America’s Slide Toward Simulated Democracy With Eliot Higgins

In this episode of “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early-internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community. He has spent the past decade exposing war crimes and online manipulation with publicly available data. Higgins has recently come up with a framework to help understand our information crisis: Democracies function only when we can verify truth, deliberate over what matters, and hold power to account. All three are faltering, he argues. In this conversation, Warzel and Higgins trace the incentives that broke the feed: how algorithms reward outrage, how “bespoke realities” form, why counterpublics can devolve into virtual cults, and what “simulated” accountability looks like in practice. They revisit Higgins’s path from early web forums to Bellingcat, look at the MAGA coalition as a patchwork of disordered counterpublics, and debate whether America is trapped in a simulated democracy. Higgins offers a clear diagnosis—and a plan for how we might begin to claw back a shared reality. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices