Should Writers Advertise for the Big Tech Platforms They Use?

Awosika’s mission to replace “negative” content with neoliberal propaganda and hackery

According to the popular writing coach on Medium, Ayodeji Awosika, “There is currently way too much negativity on the platform.” And “Much of this negativity is coming from newer writers.”

In his article, “How We Can Keep Medium From Becoming a Negative Cesspool,” Awosika aims to “help move the platform back in the right direction,” by explaining “how Medium works, the purpose of the website, and the type of culture that has helped it become a great place for writers to practice their craft.”

Awosika’s article offers fascinating insights into the mind of one of Medium’s self-appointed guardians and thought policemen, and more specifically into the confusions and obfuscations any such guardian would need to celebrate the state of the creator economy.

Why Awosika would be inclined to take up this role is clear and understandable: he flourishes on this platform so naturally it’s in his interest to downplay any problems with his self-help optimism or with the creator economy’s propaganda.

The nature of Medium

This isn’t to say I think Medium, for example, is rotten and indefensible. Medium simply monetizes the blogosphere.

I started writing philosophical articles on a blog in 2011 and continued to post them there without any marketing or earnings for some eight years, switching to Medium in late 2019. I wrote on that earlier blog for fun and to work out my ideas, not with any business agenda or commercial expectations. When I realized I could do the same amount of work on Medium and be paid a little something for the effort, with a lottery’s chance of perhaps making significant money doing so, there was no reason not to try.

And that’s the benefit of Medium: it’s just the blogosphere plus the payment of tens or perhaps hundreds of dollars a month for the effort of writing, for over 90 percent of the platform’s writers, with something like only the top one percent of them making well over $1,000 a month. Those top writers are often early adopters of the platform like Awosika who joined in 2015. The Matthew effect kicks in, in that case, and gives the early adopters an advantage over the newer users, like compound interest.

In any case, the point is that Medium’s benefits for freelance writers are obvious. You can write on a blog for no hope of any financial returns, or you can click your mouse on a different website and send your articles to Medium for a chance of some such returns. That’s it. The advantage is no mystery.

But Medium is still part of the gig economy that’s driven by big tech companies, so this platform’s culture overflows with neoliberal propaganda. The sources of that propaganda are twofold.

Note, first, the Verve’s report that most of Medium’s readers look like the platform’s founder Ev Williams: “71 percent are white, 55 percent are male, and 53 percent make more than $100,000 a year, according to internal numbers.” Note also Native Advertising’s 2015 report that “95% of Medium’s readers are college graduates,” a statistic that’s probably decreased over the years but remains high.

• First, then, that kind of audience itself will be mostly neoliberal, which means these readers have already been conditioned by corporate advertising and by American culture to celebrate the norms of postindustrial societies. Most Medium users aren’t radicals who are open to questioning those presuppositions. They’re committed, rather, to positive thinking and to neoliberal hype about the prospects of self-enrichment in a capitalist marketplace, such as in the “creator economy.” These readers are self-reliant individualists who strive to keep up with the infuencers whose perfect lives they see panning out on Instagram. Roughly speaking, then, these readers have bought into the American dream, and they’d resist the warning that they ought to wake up.
• Second, those readers who aren’t so committed are at a disadvantage in finding more intellectually nourishing content online because no major social media platform is a pure democracy or free market of ideas, with no top-down control. Platforms like Medium deploy shadowy algorithms that elevate certain contents and bury others, adding to network effects that exacerbate the economic inequality and that reinforce the platform’s big tech-friendly brand.

Should Medium’s writers be selling the platform?

Indeed, if we look at Awosika’s advice on how writers should treat Medium, we see that he’s effectively telling writers they should submit to those algorithms to help promote Medium’s brand. That advice is based on an elementary confusion that tarnishes his entire article on the damnable “negativity”: he mixes up business interests with artistic, writerly ones.

Obviously, employees of Medium should be thinking mainly about promoting Medium with propaganda, that is, with pro-technology or positive-thinking neoliberal content that promotes the capitalistic environment in which Medium is trying to prosper. And top writers on Medium may choose to think of themselves as such employees, although they needn’t do so. Umair Haque and Jessica Wildfire are two, rather highly negative and often subversive writers who would seem to run afoul of Awosika’s advice.

