How to Be a Citizen in the Information War (And Stay Sane)

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, "Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?" Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. I think there's like a hesitation that some people have, especially after the last five years, and like, "Oh, I don't just want to post, and like performative activism, I don't just want to do virtue signaling." I think virtue signaling is good. I think it is good to want to show people you're a good person. I'm Charlie Wersel, and this is GalaxyBren. For the last few weeks, I've been obsessing over a question, the answer to which may be impossible to know. What do we do with this window we have to the world? We're living in this moment of genuine chaos, in a decade that's already been full of global conflicts at botched insurrection, a pandemic, political dysfunction, all of that colliding on an internet full of conspiracy theorizing synthetic AI slop endless memes. Our phones bring us delights and numbing distractions, but also fresh horrors every day. Maybe you like me woke up last week and found yourself faced with a series of auto-playing videos of agents mobbing Alex Prety and Minneapolis. Maybe you watched as an agent shot him while he lay on his knees on the street. Maybe a few weeks ago your phone showed you the amateur video taken from multiple angles over and ate goods last moments before she was shot by an ice agent at close range. Or maybe you logged on this fall and had to witness Charlie Kirk's gruesome assassination in your feed. Social media has enabled us to vicariously witness terrifying scenes, and this is especially true in recent weeks in the Twin Cities. Sometimes we seek them out, but other times they find us in moments when we're especially unprepared to see them. A colleague of mine recounted checking his phone and accidentally stumbling upon an auto-play video of Prety Saturday morning while at the aquarium with his daughter. A reality of being alive in 2026 is that you may accidentally open your phone, witness a man being shot to death, and then have to figure out how to continue on with your day. The cognitive dissonance here is extremely difficult to sit with, to say nothing of the psychological trauma of witnessing such violence. Even if you're able to stay away from the worst of it, watching armed, masked agents pulling elderly people out of their homes in the cold or detaining young children, that takes a toll. Especially when you close your device and you find yourself back in your own life. The world feels on fire, and your life is just moving on. It can feel alienating, and it can make a person feel so angry, sad, and ultimately powerless. And yet, the power of this kind of documentation, the kind that's being performed by observers in Minnesota every day who are risking their lives to film clashes between agents and protesters, that cannot be understated. Prety's last seconds were captured from multiple angles in sickening footage that was widely distributed on social media and news organizations. It is able, though, to be seen and dissected online precisely because of the observers who were there to document it, who did not drop their phones when the gunshots rang out and who kept recording when federal agents piled a top-preddit. All of it has had an immediate effect. Encountering the administration smears that Prety was a quote "would be assassin" and quote "tried to murder federal law enforcement," the news and the footage of Prety's death managed to break through the usual informational chaos. On Reddit, an Instagram and Facebook pages, the videos of Prety's last moments appear to have galvanized people who don't normally engage or post about politics at all. You have sports, meme pages, and golf influencers, the climbing subreddit, knitting accounts, not safe for work pages. I mean, even a Facebook pages apolitical as the gravestones of New England was calling out ICE's excessive force in the aftermath. Something has changed. All of this underscores that if the truth is ever going to win out over propaganda, it can only do so in the face of overwhelming evidence, the collection of which has become ever more treacherous in the second year of Trump's second presidency. You can understand the power of documentation and of witnessing, but you can also struggle with how to consume it all yourself. I'm reminded of this great sobering essay by the New York Times writer Amanda Hess. It's about witnessing sensitive content videos on Instagram from the conflict in Gaza. This wetching series of videos and photos of dead children, all on an app dominated by ads and influencers and algorithmically chosen photos of friends doing fun stuff. Of that she wrote, "Sometimes when I tap on a post from a journalist in Gaza, Instagram suggests next steps. Are you sure you want to see this video?" It asks. It tries to point me instead to resources for coping with sensitive topics. It suggests a crisis hotline for disaster survivors and responders. But I am not a survivor or a responder. I am a witness or a lawyer. The distress I am feeling is shame. What Hess is getting at here in part is how what we might witness on our devices isn't just traumatizing or radicalizing, but it's also linked explicitly to the specific platforms that serve this content up to us. And these