Who Owns the Coffeehouse? Habermas, Subscription Culture, and the Case for Digital Third Spaces

Open a browser, and count the meters running. The word processor is a subscription; the photo library is a subscription; the cloud drive, the password manager, the note-taking app, the "AI assistant," and (increasingly) the car's heated seats are subscriptions. We now have software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, compute as a service, and, if we are honest, service as a service. I am not talking about creators using platforms to get paid for their creative work; that is good and as it should be. What concerns me is how few corners of the internet remain untouched by the meter, the ad, and the tracker, and what that suffusion does to the possibility of a public.

In this post, I will argue that the subscription-and-surveillance web cannot host a public sphere in the sense Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) gave the term, and that scholars, teachers, and editors have a stake in building digital third spaces that can. I will make the case in three moves: 1) by returning to Habermas's account of the bourgeois public sphere and its "structural transformation"; 2) by reading that account alongside two essays from the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT), Carl Raschke's three-part "The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry" and Andrew J. Ball's "Revolutionary Love," which press on Habermas from the sides of media theory and Kierkegaard; and 3) by turning to third spaces (Ray Oldenburg's "great good places") as the practical answer to a theoretical lacuna.

Habermas and the Coffeehouse #

Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; English translation 1989) tells a story about rooms. In the coffeehouses of London, the salons of Paris, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies) of the German states, private people came together as a public to argue about matters of common concern.^[1] Habermas names the institutional criteria these rooms shared: 1) a disregard of status, in which the better argument was supposed to win regardless of who made it; 2) a domain of common concern, opened up for discussion where church and court had previously held a monopoly on interpretation; and 3) an inclusivity in principle, since anyone with the means to read and talk could, at least in theory, take part.^[2]

Habermas does not romanticize these rooms for long. The second half of the book narrates their decline. As the press, and later radio and television, became capital-intensive businesses, the public that once argued about culture became a public that consumed it. Habermas gives the shift its own section heading: "From a Culture-Debating (kulturräsonierend) to a Culture-Consuming Public."^[3] Publicity, which once meant exposing power to critical reason, came to mean public relations, the staging of prestige before an audience that applauds rather than argues. Habermas calls this process a "refeudalization" of the public sphere: the public once again becomes a court before which power displays itself.^[4]

Critics have rightly pressed on the coffeehouse ideal. Nancy Fraser shows that the bourgeois public sphere was built on exclusions of gender, class, and race, and that subordinated groups formed "subaltern counterpublics" of their own rather than waiting for admission.^[5] I take Fraser's correction as a friendly amendment rather than a refutation. A plurality of publics still requires rooms, places where people can meet as something other than customers. The question for us is whether the digital rooms we now inhabit qualify.

The New Structural Transformation #

Habermas himself returned to the question at the age of ninety-three. In A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (2022; English translation 2023), he argues that digital platforms have changed the public sphere as profoundly as the printing press did.^[6] On his reading, platforms turn every user into a potential author, which looks like a democratization of the coffeehouse. Yet platforms do not take on the editorial responsibility that the press (however imperfectly) once accepted, and the inclusive public splinters into self-enclosed fragments where claims circulate without the friction of disagreement. The old gatekeepers fall away, and nothing with a public mandate replaces them.

I want to extend Habermas's late diagnosis in one direction he gestures toward but does not fully develop. The fragmentation he describes is not only a sociological effect of many voices speaking at once; it is an economic design. A platform financed by advertising earns its revenue from attention and data, so it optimizes for engagement and for the behavioral surplus that tracking produces. A platform financed by subscription earns its revenue from lock-in, so it optimizes for the cost of leaving. In both cases, the user enters the room as a revenue line before entering as a citizen. Habermas's culture-consuming public has become, in my terms, a service-consuming public; the refeudalized court has become a terms-of-service agreement.

The Tawdry and the Leveled: Two Voices from JCRT #

Carl Raschke's 2017 series in JCRT, originally a paper for "The Crisis of Representation" conference at Stift Melk, Austria, offers the sharpest theological reading of this problem I know. Raschke takes up Giorgio Agamben's claim, in the closing pages of The Kingdom and the Glory, that modern media supplies democracy with the "glory" that court pageantry once supplied monarchy. Raschke shows that Agamben is quietly arguing with Habermas, whose Between Facts and Norms holds that "all political power derives from the communicative power of citizens."^[7] For Agamben, the acclaiming people and the "communicative forms without subject" of the neutralized state are two sides of one apparatus of glory.

Raschke then flips the binary. "But what if Agamben were dead wrong," he asks, and the mediatic "glory" has "turned out instead to be the tawdry?" What if "the linguistics of 'communicative reason' had now morphed as in some kind of insidious mutation of its own semiotic genomes into a hyperpartisan 'hate machine'"?^[8] Following Bernard Stiegler, Raschke traces the mutation to a symbolic economy in which "marketizing algorithms and hyperbots" exercise "seamless, yet invisible control" over what Stiegler calls the "symbolic milieu."^[9] The demos (the people), in a phrase that echoes Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos, comes "undone." Read alongside Habermas, Raschke's argument suggests that communicative reason is not simply drowned out by noise; it is captured and repurposed by the very media that were supposed to carry it. The coffeehouse and the hate machine are flip sides of the same coin.

