151: The End of the Public

From Collapse to Commons

What if the biggest political secret of our time is that the public no longer exists?

We still talk as if it does. Politicians campaign in its name. Corporations pretend to serve it. Media invokes it. But in practice, “the public” has become an empty signifier—a ghost that haunts our institutions.

The modern public was once a powerful idea. It meant more than just a collection of individuals. It was a space of shared life, shared stakes, shared decision-making. A social contract. A place where citizens could influence power, hold leaders accountable, and care for one another beyond private interest.

This idea was always imperfect, often exclusionary, and deeply contested. But it had a gravitational pull. It gave us public libraries, public healthcare, public education, public broadcasting—an infrastructure of solidarity that made collective life possible.

Now? That infrastructure is eroding. What hasn’t been privatized is being hollowed out. Democratic institutions are increasingly symbolic. Decisions are made not in parliaments, but in corporate boardrooms, venture capital funds, and opaque algorithms. The state, once imagined as the guardian of the public interest, is now the junior partner to private power.

And many people are only just realizing it.

The Internet was supposed to change this—supposed to revitalize the public. And for a moment, it did. It gave voice to the voiceless, exposed corruption, enabled new forms of organizing and solidarity. But it also accelerated fragmentation. It disintermediated institutions without replacing them. It flattened discourse while monetizing attention. It gave us platforms, not public squares.

And so the very infrastructure that could have revived the public has instead become one of the main forces undoing it.

The result is a population increasingly aware that things don’t work as they should—but unsure why, or where to turn.

We feel the weight of systems that no longer serve us. We see wealth and power concentrating beyond democratic reach. We sense that the social fabric is thinning, and we long for something more—something human.

So what happens now?

The collapse of the liberal order is not just about the failure of governments. It’s about the failure of ideology. Neoliberalism promised shared prosperity through growth and globalization—but delivered precarity and ecological ruin. Now, as faith in institutions withers, we are left with a vacuum.

Into that vacuum rushes the far right with fantasies of control. Tech billionaires with visions of managed decline. Or worse, nothing at all—just despair and distraction.

But there is another path.

A world oriented not around profit, but around needs. An economy not of competition, but of care. A politics not of representation, but of participation.

To get there, we need more than policy. We need a new ideology—one that can reclaim what the public once meant, and remake it for the networked, precarious, post-liberal world we now inhabit.

This will not come from above. It will not come from Silicon Valley or Washington or Davos. It will be born in mutual aid kitchens and community land trusts, in platform cooperatives and participatory budgets, in the quiet resilience of people refusing to give up on each other.

We are living through the end of the public as we knew it. But perhaps, just perhaps, we are also living through the beginning of something better.

Something still to be named.