platforms are incredibly fraught curators. Many of them are owned by billionaires with their own political agendas. For example, late last week, TikTok finalized the sale of its US operations to an American investor group. And that includes among others, Oracle, the private equity firm Silverlake, and the investment firm MGX. Now this became relevant over the weekend when Freddie was killed, because influencers attempted upload videos to the platform criticizing ICE, and some found that they couldn't do that. Others got the videos up, but noticed they'd received zero views, and that was very suspect. So many of them naturally took to social media to express their outrage. They said that they'd been censored by the new leadership. Quote, "Would Larry Ellison's take over, TikTok has already silencing voices on the left and anti-ice anti-drump content." That was what the popular podcast I've had it posted on X Monday morning. And so this is just a perfect encapsulation of this moment, right? TikTok noted that it had suffered a data center outage, and that user uploads and views had been affected. The transfer of ownership from bite dance TikTok's parent company to the US ownership group paired with the data center outage might mess with the platform. That's an entirely plausible scenario. There's also the fact that non-political content on the platform, like posts from the NFL's primary account, also showed zero views on Monday, which suggests a broader issue here. But others just refused to believe that. The only thing in this that is clear right now is that there are so many people who are extremely and understandably wary of TikTok's ownership, and seem to assume at all times that somebody's thumbs are on the scales. All of this makes the job of being an informed citizen just tortured. Do you stare at the misery machine? If so, how much? What do you take from it? Is the misery machine real life? Is it not real life? Don't be a doom, or they say. But also don't under-react. The truth out there is probably as bad, maybe even worse than you think. But if you remove yourself from it all, it's easy to slip back into something that is like complacency. It is crucial to pay attention right now. It's also crucial not to lose resolve or get sucked in or traumatize yourself. There's a real world out there. Touch grass, people say. The real world is likely full of people around you who tether you to your community. People you love and who love you. But the trauma in our screens, that is also the real world. So what are we supposed to do with this window to the world? It is such an unanswerable and essential question right now. Sometimes it seems like this window has only made people grow apart. More callous, more self-interested, more adult. And yet that very same window often shows us that people are good and decent, and that they care about each other and organize and have these huge reservoirs of empathy. We've seen that in Minnesota this month. So with all that, how should you or I, how should we all think about posting and consuming and being a good citizen in the information war? To answer that, I spoke with Amanda Littman. She's the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which is an organization that recruits and supports young and diverse progressive candidates running for down ballot office. She's the author of multiple books, including One We're In Charge, the Next Generation's Guide to Leadership. Most recently she's been writing on her sub-stack about the ways that people and politicians can calibrate themselves to the internet to feel some agency and make a difference in the world. She joins me now to talk about it all. But first, a quick break. I'm Ann Appelbaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, "Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?" Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Amanda, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thank you for having me. So you've been in politics a while as an organizer, a digital strategist, and I get the sense from following you online that you have, you're a pretty online person, and that you've been closely following what's been happening in Minnesota online. And so I want to start by getting a sense from you of what you've witnessed these past three weeks, what the experience has been like watching this, but then also what you've been seeing in terms of the broad effect of other people watching this collectively. It's been so interesting because my algorithm very clearly knows who I am. I know that like politics and as I work in politics and know as I'm a mom, like it, it's nice to feel seen in some ways by big tech, by big tech, you know, recognition is recognition. Sure. And so people I follow are broadly speaking people who work in politics for the most part or people I've met through the political circle. Those folks have been tuned in since the beginning. What I have noticed over the last three weeks, both from the folks I follow from like other parts of my life, but also from the cultural creators, especially from like the parenting creators, from the book people, from the romance writers, like from the other parts of my life that are not politics. And I think this has been true across the internet is people feeling like the shooting of Alex Prairie is the last straw that this is the thing where you cannot