (and everything to do with enriching their owners), one can wonder, with Broderick, why these platforms were ever taken to be town squares. "There doesn’t need to be a public square! And there can also be many!" he writes, which amounts to a kind of long-tail nihilism: Any public sphere has already been dissolved into separate spheres of parochial interest; there is no way to constitute the demos and thus also no point in trying. The "mass media" has been dissolved into a cacophony, which is hegemonic in its own right, conveying and protecting the same interests, not by restricting the range of expressible opinion but by reducing opinions to personal ads.
Whatever the demos might be seems defined by how it is anything but what is mediated — the "silence of the masses," as Baudrillard put it, who enjoy the spectacle but surrender their coherence the minute they participate in it.