I think you have the causality backwards. If we never talk about it, the quality of discussion isn't going to get better. And as the article says, "The design of technology hides its political imperatives by presenting as neutral." Us not discussing politics here is part of that pretense that what we do is somehow neutral. The pretense that things that touch millions, maybe billions of people could possibly be apolitical.
The only choice in the current high noise/low signal environment is to pretend to be neutral or pretend to know what you are talking. Both Obama and Trump fall in the later category.
You and everyone else who believes talking is a route to solutions is delusional. Especially in the current environment of self reinforcing echo chambers and us vs them narratives. There has not been a single major issue solved in the last twenty years of social media and 24*7 news "educating and informing" the public.
Will technocrats who are political have any success? That experiment is currently running in China and the default American narrative is it will fail. So either way you look at it an SV entry into politics will fail.
What they can do is change the environment. Remove the retarded mechanisms that increase "engagement" at the cost of dividing people. This is much more in the realm of their domain expertise than thinking they need to spend their time talking or propping up talkers more.