stay silent. And it has felt so reminiscent of 2020 in that way. It's just like in that there is a tipping point where the conversation cannot continue as normal in a way that I have found shocking to be honest. Yeah, it's really wild to see it. I've seen it too. And I think a lot of people have remarked on this I like in my other life. I like to play golf. And so I follow a lot of people who are like golf influencers or whatever, or like my algorithm gives me people like that. And that is usually a pretty like we're staying out of politics, screw of people, you know. And there are like there is one image I posted online of a golf influencer. He's just like at a driving rage. He's just like hitting a shot and he's like this normally wouldn't be a political account, but golf is political because you can't play it if you get shot by an agent of the state in the street. And it was like this moment for me of like this has bled through in a really, really shocking way. It does, it feels like the conversation has shifted from it being a thing that political people are talking about. Do we think that everyone is talking about in a way that doesn't feel like it's happened honestly since Jimmy Kimmel was fired, which feels like the last big cultural moment that sort of broke through and at least even the online space. And so you wrote this piece. This is one of the reasons I want to talk to you today about the politics of posting and this idea of what we do on these platforms, whether it matters. But I think that this is a great context for this idea that there has been this shift. And you wrote it I think before Alex pretty was shot a day or two before and you started the piece by describing seeing this now famous photo of this five year old boy who was detained by ice in the image. He's wearing this little backpack and this hat and it's extremely, I think, difficult thing for anyone to see, but especially a lot of parents really broke through online. And you talked about posting that image yourself on your own platforms in order to put some pressure on ice or raise awareness here. And then you wrote, but did my posting or any of our posting on the platform do anything to further that effect? Walk me through your process there, did it? Yes and no. I'm not sure if I actually wrote this but I have come full circle here. I used to be back in my digital strategist days. So what I worked for the Obama campaign in 2012, it was my first job out of college. I was doing online fundraising. I then did digital strategy for the governor's race and then did online fundraising for the gallery. I was kind of maybe counterintrudedly like posting doesn't matter. It is important in that it is like participatory but it doesn't change things. It alone, it's like it's not enough. You can't just post them. Be like, great job done. Over the last now 10 years of the work I've done and seeing how things have shifted, I have moved my barometer for success a little bit. I think in this moment, as you have written so much about, there is no singular meat sauce. Everyone is getting a slightly different algorithm. I slightly different fractured media diet. They're seeing something a little bit different. So if I post the picture of Liam Ramos or the headlines from the Minneapolis paper, it might be the only thing that someone sees about that story if they follow me. Even though it feels like my entire newsfeed is 100% that it might be the only thing. There's actually some really interesting research about this that I think wired wrote about in December, how political content posted by non-political creators has more influence than political creators doing it. It does more to move people to the left and part because of the parasocial relationship that people have with folks who are talking about golf or parenting or books or whatever it might be. I'm not a creator. You're not a creator. Influencer is not the same way. Although maybe we are, which is for a separate conversation. But that idea that you as a trusted source for your friends, your family, they know you, they know where you're coming from. Seeing you speak up about it, you and the broadsons, that could be really, really powerful. It takes the place of having a conversation in person that most people are a little bit too afraid to have these days. Well, I mean, it's such a great point about the influencer thing. When you look at, I think this is something, and we can get into this a little later down the line. Ideologies have harnessed the media. There was this whole long conversation after the 2024 election of who is the Joe Rogan of the left, right? And the smartest people on this subject who study this type of stuff, who really understand these dynamics, all said, you can't create that because Joe Rogan is a guy who is a stand-up comedian who started a podcast about stand-up comedy where interviewed comedians then got in the mixed martial arts and did that and built this huge audience that loved and trusted him for whatever reason. Then he started to get interested in conspiracy theories and then politics. And all of the work that you do for a decade of building that trust in that audience, when you do turn on the politics jet, as you said, it's like, oh, this is such a powerful source for people who have that relationship with them. And I think that it's really interesting to think about with