“Are things really gettin’ better, like the newspaper said?
What else is new my friend, besides what I read?
Can’t find no work, can’t find no job, my friend
Money is tighter than it’s ever been
Say man, I just don’t understand
What’s going on across this land”

• Marvin Gaye, “What’s Happening Brother”

On March 12, 1711, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele’s (1671-1729) seminal publication, The Spectator, published its 10th issue.¹ Celebrating the “becoming Seriousness and Attention” with which his Morning Lectures were received by the public, Addison took advantage of the occasion to explain the project: “to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality [… to bring] Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-houses.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas would come to see this moment as a milestone in the formation of “the public sphere,” that arena of social life in which “private people come together as a public,”² to comment on the issues of their day.

The Spectator was far from the first serial publication to reach a broad audience of readers in England. Indeed,³ the oldest surviving news publication in English dates to 1513, a simple dispatch announcing the English victory at the battle of Flodden. Such dispatches were printed sporadically throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries, particularly in times of conflict, when the public was anxious for news from their armies abroad. By the second half of the 17th century, these ad-hoc dispatches had been supplanted by an intricate network of handwritten newsletters–some of them state-sponsored, some of them informal–that were read by individual correspondents to keep in touch with events abroad. These correspondents would then read the newsletters to their coffeehouse friends, or use them as sources for printed periodicals. The vicissitudes of the English Civil War, the Restoration, the Popish Plot, and the Glorious Revolution meant that censorship was intermittent throughout this period. Newsletters were routed through the Dutch Republic, where authorities were generally more permissive, while printed newspapers were spun up and shuttered according to the changing whims of princes.

1695 saw the lapsing of the last censorship bill in the United Kingdom, and the publishing landscape was transformed. Elizabeth Mallet is generally credited with launching the first English language daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, on the 11th of March, 1702. The very first issue⁴ reproduces news from the Amsterdam Courant, the Harlem Courant, and the Paris Gazette, along with a promise not to “impose any Additions of feign’d Circumstances to an Action, but give [the] Extracts fairly and Impartially.” The modern newspaper had been born; imitators followed.

This was the world that gave birth to Steele’s short lived Tattler, then to the wildly successful Spectator, a world peopled by those whom Addison calls “the Blanks of Society, […] altogether unfurnish’d with Ideas, till the Business and Conversation of the Day has supplied them[, …] needy Persons [who] do not know what to talk of, till about twelve a Clock in the Morning; for by that Time they are pretty good Judges of the Weather, know which Way the Wind sits, and whether the Dutch Mail be come in.”¹ You’ve met this guy, right? Wants to opine but has no real opinions? Parrots what others are saying, sometimes with superlative praise, sometimes with contrarian spite? Notice Addison’s pointed reference to “the Dutch Mail,” the network of foreign correspondents and handwritten newsletters. Addison asks his readers to consider: “Is it not much better to be let into the Knowledge of ones-self, than to hear what passes in Muscovy or Poland; and to amuse our selves with such Writings as tend to the wearing out of Ignorance, Passion, and Prejudice, than such as naturally conduce to inflame Hatreds, and make Enmities irreconcilable.” Every other daily prints news; The Spectator prints discourse, and only discourse can fix the guy with bad takes, not by supplying better ones, but by supplying tools for the refinement of opinions.

This distinction, between the bare reporting of verifiable facts, and the hermeneutic framework their audience fits them into, is critical. The words “Russia invades Ukraine,” “Donald Trump elected US president,” or “Gavin Newsom thinks it’s unfair for trans women to compete in women’s sports,” mean radically different things to different people. Your interpretation of these sentences relies, yes, on your ability to access relevant facts, but also on your general interpretation of our world and times. What you make of those statements is inextricably linked with your takes on political economy, family and social life, religion, ontology, aesthetic and moral philosophy, history, psychology, anthropology. It is to these broader realms that Addison and company addressed themselves, inventing various characters that allowed them to lampoon the attitudes of the day.

