If modern public life was conceived under the exclusive guarantor of the nation-state and its composite citizens (specifically for Arendt, and inferred by Mouffe), today public life has additionally come under the purview of the platform and its constituent users, or ‘user-citizens’14 — oftentimes with significantly more cultural and political impact.

Historically, public life came into existence only after humans began living outside of strict familial relationships, and the corresponding development of the city-state, revealing two key observations that are particularly relevant today. First, that public life is a necessary excess when the scales of human co-existence go beyond the possibility of ‘neighborly’ social organization based on relations of familiarity (and where politics becomes an excessive need as well).