our social feeds, this happening in a very one-to-one, very kind of community level aspect. I think that's really, really smart. Well, and I think there's a hesitation that some people have, especially after the last five years, and like, oh, I don't just want to post. I have like performative activism. I don't just want to do virtue signaling. I think virtue signaling is good. And I write this, it feels a little self-righteous, it can be a little bit annoying, but like, one, the right has tried to make vice signaling very cool. They have tried to make being an asshole and a bigot and like a piece of shit on the internet. The hot cool thing and shame you if you're a good person. I think that's dumb. We should be proud of doing good things and it should be okay to post things that signal your values. And I will tell you, if somebody runs a nonprofit, like if you're making the donations so that you get the receipt to share, I don't care. That money spends all the same. It doesn't matter why you're doing it, as long as you are doing it, and actually taking action in a meaningful way that moves the needle forward. You write that it could also be a way to find your people. I think a lot of people don't believe that. But can you give the case for finding community through some of these platforms and networks? I mean, it's hard for me personally to articulate this because everyone knows I work in politics. This is my life. I was from the people who engage with this material all the time, which is like it's so validating to see someone say something or post something you agree with in a way that might surprise you. I didn't know that writer felt that way. I didn't know that creator felt that way. that way. And especially for like people in real life like, oh, I didn't know that fellow parent at school that I only follow because like we see each other at the playground every so often feel similarly. Now we can have a conversation. Now maybe next time I want to volunteer in a campaign, I could reach out to them. You know, it often can feel either like, you know, screaming into the void or preaching to the choir, but at least when it comes to preaching to the choir, like you might reach someone who just didn't feel like they could sing loud enough and you might encourage them to speak up. And it feels, it's, it like feels so cringey to say out loud. It really does and I get that. But in this moment, especially with the propaganda war that the government is trying to instill, it really, really matters that there's a different kind of dispersion of information. I think the, there's something to the cringey thing. Like I've heard other people say this, so this is not like a deeply original thought, but like the, I think broadly speaking, it's like the whole idea of cringe is really, I think toxic. Like the idea of labeling everything as this like, like in the same way, it's like virtue signaling is good when the world is full of this vise signaling signaling. When there is like a terminal irony that like is basically poisoning all these different platforms and, and you know, that are are the White House posts, you know, like they're a forechan moderator or something like that. I feel like like, like cringe is good. Like, like, bring, bring us some cringe, right? Because it basically just means like you care a lot. And I think that that is something that I would like to see more people not be afraid to, to show that they're caring in that way. Rachel, Carton had a thing, I think was last week about like the Mr. Rogers vacation of marketing this year of how more and more brands and marketing are moving into like Mr. Rogers vibes in their social media and like leaning into the city of like kindness and hope. And I haven't been thinking about this a lot. It used to be even in 2025. Like my hottest day because I think that the democratic nominee in 2020 is going to be whoever can appropriately balance fight like hell, like kindness and joy. I don't know if you ever see that meme that's like the people you're in for Glee. They just want Glee to be on. We want that Glee joy, you know, like the television show. There is something real to that. It is nice to see nice things like fear and rage. It just it burns you out. Whereas when you reminder that like people care and they believe that better things are possible, it makes you feel like you can get out of bed in the morning. Not to put you on the spot, but are there good examples of like brands or whatever that have done this successfully pivoting to the cringe slightly or the Mr. Rogers vacation? Okay, so I'm going to quote from Rachel Carton's newsletter because I thought it was like it really spoke to me. She talks about like a nurses week video from Fig. She talks about Elmo just checking in how is everybody doing? There's a post from Willik Avaria, who's a fashion designer, like leaning into sort of joy that people are experiencing. I think you see this a lot with content creators in particular, like talking about the beautiful things in their life, like the aesthetics of happiness, feel really engaging. And I, you know, that speaks a little though to the tension here, right? Of like I know a lot of people who like I know somebody a friend who's just happens to be, they planned their one vacation for the year, you know, a year ago. And it just happens to be during this time in