We Don't Have to Build the Filter Bubble of One

Hi there,Welcome back to Untangled. It’s written by me, ​​​​​​​Charley Johnson​​​​​​​, and valued​​​​​​​​​​​​ by ​​​​members​​​​ like you. ​​​Help me make it better?​​​​Today I’m sharing my conversation with Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director of New_Public, about the rise of the agentic interface era, and how we might shape it.As always, please send me feedback on today’s post by replying to this email. I read and respond to every note.On to the show!Untangled HQ​Big update: I’m getting married next weekend! So I’m going to take a short break from Untangled, and I’ll be back in your inbox on June 21.In the meantime, don’t forget to sign up for the next Untangled community event on See the System — a one-hour workshop where we start not with the tool but with the system it would enter. Bring a specific use case you’re weighing, and leave with a map, a vision statement, and a Proceed/Pause/Decline decision you can actually defend.Deep Dive​We Don’t Have to Build the Filter Bubble of OneThis week I spoke with Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director of New_ Public, about their new report After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology — which argues that we’ve crossed into a new era of social technology, as consequential a shift as the move from newspaper editors to algorithmic feeds was fifteen years ago: the agentic interface era. Let’s dig in.New_Public’s whole orientation comes from urban planning — what physical public space can teach us about the digital kind — and early in our conversation Angelica described what algorithmic social media actually feels like: you wake up every morning in Times Square. Bright, loud, and engineered to separate you from your money and your attention. Even people who enjoy visiting Times Square don’t want to live there! And yet that’s the only public space the last fifteen years built for us — one deafening square, optimized to keep us standing in it as long as possible.The argument in After the Feed is that we’re being pulled out of the square, whether we like it or not. A few forces are doing the pulling at once.The first is that the feed is no longer where our social lives or our information diet actually live. People will still scroll — parasocial entertainment isn’t going anywhere — but the place we go to figure out what’s happening, what to think, what to do, is increasingly a chat with an agent. Think about that handoff for a second. It used to be Walter Cronkite. Then it was the algorithmically ranked feed. Now it’s a chat window built just for you, and nobody else.The second is that the big platforms are quietly falling apart anyway — not because anyone reformed them, but because AI broke the things holding them together. Harassment is happening at industrial scale. The genuine back-and-forth between people is drying up. Machine-generated slop is everywhere, and bots already make up the majority of internet traffic. The gardens are still walled, but the walls are crumbling from the inside.And the third is that, as engagement gets cheaper to fake, the metrics that used to signal real human attention stop meaning much of anything. Likes, followers, reviews — all gameable. So the scarce thing is no longer attention; it’s trust. New_Public has a nice term for what trust looks like once you try to make it operational: thick reputation. Not “10K followers,” but “contributed thoughtfully to this community for two years.” Not “verified,” but “vouched for by people I trust.”But being pulled out of Times Square is not the same as arriving somewhere good. Angelica named the failure mode hiding underneath the whole promise: the filter bubble of one. We leave the deafening square and we don’t get the online equivalent of parks and libraries; we each get an information world drawn so tightly around us that nothing is held in common anymore. The old filter bubble at least had other people in it. This one wouldn’t. And it’s the default outcome, not the worst case, if nobody designs against it.So the real question the report is asking isn’t what’s replacing the feed? It’s what do we want to build in the space the feed is vacating — before the defaults get set for us?And the hopeful part of New_Public’s answer is that the raw materials are suddenly cheap. The cost of building software has fallen off a cliff: a community platform for 500 people used to cost millions, and now you can stand one up for a few hundred dollars a month. The old logic that said a platform needs billions of users to be worth building simply stops applying. A neighborhood, a hobbyist group, a mutual aid network, a book club — each can finally have software built just for it. Thousands of small, purpose-built spaces, instead of one square for everyone.Which sounds lovely until you try to run one! Healthy communities don’t tend themselves; they’re held together by stewards — the people who set norms, welcome newcomers, manage conflict, keep the shared memory. It’s real labor, usually unpaid, and burnout is the most common reason these spaces collapse. So the obvious move is to hand the routine moderation work to an AI agent and free the human steward up for the hard stuff that really requires care.Perhaps, but Angelica pointed to research on call centers that complicates the whole thing. When you route the easy tickets to self-service and leave the humans only the hard ones, the humans burn out faster. It turns out the easy work wasn’t filler. It was rhythm. It was rest. Strip it away and you don’t always get a more strategic steward; you get an exhausted one.This is the question I keep finding underneath every “what can we automate?” conversation, and it’s the thread that ties the whole report together for me. We treat routine as fungible — the part we can safely lift out — when sometimes it’s exactly where judgment gets built, where a steward comes to know the texture of her own community. The friction wasn’t always a cost to be eliminated. Sometimes it was doing the work. So maybe the better question isn’t what can we hand off? It’s what is the rhythm quietly doing that we haven’t named yet?That, in the end, is what I admire about After the Feed. It isn’t a promise that things will work out. It’s that Angelica and her colleagues are doing the thing tech criticism has mostly refused to do for fifteen years: describing, in concrete terms, what it would look like if we got it right. Many small spaces built for actual communities, owned by their members, connected through open protocols so you can carry your history with you. AI working quietly in the background as a kind of shared memory, rather than running the show out front. Stewards supported, paid, and designed for. Parks and plazas and libraries — not one more Times Square.That’s a long way from where we are. But it’s worth knowing someone’s building toward it.Until next time,CharleyWork With Me​Here are 3 ways I can help:* ​​​​​​​​​Advising:​​​​​​​​ I can help you navigate uncertainty, make sense of AI, and steward change in your system.* ​​​​​​​​​Organizational Training:​​​​​​​​ Everything you and your team need to cut through the tech-hype and implement strategies that catalyze true systems change. (For either Stewarding AI or Systems Change for Tech & Society Leaders)* ​​​​​​​​​1:1 Leadership Coaching:​​​​​​​​ I can help you facilitate change — in yourself, your organization, and the system you work within.​​ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit untangled.substack.com