A wise man once said, “You should always save hyperbole until you really need it.” Well, 2024 feels like the year. The problem is that so much of the American media has been in such breathless panic mode for so long, there’s no hyperbole left. Nor credibility. We now find ourselves at a moment when so much may indeed hang in the balance, but legacy media is overrun with ideology or layoffs and spending most of its airtime and print talking to itself. The 4th Estate is as essential as it is unable to meet the moment.
And what is the moment? Walter Russel Mead, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal, recently argued that the world is transitioning from a postwar era (where the work of international relations is to manage problems from the last great conflict) to a pre-war era (where the existing international systems are breaking down, threatening to usher in the next great conflict).1 Amidst this transition period, 2024 will see billions of people across 70 countries vote in national elections; wars in the Middle East and NATO’s eastern flank; and the likely Trump v. Biden rematch in November that almost no one wants and will be decided by 100,000 people across a few swing states. The stale – and generally hyperbolic – refrain that democracy is on the ballot may actually understate the case. It may rather be the American-built liberal world order that’s on the ballot.
The abuse of hyperbole had some role in getting us here. As far back as the election of 1948, Harry Truman likened his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, to Hitler; calling him a frontman for fascists, and warning that Republicans were a threat to liberty in America. This seems a hard charge to substantiate given Dewey’s performance as the governor of New York, Manhattan District Attorney, and his refusal to countenance efforts to outlaw the communist party, but perhaps Truman’s improbable victory suggested a formula. By 1990 – a year before the World Wide Web was opened to the world – the frequency of Hitler comparisons on Usenet discussion boards led Mike Godwin to coin his eponymous law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. Gurwinder, who writes the Substack, The Prism, suggests this is because it’s the only history most people know. That’s plausible. If you’re looking for a simile that will resonate with the widest group of people – whether across an electorate or internet – Hitler is an obvious choice (some might suggest Stalin – and Stalin does make appearances, though more commonly from Right to Left, whereas Hitler goes both ways). Calling someone the vile issue of Iago and Goneril just doesn’t scale.
But there are also structural reasons. Related to Godwin’s Law, there is a relationship between the speed with which Hitler enters a debate and the density of the information environment. In 1948, evening TV news broadcasts were only a few years old and newspapers were still on the front end of the fair and balanced heyday driven by advertiser’s demands for wide popular appeal. In this low-density information environment of 1948, Hitler didn’t make an entry until three months before the election and only after a year of bad polling for Truman. Today, the information density is exponentially higher, creating an arms race of hyperbole.2 From social media to streaming to cable news to gaming, the competition for attention is brutally intense and the opportunity for distraction is endless. Politicians, pundits, and journalists must be ever more urgent and concise, binding every premise to an existential why. The effect can vary by platform; the path to Hitler is more direct when limited to 280-characters (partly why X-Twitter is such a cesspool) than, say, on Reddit. But the effect is everywhere. Whether legacy media, cable news, social media, it’s a war for time and money in the attention economy where everything is literally the most (adverb, adjective, noun) ever. And along the way, simile becomes metaphor and hyperbole becomes corporal and runs for high office, feeding on itself.
The question is: what to do now? Civil’s answer is to stand athwart it all, yelling stop.3
Consider this more of an informal company memo than an essay. All of you reading this have joined more on the promise of what we will do than on what we have done. So, as you are more partners than consumers, I wanted to share some thoughts on our strategy going into 2024.
First, one might reasonably ask how we propose to scale nuance and subtlety in an emotionally charged, hyperbolic media landscape that – as I just wrote – demands extremism in exchange for attention. I’ll come back to this.
Our mission is to restore trust. It’s not to build agreement or prove the righteousness of one side. We’re rather skeptical of righteousness, in general; and healthy disagreement is the engine of progress. It’s the people and process of this country, and our role in the world, that interests us. Democracy is conversation and conversation is process.
In service of this mission, we pursue objectivity and truth. We’re structurally nonpartisan. This is accomplished through the balanced experiences and backgrounds of the staff, founders, and advisors (more on this coming later). Our point of view is that the American Dream – the ability to maximize one’s potential; the duty of the government to make opportunity ever more equal – is real but under threat.
If we want to truly contribute to the health of the American experiment, we must understand the realities of the market. We must scale to the millions. Our sales channels must reach across multiple platforms and positions.
People are increasingly isolating themselves in partisan legacy media brands or passively consuming whatever the social media algorithms serve. And there are real reasons for this. Those in partisan outlets feel attacked and are retreating to their tribe. Those across social media – almost everyone under 30 – have lost all faith in legacy news and don’t know where to turn. News and culture stories that want to penetrate these thousand truth verticals must reach the person before the partisan.
Civil is a wholesale business, not a retail business. Our interest is not (only) in the insider debates in Washington DC, New York, and LA. This is not a populist approach, it is a democratic one.
For too long, it’s been hate and fear that drove clicks on news stories in social media. We want to drive curiosity. We think of our content library like a ladder, with short-form video content as the entry point, leading to increasingly nuanced and lengthy content up the rungs.
We begin with short-form video because that’s where more than 70 million Americans get their news. By leveraging emerging generative AI, we will be able to make extremely fast-turn, short-form videos on major events and trending stories; publish these to social media; and drive curiosity to encourage people to click back to our landing page to learn more.
Video also allows us to communicate on multiple levels at once; the words, the images, the music. It’s a medium that can reach past the political barriers and communicate intellectual and emotional complexity in a tight space.
We see the reductionism of the left as a threat; we see the populism of the right as a threat. We see the abandonment of objective principles of both parties and their supporting media as an existential problem. We see social media algorithms creating and curating bland, singular culture and taste that no longer respects their users or values actual diversity.
Which brings us to why this will work. There is now a market and civic opportunity imperative for a new way to restore our national conversation. Generative AI will make it possible to produce and scale video in a way never before possible - which presents both extreme threats and extreme opportunities. It is not hyperbole to say that technological, cultural, and political pivot points will combine in 2024 in a way that has not happened in a very long time, putting us at a crossroads. This will be a year of consequential choices. And it begins - as all great movements do - by standing athwart the tides that seemed inexorable, saying, No.
Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil.
Cover photo - Top left to right: Ian Allen, CEO; Suzanne Kianpour, Editor in Chief; George Nolfi, Cofounder; Lisa Bennatan, Reporter. Bottom left to right: Cole Locascio, Editor; Gabe Spaulding, Editor; Stan McChrystal, Advisor; Lea Carpenter, Advisor.
The Free Press, Are we in a Pre-War Era?, https://www.thefp.com/p/walter-russell-mead-bari-weiss
To be fair, Truman was saying that Dewey was like Hitler in a specific respect. In this way – as a simile – the absurdity of the claim exists on a scale. Is he like Hitler in that he’s short? That’d be generally harmless, if not also tasteless. Truman’s meaning was that Dewey was like Hitler in that he was a knowing or unknowing stooge of Fascist forces that would threaten national liberty (the logic of the simile aside). As we move forward in time into higher information density environments, simile becomes metaphor becomes literally.
Lest someone upset by The Pestilent Heresy of Safety First accuse us of improper citation, this is a modification of William F. Buckley’s founding mission for the National Review: to stand athwart history, yelling stop. Which is, of course, hyperbole.