ORGANIZATION
New_ Public
The nonprofit Pariser co-founded with Talia Stroud to reimagine digital public spaces — infrastructure for civic life that serves democratic values rather than engagement metrics.
New_ Public is the nonprofit organization Eli Pariser co-founded with Talia Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, to develop what they call "better digital public spaces." The premise is that the dominant digital platforms — Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube — are optimized for engagement rather than for the functions civic life requires: shared reality, productive disagreement, community formation, deliberation, the encounter with difference. New_ Public funds research, convenes practitioners, publishes analysis, and develops design frameworks for platforms that would serve different objectives. The work represents Pariser's mature response to the analysis that began with The Filter Bubble: having diagnosed the problem, the question became what institutional infrastructure could produce alternatives.
In The You On AI Field Guide
New_ Public's framework distinguishes between digital spaces that function like commercial districts — optimized for transactions, attention capture, engagement metrics — and digital spaces that function like parks, libraries, or town squares. The latter serve civic functions that do not translate cleanly