American life that is just like like awful and very chaotic and feels just like, you know, something has shifted in change. And there's this, I think everyone makes all these different calculations of like, do I post a photo of the beach? Like, am I a bad person if I'm doing this? And I think it's interesting to think of it from this lens, right? Of, no, there's a way of like, you don't want to say like, oh, the world just goes on, right? But there is this way of thinking that, you know, sharing, enjoy, and I don't know, there's a way that you can create community that feels a little generative as opposed to the constant like soul sucking nature of like we are on the brink, you know? And like not to bring everything in social media and politics, vectors, or on mom Donnie, but I do think this is something mom Donnie did so so well, which was that his stuff was joyful. Like it was right, heavily layered with millennial optimism and a little bit of cringe in a way that like really, especially spoken opposition to the way that Cuomo or anyone else was campaigning. If you believe that better things are possible and you are inherently an optimist because I think in participate in activism, you have to be a little bit of an optimist, even if you hate that about yourself. It is just contagious because it's like what gives you the forward momentum to keep doing the work. So I, I know I had a friend who was doing that too, she was like, I just was surfing in Costa Rica and the world is falling apart. Can I post? I was like, yeah, of course you can because the next day you'll be back, you know, donating and marching and doing what you can post away. We're shoveling snow. Yeah. Doom scrolling. Yeah. I wanted to ask broadly, like we've touched on this in a lot of ways, but something that I have thought so much about and to be like very candid, like agonized about for the last decade is what do we do with this window to the world that we have, right? I think whether it's seeing atrocities of broad as we have for so long or the dysfunction here at home, like there's a feeling right now that like part of just being alive today is like being confronted with auto playing videos of people being shot to death. And that's something that I think is beyond just being hyper online. It is just a, if you are in these spaces at all, you may be confronted with fresh genuine horrors that if you open yourself to them fully, it's easy to shut down or to feel just so alienated because you are going throughout your day in the way that you are. I'm curious how you think about how we bear witness, how we think about showing and sharing these things with people because they matter to us and how not to get demoralized in doing so. One of my general goals of them for online content conception, especially as it relates to the news is to only take the poison I have the antidote for. So like, I love that. I can't always do this, but generally speaking, like that means that there are huge parts of the things happening in the world that I just like scroll past. I just I can't. There's nothing I can do about that that doesn't mean it's not important that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. It's just the things that I have chosen to get a gave my life and my career and my work to and my personal outside of work interest to are not that. Now, the things that I have, like what is happening in Minneapolis, like what's happening in the United States, like what's happening to with Trump, you know, like what's happening in New York City where I live. Yeah, I'm dive and deep, but you know what, that's because I can do something about it, whether that's voting in an election, giving money, subscribing to media, like thinking about all the difference or things I could do that affected, pick the poison I've got the antidote for. I think the key is remembering that like the antidotes to extend the metaphor a little bit are more varied than you might think. Like I was talking to someone who was telling me they felt so hopeless about what was happening in Minneapolis. They're like, there's nothing I can do. You know, I this person was like, I've worked in politics, worked for facilitator, whatever. There's so hard, but there's nothing I can do. It's like, you live in DC. There's a DC mayoral election in the coming year. It actually is going to be really, really, really important who the DC mayor is because this shit is going to come back to your city soon enough. Like dedicate all of your energy to that. And that, well, it might not be like a direct solution to what's happening in Minneapolis. That is a solution and it's a concrete thing you could do. It's a thing you could show up in person for. It's a thing you'll be able to live the results of. Like be expansive in what your idea of antidote is. And it allows you, I think, a little bit more possibility. We're talking a lot about the personal, political, media consumption, how to be online as a person. We've also touched, but I want to go deeper on the idea of politicians and being online. You've written a lot about leadership, especially in younger generations, about ways that people can leverage these platforms to connect, to get messages out, but also to inspire people to affect actual political change. And something that I feel, and I think a lot of people feel, is that they're really just when, especially