I’ll be honest, so much of what I carry around is F Zuck energy: the perfect villain, a guy who can do no right. But yesterday I sat down with Deepti Doshi of New Public and she reminded me the problem isn’t the people, it’s the structure.
In her previous experience as a Director at Facebook, “our customer was advertisers, not people.” We’re operating inside a system that optimizes for metrics: our eyeballs, our time. We need to be easy on the people, and hard on the system.
At New_Public, Deepti and the team are focused on building healthy digital public spaces, places designed for trust and connection instead of ad clicks and outrage. Here’s what we got into:
Everything online happens in a mall. All of our digital interactions are taking place downstream of an earlier decision to put them inside a commercial space. There are times to go to the mall, times to go down Main Street, but not everything is a shopping trip. If we want a full life (we call ourselves Life with Machines, not Shopping with Machines) then we need alternate systems that support more than just commercial activity.
The monopoly is over. We don’t have to wait on tech companies to build the things we need anymore. If Deepti wants to share photos with family across the US and India, she doesn’t have to use Facebook: she can Claude Code her way to a private app that includes the features she actually wants to use. I just witnessed a local vibeathon here in Palm Springs where neighbors vibe-coded solutions for local businesses in a day.
“We’re free, dude. We’re free.” - Deepti
The move from passive prompter class to thinker/builder class. It’s not just that the problem got solved. It’s the way the problem got solved: together. People who may never otherwise have met helping and relating to each other has a huge impact on our social trust within our neighborhoods. More than just the commerce or the code, we’re building the community.
AI only gets the job if it’s better than the best available human. It’s awesome that we don’t have to spend an hour trying to find the perfect travel shoe anymore. AI can do that in minutes and that’s something to be grateful for. But there are some jobs we’re reserving for human beings only (like talking to a friend and everything else that requires connection and meaning).
The anti-Nextdoor app. Roundabout is a community app that offers event calendars, local guides, information, and neighborhood updates. It’s a place to connect with neighbors as the first priority, not to ship ads or to stoke engagement and basically devolve our society.
Check out the full conversation above, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the goodness we covered. And tell us in the comments: what are you craving from your digital public spaces?
Big thanks to Deepti for joining me and to YOU for being part of this community.
Stay free.
– Baratunde
Thanks to the Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
