Escaping the Vegan Echo Chamber
Grandstanding gets likes. Bridge-building gets results.
Today’s political discourse is rife with bad incentives. If you want to grow your online presence, likes and retweets come most easily from radical declarations of partisan views. On the left, this means faulting conservatives for everything in society taken to be bad or oppressive. On the right, this means seeing the cultural and institutional power of liberals and progressives as the reason for American decline. Left or right, gaining prominence online tends to require an ongoing commitment to forcefully denouncing the other side as solely responsible for the deepening rift in American life.
This applies to more than red-blue politics. If you’re an advocate for animal rights and a vegan like me, you face a similar dilemma: Do you go for radical declarations, knowing they are the surest path to online prominence? Or do you pursue bridge-building incrementalism, opening you up to potentially do more good, but at a lower level of commitment from those you reach, and at a lower level of online influence than your flame-throwing counterparts?
Do you focus on meeting the average person where they are, showing them the atrocious cruelty of factory farming and explaining how eating plant-based foods just one day a week can make an enormous impact? Or do…
