"Wait, I think you're platform-pilled"

Peer into the matrix and discover how everything we think we know about creating content and online marketing is an illusion.

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

A sort of 'platform realism' has made it easier to imagine the end of the internet than the end of the big platforms.

We've reached the internet's "end of history" moment, unable to conjure up an experience of the internet that isn't dominated by techno-feudal lords wielding ultimate power over enclosed digital territories.

When I talk to small business owners, independent workers, and creators about their marketing challenges, this platform realism is always at the core of the conversation—the unspoken but undeniable idea haunting their questions. Every goal, idea, or concern filters through a subconscious reproduction of The Algorithm.

Put another way, we're all "platform-pilled."

What does it mean to be "platform-pilled?"

I'm borrowing the term "platform-pilled" from Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. He used the term in a recent interview with popular science communicator Hank Green—and immediately, I knew that I’d be thinking about it (and writing about it) for a long time to come.

To be platform-pilled means that one’s conception of truth is the version that best serves the platforms' goals.¹ What we think of as popular, trustworthy, engaging, or even virtuous is filtered through the platforms' logic.

So, let's peer into the matrix and start to see the illusion for what it is. I’ll use the conversation between Patel and Green as a jumping-off point to examine four ways we've been platformed-pilled and what could be true instead.

People trust people more than brands

"It seems like people have an easier time trusting individuals now [rather] than trusting larger brands," says Green with the nonchalance of someone stating the sky is blue.

Patel responds, "Oh, I totally disagree with that. Wait, I think you're platform-pilled."

Most people reading this would agree with Green. We trust individuals more than brands. That's why we share our candid photos, get #vulnerable, and make sure that our audiences know where we went on vacation. It's why we celebrate our diagnoses and tell stories about past trauma. Today, good content (marketing) is personal and authentic, right?

Patel argues no.

A brand is a powerful entity, a constellation of meaning that transcends any individual. It's a big idea, a rock-solid point of view. A brand can aggregate the power of the people that make it up. Platforms can't contend with that kind of power. When brands wield power, they get leverage over a platform—remember when Elon Musk told brands that left the platform that they could f--- themselves?

Instead, platform companies want us to believe that users want content from individuals rather than brands because individual content creators are a bottomless well of free, powerless labor.

Or, as Patel put it:

I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realized that an infinite supply of teenage creators [is] cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators.

By encouraging individuals to build personal brands rather than brand brands, platforms perpetuate their own staying power and keep users stuck in an endless cycle of self-presentation. Instead of working to create something bigger or beyond myself, I become a belabored self.

Take the Platform Pill if you'd like to continue operating as if "being you" is the key to success online. Otherwise, keep reading.

People tell you what they want to see (or buy)

It's easy to assume that what gets popular on a platform is what people want to see (or buy). If you're a marketer of any sort, someone at some point instructed you to check out your posting stats and do more of what's getting liked, commented on, and shared.

If you're trying to be popular on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, that makes sense. But if your goal is marketing a product or service, expanding your professional network, or showcasing a portfolio of your work, this is bad advice. Algorithms are reinforcing feedback loops—that is, they scan content for signs that it will produce greater engagement, longer time in the app, and more ad views and then amplify the content that has those signs.

Sometimes, algorithms detect great content this way! Other times (most of the time), not so much. But even the remarkable content that gets caught up in an algorithm's net doesn't necessarily tell you what your followers want from you. It tells you what the platform wants from you. It doesn't tell you what customers might buy. It tells you what labor the platform will "compensate" you for.

If what's "popular" drives your product, service, or portfolio development, you're not making stuff for people. You're making stuff for platforms, and unfortunately, platforms aren't interested in paying you.

Take the Platform Pill if you'd like to continue outsourcing your customer research to the people who decided Instagram would just be TikTok now. Otherwise, keep reading.

Websites are dead

It's also easy to assume that if you want people to see your content, it has to be on a platform. That's where the eyeballs are. Nobody visits websites anymore!

Right? Right?

Patel often refers to The Verge as "the last website on Earth." He means that he’s betting on an audience who wants to visit The Verge dot com. And so, the team at The Verge has made content decisions that make the website itself more valuable, including rolling out a "quick posts" feature that allows their writers to share news on the fly.

Patel said the impetus behind the "quick posts" feature was to make writing for the website rather than for platforms more fun:

My number one goal was, “Boy, I’d like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts value.”

The Platform Pill illusion is that "nobody visits websites anymore." But correlation isn't causation. Platforms present themselves as website killers—they’re more efficient, more fun, more visually pleasing, and far easier to build an audience on. The platform is better than a website, so you don’t need to make one, visit one, or really ever leave the platform again.

Did people stop visiting websites because platforms are actually better? Or because platforms incentivized us to abandon the websites we used to love? Did people stop making good websites because platforms are better for business? Or did platforms make us choose between the potential for internet fame on their terms or the near certainty of languishing in obscurity on our own websites?

It's in the platform's best interest for us to believe that websites are dead—that no one reads blogs anymore, that all the good stuff is on the platform, that distribution only happens at the whims of the algorithms.

