Civics: Inside a Failed Silicon Valley Attempt to Reinvent Politics

Joshua Brustein:

This isn’t the first setback for Win The Future, which also goes by the unfortunate acronym WTF. The group, founded last July, was the brainchild of Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who initially described it as “a new movement and force within the Democratic Party, which can act like its own virtual party.” WTF set out on a series of tech-themed political experiments to engage disaffected populations by crowdsourcing policy ideas on Twitter. At one point, Pincus considered fielding a primary challenger to run against U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Now the group’s sole project is Bee’s app. Even if WTF can overcome its technical issues, it seems like quite a comedown if the sum total of its output for the 2018 midterms is a civically minded clone of last year’s hottest smartphone app.