The Spectator ran for a total of 635 issues–from March of 1711 to December of 1712, with a brief revival in 1714–by turns celebrating the Royal Exchange as a locus of cosmopolitanism⁵ and lamenting how the gossip it spins can destroy careers,⁶ condemning religious zealotry,⁷ finding the centre of morality in intention,⁸ and railing against women who delay getting married.⁹ By the time The Spectator ended in 1714, it had established an enduring reputation as a literary classic, and its collected volumes continued to be read throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

Over the next several decades, The Spectator would inspire dozens of imitators, each with their own spin on the formula. Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan’s Intelligencer (1728-29) focused on Irish affairs; Henry Fielding (of Shamela and Tom Jones fame) cut his teeth launching The Champion (1737-44) and critiquing Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Alexander Pope wrote pseudonymously for the satirical Grub Street Journal (1730-38); and Eliza Haywood’s anonymous Female Spectator (1744-46) addressed a female audience from a female perspective. Perhaps the most interesting of these projects, however, was Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, which ran uninterrupted until 1907. Cave–who coined the term “magazine”–sought to produce a monthly digest of all that could be called discourse, and enlisted a wide array of contributors to this end.

This era was, for Habermas, the public sphere at its most potent. By enabling the adult male citizenry to participate in debates about the political direction of the country, it separated private (commercial, societal, intimate) interests from public interests and the pursuit of the greater good. Suddenly you could go sit at a coffeehouse, read The Gentleman’s Magazine, argue over its political prescriptions, and have a space from which to mount a counter-attack. The shared space of the coffeehouse–where you don’t choose who the other patrons are–pushed you to turn your private feelings into a publicly coherent argument. Arguments like “we should not pass this tax, for it would be bad for my business” stopped holding water: prove that the tax is bad for society as a whole or no cigar. But this model was predicated on a careful balance of power between Addison and his readers: yes, they all had to be reading the same Spectator, but their opinions could not be blithely sourced from Addison. They had to come from debate, and this debate had to reach Addison so he could address himself to it. As the reading public expanded, this balance toppled, and “the public sphere in the world of letters was gradually replaced by the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption”¹⁰. National newspapers, mass media, and the advertising industry came together to create a world where coffeehouse debate saw itself supplanted by the passive consumption of information, so that Habermas could write in 1962 that “The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only”¹¹. Social media only makes this worse: returning to the topic in 2022, Habermas writes about a “blurring [of] the perception of [the] boundary between the private and public spheres of life,”¹² the creation of a world of “semi-private, semi-public” echo-chamber spheres, inimical to the separation between private and public affairs that he identified as critical to the formation of a democratic polity. When The Gentleman’s Magazine is The Gentleman’s Subreddit, and everyone’s posting from the toilet, are you sure that those you read have set their private interests aside?

The Gentleman’s Magazine, by the way, proved important for another reason: it allowed that colossus of 18th century English letters, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), to get his start as a periodical writer. In 1750, Johnson launched his own periodical, The Rambler, which ran until 1752. Nobody read it. In his final essay, number 208,¹³ he reflected on having “never been much a favourite of the publick,” and explained his own project, in a deliberate contrast with The Spectator’s: “[I] have never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled my readers to discuss the topick of the day; I have rarely exemplified my assertions by living characters; in my papers, no man could look for censures of his enemies, or praises of himself; and they only were expected to peruse them, whose passions left them leisure for abstracted truth, and whom virtue could please by its naked dignity.” (emphasis mine)

By the time Johnson returned to the periodical form with 1758’s Idler, his Dictionary had made him a literary celebrity, and he had developed a full-throated critique of Addison’s model of public discourse. In his programmatic essay, Idler 3,¹⁴ he explained that his project was addressed to “the innumerable multitudes that, having no motive of desire, or determination of will, lie freezing in perpetual inactivity, till some external impulse puts them in motion; who awake in the morning, vacant of thought, with minds gaping for the intellectual food, which some kind essayist has been accustomed to supply.” Contrast this “Blank of Society” with Addison’s: Johnson moves the locus of societal hermeneutics away from conversation, towards individual reflection. The problem of bad takes isn’t that people don’t converse–it’s that people don’t think.

After all, conversation, Johnson tells us, is like punch.¹⁵. It’s made of “spirit, volatile and fiery, [which] is the proper emblem of vivacity and wit; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery, and acrimony of censure; sugar is the natural representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance; and water is the proper hieroglyphick of easy prattle, innocent and tasteless.” The success of a bowl of punch lies in the balance: too much spirit overpowers, “every one shrinks from the force of its oppression”; too much lemon “distort[s] the face and torture[s] the palate”; too much sugar will “soon pall and nauseate.” But water? You can just chug that stuff. You can drink as much water as you like. You can make the most anodyne, watery, punch, fill your talk with “inoffensive copiousness, and unenvied insipidity,” and no good-mannered party guest will be so impiously acidic as to call you out.