when you look at, say, our politicians, they fall into two camps. They're either like hyper online, really cocooned, troubling, like, edge lords, or you have people who are kind of thinking and regard in the internet on dialogue terms, right? You've said that we need to find elected officials who are the right amount of online. Like what is the right amount of online for an elected official? So I think it's folks who are enough of a consumer. that they can be a producer without the brain rot. Like JD Vance has brain rot. (laughs) Trump has brain rot. Like they're so online that they're unable to see that it is an ecosystem, an echo chamber that they cannot get out of. Like they are sucked into it. I think there's actually a lot of, you know, Republican elected's kid, and they who, whether it's Twitter or Fox News, same idea, like there's not something that's some secret source of information. They're doing the same shit. We saw that in the photo from the Venezuela attack, or cool, I guess, where they're like scroll on Twitter as they're kidnapping dictating. - Right, this is the sort of the not situation room, but the Mar-a-Lago command center during the Venezuela raid, where they are conducting an operation in PTAG Seth has a screen behind him that is showing a Twitter feed or an X feed. - That is too online. And then you, as you say, like the politicians who clearly have no idea how the internet works, they don't understand, they don't know the language of like a forward-facing video, so they can't do it in a way that feels genuine or authentic, which means they can't communicate in this moment. And that is 80% of a politician's job is communication. And if they can't do it in a way that works for 2026, they can't be a good politician right now. You've got some politician, I think like AOC, Maxwell Frost. I actually think Chris Murphy and Brian Shots, it's not all younger, but it's a lot like, so ones who are online enough that they know how to use the tools, even if they don't actually know how to like edit the video themselves, while still understanding that the internet is not real life, but it is a huge part of real life for a ton of people, and it is how people understand real life. It gets a mediation. It's a mediation for how people understand real life. - What makes, when you see something good from a politician, like a piece of content that they've produced or a response, what are some of the flavors of that? What is a taxonomy of a good response or a good post from an elected official? How does it work? - Does it feel like it credibly could have come from them? Do I buy that this is a thing that even if they're Zoom or digital staff are told them, hey, this is a thing you should make, we're gonna edit it? Does it feel like it credibly have come from them? Does it feel like they're responding to a post that they probably could have seen? Does it look like they're copy-pasting talking points they've been emailed, which you see politicians often do, and then forget to delete the copy-paste notes on top, which is such a flag? And I think how much did their staff have to explain to them the format, the function, how it works? One of my favorite questions to ask politicians of any age, but especially the older ones, tell me about what side of the internet you're on. What side of TikTok are you on? What Reddit subreddits are you on? Are you on Pinterest or you on some ravler, if you're a knitter? I don't know, tell me about the internet that you're on. And the ones who don't even understand the question are the ones who are not well suited for this moment. - It's interesting. I once asked, I had an opportunity via the New York Times editorial board interview, Bernie Sanders, and my job was to ask him a tech question. I was just like, show me some of the apps on your phone, and he just yelled at me and said, he doesn't have any. And yet somehow that works, right? Somehow there are some people because he is authentic to that, like, hey man, like, miss me with all of this. - He doesn't do, but you can tell the ones who are actually really good at it, don't do Mimi stuff. Like, they're not making memes. They're being like genuine personal, community, communicators who maybe are like using different formats and functions, but I think part of it is they so clearly know themselves and know what they believe, that the question becomes like what tactics am I using to communicate it as opposed to which memes am I jumping on to become trendy? - This is what I noticed about, and another people pointed this out about Mamdani, and again, like politics aside, like what was so, and also even beyond the joy part of it aside, what I thought was so interesting as a, from a media perspective, about some of his videos, especially the first ones that he did when he was out in Queens on the street, was he was taking a very popular online form of content, which is the man on the street asking random people with a microphone in their face, some kind of question, right? And then that getting chopped up and put online, like that's how we found Hock Tua Girl, who became like the, that's like the other side of it, but he was just asking these questions about like, why did you vote for Donald Trump in 2024, right? And having that man on the street thing, but it's that fluency with a type of content that people are familiar with, but