| The American electorate is more divided than ever—riven apart, so we're told, by partisan echo chambers and algorithmic filter bubbles and mountains of misinformation. For the February issue of WIRED, we set out to answer the question on every citizen's mind: What really ails democracy, and what would it take to reboot it? Step one, ask Chris Evans. After years playing Captain America, the Nazi-slaying, homeland-defending superhero wrapped in red, white, and blue, Evans has been losing sleep to another project—a civics engagement website called A Starting Point, where elected officials answer policy questions in short, snackable videos. This isn't a place for wonks, explains senior writer Arielle Pardes, who visited the actor at home in Los Angeles and got a personal tour of the site. "It's for average Americans, centrists, extremists, swing voters—everyone!—who want to hear about policy straight from the horse's mouth. (Never mind that most people hold horses in higher regard.)" If Evans' solution sounds too Pollyannaish for your tastes, fear not: We asked the UN Secretary-General and the 2020 presidential candidates to weigh in, too. Contributing editor Gideon Lewis-Kraus, meanwhile, has a darker theory to offer. Drawing on the work of André Girard, a French literary critic and personal hero of Peter Thiel, Lewis-Kraus looks at political polarization as a problem not of supply but of demand. Girard believed that what defines us as a species is our propensity to mimic each other. When we don't know what to desire for ourselves, we adopt someone else's desires as our own. Facebook and Twitter don't turn us into monsters; they merely help us find new monsters to emulate. The fault, dear reader, is not in our algorithms but in ourselves. But if that's the diagnosis, what's the cure? Steven Bonnell, an online streamer who goes by the name of Destiny, may have an answer. A few years ago, he began conducting raucous debates on YouTube and Twitch with some of the internet's most toxic figures, including "race realists," neo-Nazis, and alt-right carnival barkers. His goal isn't to beat his opponents or push progressive values—not directly, at least. Rather, he aims to give viewers a taste of genuine critical thought. Bonnell, a reformed troll himself, estimates he has received hundreds of emails from disaffected former alt-righters. As Trevor Quirk writes in his profile of the firebrand, "One seemingly anodyne admission of doubt can, like a potent acid, slowly dissolve an entire system of thought." Anthony Lydgate, Senior Editor |
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