Public vs. Private

A lot of people assume that if something is popular or public, it must not be good—and that private is automatically better. But that isn’t necessarily true. Think about public parks and national parks. They’re public, and many of them are amazing. Public swimming pools can be great too. The real issue isn’t that public spaces are always worse. The real issue is that today, almost nothing is truly public anymore. Public space is shrinking, and that’s not good—especially for democracy.

If you think about modern life, everyone is more separated than before. A big reason is that so much can be done online now. In the past, if you wanted to live and make a living, you had to be part of the community. Now you don’t. You can work remotely. You can drive everywhere. You don’t even have to go grocery shopping in person—you can order everything on Amazon. People can build a digital identity and start treating that digital identity as their “real” identity, while real life becomes something secondary.

In a lot of cases, you can go an entire day without talking to a single person and still function. You can work from home. You can get your groceries delivered. You can meal-prep at home. You can work out at home. With telework and all these services, it’s possible to live a full life while barely interacting with anyone in your neighborhood.

That wasn’t true in the past. If you wanted to survive, you had to leave the house. You had to go to grocery stores, and you would naturally run into people. If you wanted to work out, you’d go to a gym or run in the park—most people didn’t have full setups at home. If you wanted a job, you usually had to show up somewhere physically, and networking mattered more because everything wasn’t remote. Even social life was more tied to community. If you wanted friends or a partner, you had to go out and be around people. And there wasn’t the same level of online entertainment. You couldn’t just tune into Netflix for hours. You had to go outside and do more physical activities.

So in the past, where you lived was strongly tied to who you were. Your community shaped your identity. But now you can live in New York City, work for a company based in California, buy products shipped from Mexico, and spend your nights watching Korean dramas. Your lifestyle becomes international and disconnected from your immediate surroundings. You’re physically in New York City, but your daily life has very little to do with New York City.

That shift reduces the need for public space. A lot of people don’t even go to parks anymore. And at the same time, everything is being privatized. That separation makes society more fragmented. People vote, but they don’t even always know what they’re voting for, because they aren’t grounded in the local community. They may live in New York City, but their attention and identity are elsewhere—online, in global media, and in digital spaces.

And this separation also contributes to polarization. You might live in a blue state, but your information diet can come from completely different sources. Or you might live in Texas, but your worldview is shaped by social platforms and online ecosystems. Big tech platforms control what information you see and even what goods and services you access. So everything becomes privatized—not only in the economic sense, but also in the cultural and informational sense.

But privatization doesn’t guarantee better quality. And the bigger issue is that you have less power to check private power. With public systems, you can vote. You can write to your representative. You can push for accountability. If the president or a local official fails, you can vote them out.

With private companies, you can’t do that. You can’t vote out a CEO. You can’t remove an executive through elections. You can try to boycott, but that’s not the same as democratic control—especially when a handful of companies dominate the platforms and services everyone relies on. When so much of life moves into private hands, the public loses its ability to check power. And that’s why the decline of public space—and the rise of private control—is not just an economic issue. It’s a democracy issue.