Die flayed a mouse

An open market for ideas - especially for luxury anarchism! Fuck communism.

" . . .  in an essay called ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, printed as the closing chapter of Calhoun’s book. Habermas conceded that the exclusion of women was not incidental but built into how the bourgeois public sphere had worked from the start. Unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, which was a problem of class, and in principle correctable, the exclusion of women, he now wrote, ‘has been constitutive for the political public sphere not merely in that the latter has been dominated by men as a matter of contingency but also in that its structure and relation to the private sphere has been determined in a gender-specific fashion.’ 

Habermas conceded that other public spheres had existed alongside the one he had taken as foundational. And he softened the warning, without abandoning it. He came to think he’d been too sceptical about one piece of that story, the early stirrings of consumer society. 

But the warning itself never went away. Sixty years on, he was still diagnosing a public sphere being distorted by commercial and structural forces, only now the culprit was platforms and algorithms rather than advertising and mass circulation.

He did not give up everything. He still wanted to keep the public sphere as something to measure democracies against, even if the history behind it was messier than he’d first made it look . . . "