There was a time, not so long ago, when a town square meant something. Not merely the physical geography of cobblestones and cafés, but a shared conceptual space—where stories could be told, grievances aired, and laughter woven like thread through the fabric of the everyday. These were not perfect spaces, certainly not always just or inclusive, but they offered something precious: the chance for a common life, spoken into being.
Today, we carry our squares in our pockets. The agora has become an algorithm. The commons, once echoing with a cacophony of live voices, has fragmented into curated feeds and private comment sections. Words still flow, perhaps in greater quantity than ever before, but rarely do they gather. Rarely do they convene.
We speak, but are we heard?
It is tempting to idealize the past—to imagine the village green or the local newspaper as bastions of civility and dialogue—but the truth is more nuanced. Even in those spaces, voices were excluded. Women, people of colour, the poor, the dissenters—many had to fight to be heard. Still, the aspiration for a shared space was there. The very idea of the commons carried with it an ethic of responsibility. Speech was not just expression. It was contribution.
Now, in a world of hyper-individualised attention economies, we are trained to speak not to contribute, but to perform. The commons has not vanished entirely, but it has become haunted. Ghost towns of abandoned forums and disused comment sections litter the landscape, while the new plazas—Twitter-now-X, Instagram reels, TikTok trends—pulse with a different energy. It is not conversation but contagion. What spreads wins.
Language, in such a world, begins to warp. Words become signals, stripped of nuance, engineered for maximum velocity. A phrase once rich with cultural meaning is now a hashtag. Disagreement is flattened into a binary—agree or be algorithmically erased. The commons, once a place of cohabitation and contest, has become a marketplace of attention where ideas must sell themselves or vanish.
This is no small loss.
Because the commons was never just about location. It was about formation. It was where we learned how to speak and how to listen. It was where children overheard the debates of adults, where elders told stories that explained not only the world but our place within it. It was where a shared language could emerge—not uniform, but coherent enough to build bridges across difference.
When we lose the commons, we lose more than dialogue. We lose the slow formation of the civic imagination. We lose the mutual vulnerability of speaking with, not just at. And we lose the humility of being shaped by others, even as we seek to shape them.
But all is not lost.
There are signs—quiet, persistent—of a longing for something deeper. Book clubs, intentional communities, supper clubs, and storytelling circles are making a quiet return. Podcasts have, in a strange way, revived the long-form conversation. There are teachers gathering students not just to think critically but to speak generously. And in the liturgies of faith communities, there remains a rhythm of shared word and song that resists the logic of monetisation.
Perhaps the new commons will not be found in one place, but in many small ones. Not a singular square, but a constellation of circles. Around kitchen tables, in community halls, beneath stained glass and on street corners, we might yet recover the art of slow speech and attentive presence.
It will take intention. It will mean choosing depth over speed, and dialogue over performance. It will mean asking not only what we want to say, but what kind of space our words create.
And so, a call to action:
Reclaim a commons, however small. Host a conversation without agenda. Read a poem aloud to a friend. Turn off the feed, and gather—two, three, or ten of you. Speak truth. Listen long. Let your language be a bridge and not a brand.
The commons is not gone.
It is waiting to be spoken into being once more.
