Steven Olikara
There is an industry that profits every time you come to hate your neighbor a little more. Steven Olikara calls it the "division industrial complex" — "a collection of algorithms, polarized media, and hyper-partisan political operatives that make money on making us hate each other all the time." It is a multibillion-dollar machine, he argues, mirroring the military-industrial complex it rhymes with, and it has convinced most of us that the people on the other side want to destroy everything we hold dear. The strangest part, he says, is that it's mostly a lie. "We end up having a lot more in common than we realize. Just our discourse doesn't reflect that."
Olikara's response was to go where the lie is manufactured. He runs Bridge Entertainment Labs, what he describes as the first Hollywood office built to combat toxic polarization and grow a culture of pluralism in America. It advises filmmakers and studios from Disney to Paramount on how to tell stories that make Americans see each other as human again. He came to it the long way: a decade in politics, and before that, a kid at a piano in a segregated city, learning that the people who aren't supposed to share a room can still build something together.
That kid grew up in Milwaukee, one of the most racially and socioeconomically segregated metros in the country, a place where, as he puts it, "not a lot of people looked like me or shared my background." Music was his way across. What he loved most was when his bands would draw and infuse different influences across genres and cultures — the collision that made the art, in his words, "so much more dynamic, exciting, and creative." Jazz in particular taught him how. "You have to listen before you can play," his instructor used to say — a discipline of presence and call-and-response he came to see as a model for how a fractured country might talk to itself. In the right kind of creative, open and dignified **** es, he says, people "can add up to something that's larger than the sum of our parts" — not a least common denominator, but "something totally new and evolutionary together."
Olikara spent that decade chasing the idea into politics, founding Future Caucus, now the largest movement of young elected officials working across partisan lines on issues from gun violence prevention to criminal justice reform. The wins were real. But he kept circling a harder problem. Passing reforms in statehouses was one thing; convincing the friends he grew up with that a better discourse was even possible was another. "That's hard to believe if you're not seeing it in our media, you're not seeing it in the stories we tell," he says. The question that followed reframed his whole mission: for the people with media platforms, "which stories do we choose to tell and which ones do you choose to ignore?" That question launched the Bridge Entertainment Labs chapter. As the country approaches its 250th year, he frames the stakes in one line: "Can we cre
There is an industry that profits every time you come to hate your neighbor a little more. Steven Olikara calls it the "division industrial complex" — "a collection of algorithms, polarized media, and hyper-partisan political operatives that make money on making us hate each other all the time." It is a multibillion-dollar machine, he argues, mirroring the military-industrial complex it rhymes with, and it has convinced most of us that the people on the other side want to destroy everything we hold dear. The strangest part, he says, is that it's mostly a lie. "We end up having a lot more in common than we realize. Just our discourse doesn't reflect that."
Olikara's response was to go where the lie is manufactured. He runs Bridge Entertainment Labs, what he describes as the first Hollywood office built to combat toxic polarization and grow a culture of pluralism in America. It advises filmmakers and studios from Disney to Paramount on how to tell stories that make Americans see each other as human again. He came to it the long way: a decade in politics, and before that, a kid at a piano in a segregated city, learning that the people who aren't supposed to share a room can still build something together.
That kid grew up in Milwaukee, one of the most racially and socioeconomically segregated metros in the country, a place where, as he puts it, "not a lot of people looked like me or shared my background." Music was his way across. What he loved most was when his bands would draw and infuse different influences across genres and cultures — the collision that made the art, in his words, "so much more dynamic, exciting, and creative." Jazz in particular taught him how. "You have to listen before you can play," his instructor used to say — a discipline of presence and call-and-response he came to see as a model for how a fractured country might talk to itself. In the right kind of creative, open and dignified **** es, he says, people "can add up to something that's larger than the sum of our parts" — not a least common denominator, but "something totally new and evolutionary together."
Olikara spent that decade chasing the idea into politics, founding Future Caucus, now the largest movement of young elected officials working across partisan lines on issues from gun violence prevention to criminal justice reform. The wins were real. But he kept circling a harder problem. Passing reforms in statehouses was one thing; convincing the friends he grew up with that a better discourse was even possible was another. "That's hard to believe if you're not seeing it in our media, you're not seeing it in the stories we tell," he says. The question that followed reframed his whole mission: for the people with media platforms, "which stories do we choose to tell and which ones do you choose to ignore?" That question launched the Bridge Entertainment Labs chapter. As the country approaches its 250th year, he frames the stakes in one line: "Can we cre
3 months ago