The danger of conversation as the locus of reflection is that people’s desire for social credit outstrips their desire for genuine reflection. For Johnson, the way to produce authentic reflection is to have a set of writers who produce content for a set of individual readers who read and examine it in private idleness. Addison’s model is centripetal: it relies on topics being brought to specific locations (coffeehouses, dinner parties, clubs) to be conversed upon. Johnson’s model is atomizing: everyone is responsible for curating their own sources and making their own mind up.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797) inherited, like Johnson, the Addisonian model of discourse, found similar faults with it, and reached a radically different solution. In a letter¹⁶ to the antiquarian Henry Zouch, May 14, 1759, Walpole wrote “I am sick of the character of author, I am sick of the consequences of it, I am weary of seeing my own name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms on me, and as foolish defences of me.” Walpole, unlike Johnson, had a public profile that reached beyond his literary activity. The son of Henry Fielding’s bete noire, the Prime Minister Robert Walpole, he served in Parliament for over two decades, enough to grow exhausted at public discourse. Rejecting periodical-writing and coffeehouse chatter, he chose instead to express himself over the course of a voluminous private correspondence, collected in a Yale edition¹⁷ spanning 48 volumes.

In a letter to his friend, the scandalous divorcee Anne FitzPatrick, Countess of Upper Ossory, Walpole explained¹⁸ his epistolary (anti-)method: “since neither Aristotle nor Bossu have laid down rules for letters, and consequently have left them to their native wildness, I shall persist in saying whatever comes uppermost, and the less I am understood by anybody but the person I write to, so much the better. St Paul is my model for letter-writing, who being a man of fashion and very unaffected, never studies for what he shall say, but in one paragraph takes care of Timothy’s soul, and in the next of his own cloak.” The references to Aristotle and Bossu (an influential neo-classical critic) show that he was consciously thinking of the distinction between published and private statements: for Walpole, the power of letter writing relies on being able to converse without pressure, to tailor his message and style to his interlocutor, to be amongst friends.

And boy, did Horace Walpole converse with friends. The Yale edition collects over 2000 of his letters, and finds him discussing Parliamentary debates¹⁹ with the illustrator Richard Bentley, talking heraldry²⁰ (are lions leopards?) with the archivist Andrew Coltee Ducarel, or reviewing²¹ the newly opened Ranelagh Gardens, along with a few operas, for the diplomat Horace Mann.

Walpole’s correspondence and behaviour give us a sense of the discursive model he was implicitly operating within. In contrast to Addison’s centripetal or Johnson’s atomizing models, Walpole’s is rhizomatic. Discourse bounces through a multitude of (primarily) dyadic connections. Walpole talks to people in London, shares his intelligence with Mann, receives complementary reports from Florence, and spreads them in London. Meanwhile, everyone he talks to is writing letters to other recipients. Because all of these conversations are inherently informal, they organically span not just events themselves, but also the very cultural and philosophical topics that The Spectator wanted to bring to the coffeehouse. These properties may be a result of letter-writing being a private, rather than public, endeavour, but Walpole was also very aware of the porosity between a private and a public letter. In 1748, he began requesting that his friend Horace Mann send his letters back. These he transcribed, erasing any details he didn’t want remembered, in preparation for a posthumous publication. He even affixed an introductory advertisement²² to the manuscript transcriptions. He doesn’t seem to have circulated these letters in life, but his friends weren’t always as scrupulous, and his final letter to Lady Ossory, towards the end of his life, finds him chastising²³ her for showing letters of his to her friends.

Horace Walpole’s world was, after all, that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a world of letters forwarded by recipients unbeknownst to their authors, letters discovered in teenagers’ desks following tips from disloyal friends, letters held as evidence for use in blackmail. I cited Walpole’s letter of May 14, 1759 to Henry Zouch earlier: he is, in fact, replying to Zouch’s inquiry about his position on a parliamentary debate, a debate Zouch himself had a financial interest in. Again, porosity. The debate is public, it’s being discussed in public circles that Zouch and Walpole have access to, but the truly impactful discourse isn’t exclusive to those public circles: it bleeds over into private correspondence.