it's also a type of content that you can do in your own way, that is not going to, or that is going to then spread naturally, right, because like the internet is primed to take that type of content and just like, get it out to a lot of different people. I thought that was a really great example of like, of pairing form, regardless of even the politics, with something that is actually gonna spread. - Well, and that's because he's the right amount of online. Like, that's a dude that has an FIP that is carefully calculated to his interests, whether or not he's talked about this. And I think that is telling of like a guy who at the very least knows the language. Like, he can speak enough of it that he can get by. And I think that is true for so many of the politicians who are really effective in this moment, is they're good enough. They've done like enough days on duo-lingo to get by. (laughs) - They're not being, they're not being gilted by the duo-lingo, Owl-Logo. That's very important, I think, in general. So if you could give advice, and I'm sure you are, but if you could give advice to like the Democrats right now, and that's even just like in choosing candidates. Like, how important is that part of it, like the online strategy in assessing overall, like whether a candidate's gonna be good. Obviously you don't wanna candidate, who's just like, you know, hyper online and great at it, and you know, not good at the retail, politics, or whatever, but how do you, when, how should they judge that category of being online? - I don't wanna say it's everything, but I think it is a bigger part that most people would like to admit because I think it's how, one, it's how people get information, but two, it's like we've learned with Joe Biden. If you cannot effectively sell the good stuff, you're doing it, doesn't matter how good the stuff is. Like, you've got to be able to continually communicate in all the ways people get information in all of the platforms, and part of it is like yeah, being sufficiently online, but it's also being a normal person who can show up in non-political spaces and still be a normal person. Like, I think a lot about how many members of Congress could credibly go on basically any non-political podcast, chat show, influencer, and not sound like a robot. Maybe it doesn't, if you're being generous. Which doesn't mean they're bad people or bad politicians or bad legislators. It just means that like, the skill set for what you need to be an effective leader in 2026 is not the same skill set that you needed in 1990 or 2000 or even 2010 when a lot of these folks got elected. Now, I think it's the same thing that like you're seeing CEO struggle with too, where if you are too online as a CEO, you will suffer, but if you're not online enough, like you're not gonna know how to perpetuate the brand, you're not gonna know how to sell the work, you're not gonna know even like how to influence internal communication, which is driven off of external communication in many ways, it really matters. - Something that I really appreciate about your writing on this entire subject is always that it draws back to IRL, right? It's always focused in the idea of actual civic engagement, actual community, the stuff that we do online, driving change in the real world. You've written about things that, you've written like a long list and one of your substats of just things that people can do. Some of it is political, some of it is civic engagement or relationship building. Can you tell me some of the things that you have found most helpful there in just building community and giving people just a broader sense of agency? - Go to a city council or school board or library board meeting, go to a state legislative hearing, go to a neighborhood cleanup, stock your neighborhood fridge if it has one of free fridge, participate in mutual aid, support a local artist, buy something from a local artist, share the thing that you bought online. So then where people can buy things from that local artist, subscribe to local media, bring a dish to someone who just had a baby or lost a loved one or just because start a neighborhood group chat, sustain the neighborhood group chat and make sure it's not that annoying. You know my favorite one and I've written about this a lot, it's sort of like the other thing that I've been clinging to this year is how-- - I think I was gonna ask you about this one. - Yeah. - Is this your experiment? - Yes. - Absolutely. - Tell the people. - So tell the people. So in 2025, I've written about this a bunch and talked about it a bunch lately. My husband and I in order to combat our new parent's isolation decided to host people for dinner every Saturday at 2025. Every Saturday we were in town, which since we had a, we started the year, a two year old and a two month old was every Saturday 'cause we didn't travel with them. And we ended up succeeding. We had 52 dinners. More than 100 summer people came to our home over the year 40 summer kids and it was hard in many cases, but so magical. And as I think about like, okay, what happens when ice comes to New York? What happens, which they well, they are, they are, I see it in the neighborhood. Hachatsari, like when they send tanks rolling down Flappish Avenue in Brooklyn, not a crazy thing to say might happen at some point in the next couple of years. Who are the people