Andrew J. Ball's essay "Revolutionary Love: Kierkegaard's Gift Economy as a Religious Corrective to the Leveling of the Public Sphere" (JCRT 20.1) comes at the same problem from the nineteenth century.^[10] Ball reads Søren Kierkegaard's attack on "the public" not as a rejection of sociality but as a critique of a particular mode of it. For Kierkegaard, the public is a "monstrous abstraction" and the "master of leveling"; it "is not a people, not a generation, not one's age, not a congregation, not an association, not some particular persons, for all these are what they are only by being concretions."^[11] Ball contrasts the public with the congregation, a "deliberative union of individuals in their difference" (Ball here follows Martin Matuštík).^[12] Kierkegaard's foil was the Copenhagen press; ours is the feed. The metrics dashboard, which renders every reader as a click and every neighbor as a follower count, is leveling in its purest technical form.

Ball's Kierkegaard also names an alternative economy. Against "the economy of reciprocal exchange," where we give in the mode of do ut des (I give so that you will give), Ball reconstructs an agapic gift economy that gives without expecting return.^[13] I find the resonance with the open web striking. The blogroll, the open-access journal, the freely licensed syllabus, and the hand-coded personal homepage all operate as gifts in Ball's sense; none of them meters the reader. Stiegler, in Raschke's third installment, calls for an "economy of contribution" in similar terms, while Raschke rightly notes that Stiegler leaves it underspecified.^[14] Habermas gives us the criteria for a public; Raschke and Ball give us the diagnosis of why the platform cannot meet them; what remains is to specify the rooms.

Third Spaces as Digital Publics #

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls them "third places": the café, the barbershop, the library, the pub, places that are neither home (the first place) nor work (the second).^[15] Oldenburg's third places look a great deal like Habermas's coffeehouses. They are leveling in the good sense (status checked at the door), conversation is the main activity, and regulars give them their character. They also let people linger without buying very much.

Digital third spaces exist, though they rarely make headlines. A personal website on one's own domain, a blog with an RSS feed, a mailing list, a small Gemini capsule, a Mastodon or Bluesky community run by people rather than shareholders, and an open-access journal all meet Habermas's three criteria better than the walled garden does. They disregard status (anyone can publish, link, and reply), they open a domain of common concern (the topic sets the room, not the algorithm), and they are inclusive in principle (no subscription, no tracker). The AT Protocol is an instructive case: because identity and data live with the user rather than the app, a post can outlive the platform that first displayed it. The new JCRT website, for example, now attaches an AT Protocol record to each article, so that a conversation in critical theory and religion that began in 1999 can circulate in the open network without a paywall or an ad server standing between the essay and its readers.

None of these rooms is a utopia (the catastrophic-utopian imagination is its own kind of humbug). Small publics can become echo chambers, volunteer moderation burns people out, and Fraser's warning about exclusions applies with full force to who has the time, skills, and bandwidth to self-host. But the open web at least makes the coffeehouse possible; the metered web forecloses it by design.

Conclusion: Building the Rooms #

Habermas teaches us that a public sphere is not an abstraction floating above society; it lives in specific institutions and specific rooms. Raschke shows what happens when those rooms are replaced by an apparatus that turns communicative reason into a hate machine. Ball's Kierkegaard reminds us that the alternative to the leveling public is not isolation but a congregation of concrete persons who give without metering. Taken together, they suggest that the importance of digital publics lies less in any single platform than in the practices of hospitality that make a room public in the first place.

For scholars, the practical upshot is modest and achievable. Publish on a domain you control. Put your articles in open repositories. Support open-access journals with your labor as reviewers and editors. Link generously to other people's work. Teach students to build a homepage before they build a following. Every one of these acts carves out a corner of the internet where people meet as interlocutors rather than as customers, and in an age of service as a service, that corner is a public worth keeping.

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1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), ch. 2. [verify page] ↩︎

2. Habermas, Structural Transformation, §5 ("Institutions of the Public Sphere"). [verify page] ↩︎

3. Habermas, Structural Transformation, §18. The contrast between a "culture-debating" and a "culture-consuming" public is widely taken up in media studies; see, e.g., Janet Wasko, ed., A Companion to Television (Malden, MA: Blackwell). [verify page and chapter author] ↩︎

4. Habermas, Structural Transformation, chs. 6–7. On "refeudalization" in an American literary context, see Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). [verify pages] ↩︎

5. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. ↩︎

6. Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2023); German original Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022). [verify pages for the paraphrase above] ↩︎

7. Carl A. Raschke, "The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Media and the Undoing of the Demos (Part 2)," Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (blog), July 12, 2017, jcrt.org, quoting Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 170. ↩︎

8. Raschke, "The Tawdry (Part 2)." ↩︎

9. Carl A. Raschke, "The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Media and the Undoing of the Demos (Part 3)," Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (blog), July 18, 2017, jcrt.org. ↩︎

10. Andrew J. Ball, "Revolutionary Love: Kierkegaard's Gift Economy as a Religious Corrective to the Leveling of the Public Sphere," Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 20, no. 1 (2024): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.17613/vr6vv-eb856; first serialized on the JCRT blog (May 2020). ↩︎

11. Ball, "Revolutionary Love," quoting Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages (TA 92–93). ↩︎

12. Ball, "Revolutionary Love," quoting Martin J. Matuštík, 240. ↩︎

13. Andrew J. Ball, "Revolutionary Love (Part 2)," Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (blog), May 23, 2020, jcrt.org, drawing on Jean-Luc Marion, Given Being (GG 104). ↩︎

14. Raschke, "The Tawdry (Part 3)." ↩︎

15. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Paragon House, 1989). ↩︎