Who we are and how we got here
– From our CEO, Ian Allen
Strange this journey, finding myself as the cofounder of a media company at almost 50 years old. Not long ago, I was an Executive Producer at Fox News. A few years previous, I cofounded a tech startup that spent 2020 deeply involved in the fight against COVID. Before that, I ran a Veteran-focused nonprofit for several years, and this was preceded by a combined seventeen years in the Marines and CIA. All of this makes for a very confused resume, but also provided some interesting vantage points to take in America over the last twenty-five years. It also deeply informs what we’re trying to do with this company; a visually thematic news and culture video magazine that prioritizes human connection over division. Naïve, you may think, but bear with me and I’ll explain.
Probably this course was set in August 2008 when I was wounded in Afghanistan. After a year recovering, I redeployed for a few more years, but ultimately had to concede that my body couldn’t keep pace. I left CIA in 2012, and, for the first time in years – maybe since 9/11 – I had a moment to stop and look around. The experience was jarring. For years, I’d had this hyper focus and clarity that war, for better or worse, provides. But once that was gone – sitting in a dark room is how my brain serves up the memory — I was overpowered with this question: What was it all for? I don’t admit that easily. I’m strongly of the view that if anything in war surprises you, then you didn’t read enough. From Homer to Michael Herr, there is little excuse to be unprepared for the nature of war and how hard it is to transition back into the normal world.
But life goes on and I let the question go, following a path that was oddly similar to many of my peers: first, cofounding a nonprofit (maybe all of us still searching first for the meaning that war provided?). Then, after the nonprofits, all of us going into finance or tech, trying to make a little money with the realization that our kids were getting older and life is expensive. Then, of course, came 2016 and the subsequent reaction; the breaking open of a simmering division – and one that threatens to again boil over in 2024.
This was also around the time that I cofounded a data analytics company designed to help state and local governments use data to better serve their constituents. By April of 2020, the company was also closely involved with the Office of Science and Technology Policy in an effort to help coordinate the efforts of private industry in the fight against COVID. And it was during these long days – especially through the summer of 2020, after George Floyd – that my old question returned, with others: What is it that we fought for? What are we still fighting for, at home and abroad? Where is this country going? Why were people so angry? I became fascinated (obsessed, maybe), trying to understand what was really happening in the country, seeking out acquaintances in politics and media for their view of things.
Through one of these conversations I met George Nolfi, my eventual cofounder at Civil and the person to name the company. George is a former political scientist focused on how people develop their social and political views, and almost accidentally became a filmmaker. His “second career” began as a writer with credits on the Ocean’s 11 and Bourne Identity franchises, and continued as a director, writer, and producer. His work includes the Matt Damon-Emily Blunt film, The Adjustment Bureau, the Anthony Mackie-Samuel L. Jackson film, The Banker – which won the NAACP Best Independent Feature Film award in 2021 – and the upcoming Anthony Mackie-Morena Baccarin film, Elevation.
One thing that became clear to me about George’s film work: he isn’t interested in mindless entertainment. His work probes situations where people are trapped in a powerful system that is both hostile to, and larger, than their own particular goals and desires. The parallels with America’s current politics, deeply dysfunctional at best and darkly dangerous at worse, were quickly apparent. George was looking for a way to marry the power of visual storytelling with what he’d observed in political science as well as thousands of in depth conversations with Americans about how they think about politics and society – namely that the vast majority of Americans reject the toxic politics on display in so much of the media. We agreed that the vast majority of Americans are not only capable of civil conversations about even the most “divisive” of social and political issues, but tens of millions of us have tuned out the media because we’re sick of the spinning, the demonizing, and the relentless outrage-generation on which so much of the media depends. So, with that, Civil was born. We’re so grateful you’ve joined us, and we can’t wait to see where this will go.