Patel is clear that building an audience for a website is really freaking hard. And yes, it might be easy to generate a following and traffic on a platform. But is investing your time, energy, and brainpower into a platform right for you (and your business) in the long run? Does it help you realize more creative or innovative ideas? Does it give you more or less insight into the overlap between what you want to make and what people want to buy?

Take the Platform Pill if, well, actually, I can't beat how Green and Patel put it:

Green: We can’t shut up about how our work has value, but then we can’t stop giving it away for free.

Patel: Yeah. “F--- you, pay me,” he typed furiously for free into another box.

Platforms support creative work

Platforms sell themselves as places for us to connect, express ourselves, and share our creative work with the world. And it all sounds really good.

In fact, here's how Instagram positions itself:

• Be creative to connect your world

• There are so many ways to express yourself on Instagram

• An everyday glimpse into what makes you, 100% you

• Be yourself and the fans will follow

Unfortunately, none of that is true. And that's because platforms don't (really, can't) support creative work. They support work that's legible to the algorithm, and that work starts to look and feel the same—which in turn starts to make our physical spaces look and feel the same, too.

You might be creating work for Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, but it's not creative in the sense that you made something new(ish). You're creating work in the sense that you're working.

Distribution channels shape what content is created, argues Patel. This idea is as old as media theory itself. Broadcast television produces a certain kind of content; cable television produces another kind; streaming produces yet another, all of which differ from the content produced for radio or magazines.

A platform (and its recommendation algorithm) is a distribution channel. It shapes the content that its users produce:

The distribution actually ... creates the pressures that force all the work to be the same. And I think over time, that’s what drives the audiences away. So there’s a real change in how these platforms work, where, over time, they just become more and more of the same thing and the creators become more and more the same. And that’s a little exhausting.

Not only is making all that sameness exhausting for creators, but it's also exhausting for consumers. It foments churn on the platform—and in our audiences. And yet, distribution channels hold such power that make culture bend to their demands. But even that power is an illusion.

After all, plenty of culture-making happens through distribution channels that aren't algorithmic or gatekept.

Anil Dash recently wrote about why "wherever you listen to platforms" is a radical statement.

Podcasts and newsletters are powered through open distribution systems.

All you need is a way to play an MP3 file or an email account. There is a wide variety of options for both. But if you want to view my Instagram content, you need to be on Instagram. I can't say, "View my visual content wherever you view visual content."

With a podcast or a newsletter, I have relative control over how it is distributed. I own my podcast's RSS feed. I own by subscriber list. They're portable assets. Sure, Apply or Spotify or Substack might choose (as in by a human curator) to feature my podcast or newsletter, but there is no algorithm training me on what to make. What little data I have is (largely) indicative of real audience behavior.

Patel points out that podcasts and newsletters, as a result, have a wide variety of formats, points of view, and styles. My husband listens to podcasts that have no talking at all. I listen to interviews, carefully researched conversations, and non-fiction audio dramas. Others listen to two bros behind mics shoot the shit. Still, others listen to fiction or guided meditation.

I never have to ask myself what an algorithm is going to do with a particular podcast episode.

Never.

I only ever think about the story I want to tell and the stories my audience wants to hear. The same goes for this newsletter.

Every place where you see open distribution, you see a huge variety of creators and content.

That's not to say that creating a podcast or newsletter that people want to invest time in is easy (or lucrative). It's really, really not. But it does eliminate the need to consider an algorithm before hitting publish.

Take the Platform Pill if you prefer divining the will of the algorithm before you "get creative."

Ready for the Red Pill?

Not the one that makes you a conspiracy theorist or a crypto bro.

My guess is that at least one of these ideas made you feel insecure about how you represent yourself and your work online. I bet you'd like to know what I propose as a solution. I sure would like to tell you.

But that's the thing about platform realism: imagining alternatives seems impossible. The system pulls us back into line at every turn.

What’s more, the alternative that many are looking for is the next "big thing" that's going to allow them to quickly and cheaply build a mass audience. A lucky break, if you will, manufactured by someone with venture capital willing to start the enshittification cycle from the start yet again.

There is no next big thing coming.

There won't be another easy way to reach a massive audience, at least for as long as our current platform reality lasts.

If you take the Red Pill, you have to be willing to think small. To play small.

Or, to paraphrase Mark Fisher, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain” of work under platform realism. A small change can shake us from the endless loop of boredom and insecurity so we can discover that “suddenly anything is possible again.”

Thinking and playing small does not acquiesce to the impossibility of change. It's not our only recourse amidst the despair of insecurity.

Thinking and playing small is how we figure out what's next—and what’s better.

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1. For my readers who are not steeped in the mythology of The Matrix, the idea of being X-pilled references the scene where Morpheus (the guide played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (the hero played Keanu Reeves) the choice between a Red Pill and a Blue Pill. If Neo takes the Blue Pill, he’ll go back to his regular life, continuing to believe that what he sees around him is reality. But if he takes the Red Pill, he’ll wake up from the illusion and see reality for what it really is.