Civics in the Simulation
We’re vocal critics of “The Simulation” (and its new class of elites) because we believe in the possibility of a dramatically better and more humane digital world where our most precious resources — our attention and our trust — aren’t constantly being fracked for profit. But idealism alone is not enough. While critiquing the Simulation, we must simultaneously be pragmatic and meet the moment to make today’s broken internet as conducive to civic discourse as possible.
The stakes are stark. Nearly half of Americans (42%, per the Reuters Institute’s 2022 Digital News Report) now avoid the news altogether. In what we like to call “Social 1.0” — the friend-and-family era of Facebook and early Instagram — information could still slip past those avoidance instincts because content spread virally (in the literal sense, mimicking pathogenic spread via direct peer-to-peer contact) through real-world networks. If your cousin posted about an issue happening in your community or an upcoming election, you saw it.
“Social 2.0” has traded the friend-to-friend relay of early social media for a hyper-efficient, interest-driven marketplace of discovery. Our feeds are no longer populated by people we know but by strangers whose posts the platform predicts we will like. Here, sophisticated algorithms pair each piece of content with the users most likely to crave it, turning our feeds into an endless archipelago of tightly curated micro-realities — golf TikTok, knitting Reels, partisan-politics Twitter (partisan-politics X?), etc.
This unprecedented degree of algorithmic efficiency comes at a steep social cost. When the system detects no appetite for hard news content, it simply withholds it, sealing habitual news avoiders inside entertainment silos while vital civic information passes them by. The danger, then, is not so much lurid clickbait being rammed down everyone’s throat as crucial facts being quietly kept off the menu for millions.
That new reality and the negative externalities it produces demand a new playbook. Civic communicators can no longer broadcast from an imagined “view-from-nowhere” and hope to reach the median voter. They must narrowcast — crafting messages that resonate as native, relevant, and trustworthy inside countless cultural verticals where traditional news rarely penetrates. Think financial-literacy creators weaving voting reminders into budget tips, or sports-analysis channels explaining how stadium subsidies affect local taxes. In each case, the message travels authentically through a creator and topic area the audience already cares about and trusts, enabling it to get amplified by the very algorithm that once shut it out.
Put plainly: the era Social 2.0 and the rise of the Simulation demands a new approach to engaging an increasingly siloed and weary public. Democracy’s next generation of storytellers will be translators, embedding civic substance in the language, aesthetics, and emotional cues of every niche community online. Only by meeting citizens where their attention already lives can we rebuild a shared civic foundation inside the fragmented Simulation.