Welcome to StateBook. A Public Option for Social Media.Beginning these debates over ten years ago, I used to joke that the United States should nationalize FaceBook and make it a division of the Post Office. If this was ever truly an option in the past, it seems highly implausible now. But the underlying provocation rings true and is more necessary than ever.So long as big monolithic platforms are privately owned and operated, lawmakers will perpetually operate decades behind new innovations and their downstream negative consequences. The good news is that the bare essentials for a public utility are relatively simple to design and do not need frequent updates. A public option for digital communications infrastructure is the only viable way to maintain regulatory control, user privacy, and democratic consensus. This digital extension of the post office will serve as the entry point to tax filing, claiming benefits, voter registration, official identification and more.In the public option for social media, every citizen will be given a Your-Name-[at]-usps.gov email address at birth. This unique, verified account will be free from any tracking or surveillance and secured with end-to-end encryption. Data collection will be technically impossible, but user privacy will also be secured as a political right. Today, scammers may hack your Gmail account and make you jump through annoying and costly hoops to recover it — but if they open your physical mail, they’re committing a felony. An envelope is very low-tech, but its an important example of how legal rights are often more secure than technical fixes in the long term.As we learned over the pandemic, having an email address is a necessary step to partake in many state services. To claim simple benefits like unemployment, citizens needed to transact with private email providers. These perverse incentives indirectly require users to produce data and value for private companies, like Google, to claim resources they already