that I'm going to text? Who are the people I'm going to turn to? It's the folks who've come over to my home for dinner and their friends and their networks. Like I described it as like the most political thing I did in 2025. And I am a political operative who voted in two different elections in 2025, thinking New York City and give money and engage having people over for dinner was the most political thing I did. And as I read about what's happening in Minneapolis, I feel even more affirmed in that that like building strong relationships with the people around you is what will get us through this. What did you learn about about being social in 2025, 2026? You know, this era where people do feel really isolated a lot. There is a, you know, quote unquote, lonely in a epidemic, however you want to describe it. What, what, did you learn about being being social from from having 52 dinners at your home? One that it really surprised people to be invited over. Like people were like shocked that we were inviting them into our home. To that the tone that we set really mattered, like how casual could we make it? I had often text people learning of to be like, Hey, just FYI, one of my children is not wearing pants and I'm still in my pajamas. See you later. Like being really aggressive about making it clear, like this is not fancy. This is, this is as real as it can get because it's all like, so all we can do at the stage in our lives, but come into our home anyway. I will say some of the questions that I've gotten since I've wrote and about this and posted about it is always be posting is like really have stunned me. People would ask like, so what did you talk about? The books, movies, vacations, our kids, the dog, all kinds of things. But I do think like that that that's social muscle. And they don't mean to embarrass anyone by saying that's a real question. Like that social muscle has so clearly attribute and you so deeply overthink it to the point that you've like forgotten that actually you can just let go. Not to like Mel Robbins, you believe you can just let them just let it go. Yeah, I love I am probably butchering it, but I believe it's it's like a it's a Vonnegut quote, but it's I think it's like the humans were put on this earth to like to fart around is the quote, right? And it's like, I think about that. I thought about that when I read your post and I think about it sometimes when I am out with with my community engaging in whatever. And a lot of that time is like it's it's not structured, right? It's not like here's the list of what we're going to talk about today. And the eight political actions we're going to take in the 12 things, you know, it's like it I almost sometimes can't remember what we talked about, right? But it's this you leave with this feeling of like that was so great and unproductive. Be because it was unproductive. It's it's like a wonderful thing. And it feels like it's something that that we just like we need to have is that just that unstructured hang. And like it's really hard to be on your phone when it's just like four or six people in your house hanging out and having dinner would drink a wine, whatever it might be, which I think is also a big part of this is like it's two or three hours in which I am not on the internet. And I wish that was more of my life. I wish I was better about not being on my phone. But like especially when people are over, it is so valuable to unplug. Well, I think we will let people unplug by wrapping this. Excellent. Thank you. I'm trying to do this. Still new to me here. We're working on it. But I mean, this this is lovely. I thank you so much for helping people try to understand how to how to use these these tools to feel like like a person in the world instead of like a you know, being tossed by the algorithm wins. So well, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. I was just like, I know it feels bad. But like the we're winning. We're going to win. I think that's the that's the thing I've taken away from the last couple of days of the internet is like, Oh, they're not popular with their doing is not popular. They're getting cat bongo reddit sub threads to like vocally disagree with them. They are not popular. This is terrible. But we will win. And I find that to be really comforting. Amanda, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Amanda Litman. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday, you can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel or to Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support the work that I'm doing and the work that all of my colleagues at the Atlantic are doing, you can subscribe to the publication at the Atlantic dot com slash listener. That's the Atlantic dot com slash listener. Thanks so much. And I'll see you on the end of this episode. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Nathaniel from and edited by Claudine Abade. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme music is by Rob Smersiac. Claudine Abade is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. And Andrea Valdes is our managing editor. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he in his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of mid term elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win. The new season of Altocracy in America available now. [BLANK_AUDIO]