It is pretty cool to see the OGs of internet criticism, Nicholas Carr and Eli Pariser, both writing about this current moment. Carr wrote The Shallows in 2010, and Pariser coined “filter bubble” in 2011.
Carr’s new essay (and book) returns to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion and makes a claim: every new communications technology since the telegraph has been sold as the thing that would dissolve misunderstanding and produce informed citizens, yet none of them have. The most engaged people end up the most narrowly partisan, while the most educated have the most distorted view of their opponents. More information has not produced more understanding. It has, Carr argues, produced less.
Pariser’s recent report from New_ Public is slightly different in theme, but similar in diagnosis. The engagement-based public square has collapsed under synthetic content and AI mediation. What comes next, in his framing, is not more engagement but a different kind: trust over attention, thick reputation over follower count, and small, high-trust communities that AI might actually help build and sustain at scale, which were previously not economically viable.
(New_ Public itself is worth knowing about since they have been doing fab work on what good digital public spaces could/should look like.)
The two pieces argue that the mass engagement era is closing because the information-abundance frame that organised the last twenty years was wrong about what it would produce. What comes next is smaller, slower, more relational, and partly mediated by tools that can support rather than replace the relational work.
Question: What conditions are required for these micro-communities to flourish rather than recapitulate the same failure modes at a smaller scale?
Do they work best if the people inside them bring some pre-existing capacity for relational life? And fail if the architecture is asked to produce the capacity from scratch?
Links to both pieces in the comments.
References
- Nicholas Carr, “The Myth of the Informed Citizen”, New Cartographies.
- Eli Pariser, report from New_ Public.
Originally written for LinkedIn on 13 May 2026. View original →