This is where Habermas’ 2022 paper goes wrong. The superposition of public and private spheres, the creation of semi-public, semi-private, spheres is not new. Our discursive conditions are not, fundamentally, new. They are, rather, an ill-understood mishmash of the 18th century models I’ve presented. The 19th and 20th centuries–the eras of media centralization that Habermas 2022 yearns for as much as Habermas 1962 critiqued–were not the norm for democratic societies, they were the anomaly. We’re now back where we started, with the exception that, unlike in the 18th century, we don’t just have one public sphere, one set of papers, Parliamentarians, and coffeehouses, but multiple overlapping public spheres, whose behaviour can only be modeled in reference to their distinct aims, functions, and audiences.

Enumerate the platforms where you talk: I use Discord, Whatsapp, and Bluesky. Okay: individual Whatsapp conversations are clearly Walpolian correspondence, rhizomatic networks that stretch beyond my immediate circle. My friend is in my messages, sharing intelligence from Chilean immigrants to Toronto who in turn are in contact with their families in Chile, hence I can try to come to grips with José Antonio Kast’s electoral victory. Discord servers are Addisonian: I go on my poetry server and talk poetry with poet friends. It’s our coffeehouse. My friend receives her ARC Poetry subscription, photographs a poem, and dumps it in the chat for us to talk about, hence replicating the coffeehouse sharing that allowed Addison to boast that every Spectator sold reached at least twenty readers. What about Bluesky?

You might be tempted to say, “obviously Bluesky is an enormous coffeehouse” but are you sure? For a coffeehouse to be a public space, we must all be gathered under the same auspices, and there must be a sense of a discursive level playing field. A post on a Discord chat reaches all participants at the same time. A shout of “BAD TAKE, BAD OPINION!” is heard equally by all persons inside a coffeehouse. A post on Bluesky reaches my followers first, then potentially their followers. It might make rounds, but replies to quote posts are separate from replies to the original post. Speaking of replies, they’re hidden by default. For such a public app, it’s surprising how easy it is to get into a quasi-private conversation in the replies to a high-visibility post. “So Bluesky’s rhizomatic,” you say, “it’s Walpolian”: ah, but it’s public. In fact, I think Bluesky exists on a gradient from Walpolian–when a post is made in a dense network with few outside followers–to pre-Addisonian: dispatches, lists of events, lists of facts. This is the model for most mass social media apps, including Instagram, Reddit, or Tumblr.

Meanwhile, meta-discourse–discourse about discourse–seems to have caught itself in a Johnsonian epistemic loop. We are asked, over and over again, by both left and right, to dig up our own evidence, to form our own opinions. When we see someone with what we think is The Bad Take, we shout at them to collect different evidence, damn it, form different opinions! In the cacophony of multi-modal instantaneous mass communication, we’ve given up on collective sense-making. Every epistemic conflict is redirected to an atomizing model that tells us “if only you had the right facts you’d see it my way.” This hasn’t worked for decades. There’s no amount of fact checkers, no judicious use of community notes, no incentive alignment that’s going to make this model work. Samuel Johnson was only able to develop his Idler model in the context of an Addisonian society. In a world where everyone is engaging in high-context conversations on an equal footing, sure, it makes sense to encourage moments of solitary reflection, to ask people “do you really believe this, or are you parrotting popular takes?” This makes no sense when we can’t decide on what a “popular take” is. Should trans women compete in women’s sports? Be careful: your answer will be lauded in this room, decried in the next. Is inflation real or is it vibes? Would you be able to tell me, with enough methodological rigour that everyone accepts your answer, what percentage of the adult population believes that inflation is real and what percentage thinks it’s merely vibes? Can you even define “real” inflation versus “it feels like inflation?” You can collect all the evidence you like–your opponents will claim it supports their thesis.

At the root of Habermas’ 2022 critique of public discourse in the age of social media is the sense that Addison’s centripetal model has disintegrated. This is the model, recall, that Habermas identified with an inclusive, egalitarian, rationally-ordered public sphere. If you’ll excuse my pedantry though, Habermas himself wrote, in his 1962 book, of the death of that model. The difference between Addison and Steele’s 1710 Spectator, and the ongoing 1828 magazine The Spectator is that the latter is so centripetal as to not need the coffeehouse as a locus of discourse at all. 19th and 20th century publications are not made for public reading so much as they are made for private Johnsonian consumption. From this perspective, a Discord server is far more Addisonian than any extant newspaper. The chief difference between Discord servers and Addisonian coffeehouses is the degree to which the latter lend themselves to a kind of constructive centralization: every political actor in 18th century London knew which coffeehouses to frequent, whereas Discord servers are a dime a dozen. A Discord server behaves more like a kind of hub in a rhizomatic network than a true discursive centre. You might call it a pseudo-Addisonian space: it collects discourse but has no centralizing function. News is carried out of hubs by individual correspondents, who can either translate them for other individuals in a Walpolian manner, or translate them for a decontextualized Johnsonian subject, yeeting them into the pre-Addisonian world of the Bluesky firehose. The former results in high-fidelity high-latency translation: if I’m in the poetry scene and you’re not, I can talk you through the latest developments because I know where you’re coming from, but I can’t do the same for 200 people. The latter is low-fidelity low-latency: I can explain poetry drama to 200 people, but only if I assume they know literally nothing about literature beyond high-school English.

