What is a town square?

If you have been following the death spiral of X (formerly known as Twitter), you may have noticed that the official X account is posting about how they want to be the “global town square.” And their CEO Linda Yaccarino has often called the site the global town square. Elon Musk uses this phrase a lot too.

So it got me thinking—what do these tech idiots think they mean when they use the phrase “global town square?” The most important thing to keep in mind when reflecting on what these tech idiots do and say is that they have given absolutely zero thought to what their services and products do, what they mean, and what they’re for. This is why in the early 2010s they all just repeated the “making the world a better place” slogan, which made absolutely no sense, and in fact they all accomplished the exact opposite. (This slogan was satirized for several seasons on the HBO show Silicon Valley).

So the place to start in thinking about what the tech idiots think “town square” means is to understand that they have no idea what it means. So let’s try to imagine what they might mean. It’s interesting that tech elites seem to love the concept of a town square, because it’s their fake idea of what living in a society must be like, because they’ve always been so removed from one, they think people just go to the center of town and start talking to each other. Is that it? Usually a town square is like a public park with benches, maybe a gazebo or stage where local musicians play concerts, and local parades begin or end there, things like that. There isn’t usually a lot of vigorous intellectual debating happening.

So this concept of town square doesn’t really exist in actual American towns today. That much is pretty clear. What they probably have in mind is something like the agora of ancient Greece, specifically Athens. You’ve probably heard the term agora before—it’s where Socrates spent all his time hanging out and doing dialectics.

The Greek word agora means marketplace, and that’s just what it was—a place where local artisans would sell goods and services. The concept of the agora gets fetishized a lot, as like this ideal place where people would come and meet and have great conversations or something. But it was mostly artisans selling rhetoric programs to poor people who wanted to join the middle class. Athens was first and foremost the world’s first democracy, and this meant that lots of poor people had the chance to move up in the world—and the best way they could do that was by learning how to speak well. This is what the artisans in the agora offered the masses eager to advance up the social ladder—training in rhetorical skills. If you could learn to speak and argue and persuade well, then you could have a career in politics, and the world was your oyster.

The people who specialized in selling rhetorical skills were called sophists. This comes from the Greek word sophia, which means wisdom. So they were wisdom salesmen, basically. If you know anything about Socrates, you probably know that he engaged in intellectual combat with sophists all the time—Socrates was not a sophist, he was a philosopher. Philosopher means lover of wisdom (philos + sophia), rather than being a sophist who claims to have wisdom to sell. Socrates couldn’t sell anything because he didn’t claim to have anything to sell.

Socrates actually tried to take the promise of the agora seriously—as a marketplace of ideas. Marketplace of ideas, of course, is a phrase that libertarians and conservatives in general love to use. So Socrates went to the agora to have real conversations, and nobody there wanted to do it, because that’s not what it was actually about. It was not a marketplace of ideas, it was a marketplace where ideas were sold. This is a subtle but crucial difference. There can’t be an actual marketplace of ideas—it makes no fucking sense. What would that even entail? It would be something like what Socrates tried to do with the sophists—to carefully examine every inch of the ideas that were being sold, as one would with any product for which they were paying. And the sophists immediately were exposed as frauds, because ideas aren’t products. So the whole point of Socrates is that the agora, as a marketplace of ideas, was fake and bad. If it was a legitimate thing, then Socrates would have fit in well and been happily accepted, because he was trying to verify the value of the ideas being sold. If you go to a store and inquire about what you’re buying, the salesmen won’t freak out, they’ll answer your questions and direct you to the best product to fit your needs. This is not what happened with Socrates and the sophists in the agora. Socrates stuck out like a sore thumb—so much so that they eventually sentenced him to death!—because he tried to take the promise of a marketplace of ideas seriously, which nobody else did, and which nobody should have, because it’s fucking absurd.

But after saying all of this, this is kind of what X/Twitter is. It is mostly just artisans selling services (users trying to monetize their content in various ways), and then aristocrats who didn’t have to work, and would just hang out, which is basically Twitter, except the artisan/advertiser element is leaving.

So to sum up: tech elites constantly talk about creating a “global town square” in digital space, as some kind of giant social good; but a “town square” does not exist in in American towns in the way that tech idiots think it does. What they mean is something like the ancient Athenian agora, which was not a town square, but more of a marketplace of ideas—which was exposed as bullshit at the time by Socrates. So the tech idiots are wrong on many levels, which requires only the most basic knowledge of history and literature, and a few moments of thoughtful reflection, to realize. But even that, of course, is beyond the tech elites who control our fate, who know only how to write computer code, and nothing else—and for some reason we have allowed these creatures to control everything. Not good!