[Note: This was originally for a magazine that shall not be named. I pulled the piece after disagreeing on edits. So here it is for you :).]

On a recent, warmish evening, I walked through New York’s Lower East Side with a man. We passed Tompkins Square Park. The park was nearly empty.

Deadening these blocks was a purposeful act: the Lower East Side was a hotbed of anti-gentrification activism in the 1980s, and after a protest turned into a riot in 1988, the city redesigned Tompkins—splitting it into several, much smaller sections via neck-high iron gates; installing a playground and dog run (great for some people (and dogs), but mostly done to further atomize the space). New York is more expensive than it has ever been, but it’s hard to fight against that fact when there’s not even an adequate space to gather. As the late, great, Marxist geographer Neil Smith argued, the strangulation of Tompkins was the death knell for a more equal and less capital-infected version of New York City.

Which is to say: our built environment encourages certain types of speech and discourages others, and, in doing so, affects how we conceptualize our present and future.

There are very few good public squares in the United States, and so, perhaps, it makes sense that the internet became the biggest, or at least most immediately available, one. It is where Americans, and especially young ones, spend much of our free time—the average teen looks at social media for nearly 5 hours each day. It is even recognized by the Supreme Court as a public square—most explicitly so in the unanimously-decided Packingham v. North Carolina, in which the court ruled that a sex offender could not be barred from social media platforms, lest he be barred from public life.

But it is not very public (nor square-shaped).

If putting up fences in Tompkins Square destroyed the ability of a public square to serve the public’s desires (for affordable housing, for community, for an end to police brutality), and thus influenced the future of its populace to be more staid, more conservative, less diverse, and more oriented toward capital, then one might ask what spending five hours each day in a public square (or, really, private series of tubes) owned by a few billionaires in which algorithms not only fence us off from each other, but also dictate what paths we go down and who we encounter on those paths (the paths are also lined with 100-foot tall flashing billboards for dropshipped stuffed animal advertisements or whatever), is doing to its populace (which is to say: all of us).

Well, nothing good.

Exit poll data suggest that Trump won more votes from 18-to-29 year olds than Harris did in 2024. Electoral politics are only one measure of public sentiment but here are some others, all of which point toward a growing conservatism, largely influenced by the amount of time we spend online: research has correlated using TikTok with becoming more conservative; a survey has found that more than half of Gen-Z-ers want sex off movie screens; young people are having less sex than previous generations and spending less time with friends (isolation and fear of others has been linked to support for right-wing belief systems), and instead spending that time on their phones.

You can, of course, also just go online and see it for yourself...