We cannot reconstruct the original coffeehouse; fragmented special-interest ecosystems equal specialization, and specialization is advantageous. What we need is to empower pseudo-Addisonian spaces to make valuable contributions rather than turn into echo chambers. It’s clear that some pseudo-Addisonian spaces are doing this quite well on their own–the Adam Clery football channel, the Discordia review, and the work of Thalia Bhatt are just some loci of valuable, intelligent discourse. To drown out the noise, we need these high-quality loci to be amplified, for which we need high-fidelity low-latency translation that allows any reader to hop from their end of the rhizome to any faraway corner and understand what’s happening as well as they would at home.

That’s why I built a new type of newspaper! How’s that for a smooth call to action? The New Intelligencer reads your whole Bluesky feed for the last 24h (over 10000 posts for me this morning!) and uses Claude Code to produce an HTML newspaper that consolidates similar posts (without hiding the originals), and fits them into categories you define.

Here’s an example workflow: I want to understand ATProto. I could spend an hour a day on Bluesky, gradually building a follow list, monitoring for interesting developments, probably still missing half of what goes on. But I’m debonaire, cultured, urbane, I have a million things on my plate. So instead I set the robot to deep research mode (via Claude’s web ui) and asked “who do I follow on bsky to learn ATProto?”

The robot gives me a dozen key accounts plus five starter packs:

Then I turn to the New Intelligencer and added a few categories to my newspaper.json:

Now I get high-signal reports of goings on in the ecosystem:

Claude is functioning as a Walpolian correspondent embedded in pseudo- and pre-Addisonian spaces. Now I can build a follow list for niche interests and come, over the course of a couple of days of reading my Morning Papers, to understand the state of their discourse. The hope is that this will help me form concrete opinions on increasingly remote topics–not just understand what’s happening, but what sets of values are driving events. Look at the screenshot above: “opinion: SociaIFi platforms pivot as ATProto gains momentum,” is a headline that’s, yes, based on events, but that also encodes an interpretation of those events and their causes and likely effects. By expanding the tile I can read the interpretation and gain a sense for how the ATProto community thinks about finance.

As you might guess, there are limits to this model. For one thing, Horace Walpole was a real guy with a calendar. When he wasn’t writing letters to his friends, he was out and about doing things, and his activities informed what he wrote about. Claude comes in from the cold every single time, denuded of the broader context for what’s happening in my feed. This leads to interesting artifacts: when federal agents killed Alex Pretti, Claude generated a headline like “Federal agents kill American nurse, resulting in nationwide protests” for several days in a row. Surely a human correspondent would’ve seen fit to add some new information each time.

And there are, naturally, other problems, beyond curation and context collapse, with our public spheres, problems that have always lurked but have only been accentuated by the rise of online mass media. My correspondent could, for instance, be fooled by a fake story. My feed could be biased. Perhaps the greatest danger of all remains the social credit problem identified by Johnson. How do I know that the things I read, indeed, the things I write are sincere? It takes a lot of sobriety to withstand the cocktail of perverse incentives and clout-lust. There is no single fix for the problem of bad takes. This piece attempts to address it from the perspective of discursive modeling, but I could’ve also talked about data provenance and incentive re-alignment as components of the fix. Ideally, we can patch together enough of a solution that theorists in 300 years get to sit around in coffeehouses and debate what exactly the silver bullet was.

Bibliography

Addison, Joseph, and Steele, Richard. The Spectator. London, 1711–1714.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, (1962) 1991.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 39, no. 4 (2022): 145–171.

Johnson, Samuel. The Idler. London, 1758–1760.

Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. London, 1750–1752.

Lewis, W.S., ed. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. 48 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983.

Notes