The civics education most Americans got was thin. The civics conversation most Americans have today is loud. SuperCitizen is built on a bet that the gap between “I have an opinion” and “I have a defended position” is a muscle you can train — and that the right AI can be the trainer, if it's built right.
The three things existing tools don't do
1. They don't know what you actually believe
Every chat starts cold. There's no record of the position you held in March and updated in June, no way to ask “am I still 70% sure about RCV?” SuperCitizen treats your stated positions as first-class memory: stored as markdown, diffable, forkable, and the coach reads them at the start of every session.
2. They don't make you steel-man your opponents
Mainstream civic AI tends toward two failure modes: corporate equivocation (“there are many viewpoints”) or ideological capture (the model has been trained to subtly agree with its operator's priors). SuperCitizen requires steel-manning as a checkable behavior: the neutrality clauses cite_or_caveat and no_partisan_framing are non-removable from any soul that loads, and the system prompt is unit-tested for them. Tests red → builds red.
3. They don't connect knowledge to civic action
Knowing the Constitution is good. Knowing your representatives, the bills they voted on, and how to write them a useful letter is better. Knowing how to allocate a $200 donation across cross-spectrum recipients with full transparency on where the money goes is best. SuperCitizen ties the curriculum, the studio (op-ed, letter, speech, debate prep), and the Mint together in one product so the user's civic loop closes.
Why open-source, why self-hostable
Civic education that runs on closed infrastructure is fragile and easy to capture. SuperCitizen ships under Apache 2.0 (code) and CC-BY-SA-4.0 (content); you can fork the entire stack, run your own instance with docker compose up, and even bring your own LLM via Ollama for a fully-offline build.
Why anonymous-first
Signing up is never a precondition for learning. Account creation is a strict superset — every flow works without an account, and what an account adds is cross-device sync, not access. We never collect SSNs, IDs, or financial account numbers. Address is opt-in for hyper-local representative resolution and is separately encryptable at rest.
What we don't do
We don't tell you what to think on contested values questions. We don't hide our funding (quarterly disclosures at /transparency). We don't auto-update content (every feed is sha-pinned at subscription time). We don't do partisan mobilization at any time, and the platform observes a 14-day pre-federal-general-election promotional blackout.
Where this came from
Started by Chris Borgia — solo at v1.0 with a public commitment to recruit a cross-spectrum editorial board within 90 days. The founder is the editor of record until the board is seated; every editorial choice is logged and contestable through the bug-bounty program. See /board.
What success looks like
A user opens SuperCitizen, declares a position they hold strongly, completes a steel-man drill on the strongest opposing case, refines their position with new sources, drafts an op-ed and gets it sharpened, finds their representative, writes them a letter the rep's staffer reads twice, and allocates a hundred dollars across cross-spectrum recipients with full visibility on where it goes. And then — this is the part — they tell a friend.