Regardless, the majority of Medium’s writers who are only making a pittance and who naturally view Medium as just the blogosphere with a perk or two would hardly be inclined to adopt the business perspective at the cost of their artistic integrity. Granted, writers who just want to start a business as freelancers may have no artistic credibility to begin with, so they’d happily agree with Awosika that writers on Medium should write as if they were employees of the platform who are charged with selling Medium’s neoliberal presuppositions.

But if you’re not making a living on Medium, and you see no reasonable chance of doing so, you have every reason to stay true to your muse or to your artistic vision (if you have one), regardless of whether your resulting output is likely to find much of an audience. Artists often tell us truths we don’t want to hear, so we ignore them and distract ourselves with more flattering messages. Artists can choose to stay true to their vision or they can try to sell out, compromising that vision to succeed in the more degrading business of outcompeting others in a laissez-faire market. Or they can try to balance those opposing interests.

It’s unclear whether Awosika is opposed to all “negativity” on Medium. Not only does he say outright that he is, mind you, but he highlights his general, reckless statement that “There is currently way too much negativity on the platform.” Moreover, in the call for submissions for his new Medium publication, Practice in Public, he says, “We will not accept submissions that we believe are geared toward political outrage or excessive negativity,” which could technically cover any article that rocks the boat.

Yet the bulk of his article on the “negative cesspool” isn’t concerned with policing all forms of criticism and thus with imposing a totalitarian ideal of positive thought. Rather, he argues specifically against negativity directed towards Medium. Still, even in that article he leaves the impression that he’s opposed to negativity in general. And that would entail a replacement of philosophy as such with the self-help mindset, that is, of the neutral search for knowledge regardless of the consequences, with neoliberal propaganda and sophistical salesmanship.

Indeed, it’s worth emphasizing that this general objection to “negativity” would be inexcusable. First, this objection would itself be negative, so it would be self-refuting. Second, the opposition to all negativity would discount not just philosophy, radical criticism, and the personal attack, but critical thinking and an objective, skeptical mindset. The implication would be that we all ought to subscribe to some infantilizing cult of positive thinking. Ask yourself who would benefit from this weird rejection of critical thinking. Answer: those who are trying to get away with wrongdoing.

Anyway, I’m going to focus on four of Awosika’s six topics that he covers in his article. I mostly agree with what he says about the other two: just whining about your failure rate as a writer doesn’t make for interesting reading, and if you’re a new writer who’s interested in the business side of things, you should start by blaming your failure on yourself rather than on the platform since there are lots of tweaks that can improve your chances — at least slightly — with the audience and with the algorithm.

Awosika’s other four main points, though, are egregious.

Hit pieces

The first bit of negativity Awosika thinks is ruining Medium is what he calls the “hit piece,” which he says is “when someone writes a negative article solely about another writer or decides to take shots at multiple writers in a single blog post.”

On the same day he posted that article, I reminded Awosika in a comment that I wrote an article criticizing his self-help optimism and his piece on the law of attraction. But we’ll call that a coincidence, rather than assuming his article on the “cesspool” was intended in part as an indirect reply to me. Regardless of his intentions, he’d likely think my article was a “hit piece” since there I point out that Awosika ends up unintentionally refuting the law of attraction: to succeed as a writer he turned himself into a hack, meaning that he evidently submitted to the objective reality of Medium’s neoliberal brand, rather than just nurturing a positive mindset.

Indeed, precisely because Awosika takes himself to be an unofficial ambassador for Medium, he can no longer be treated as just an independent, artistic writer. He’s a top writer who adopts the neoliberal culture that the big tech companies propagate with the myth of the so-called creator economy. Criticizing Awosika is, in effect, the same as criticizing that whole culture and business model, since he implies that all of Medium’s writers should write like salespeople or propagandists for Medium. We’ll see below more specifically how Awosika fulfills that role.

But setting that background aside, Awosika alleges that the only reason a writer would write a hit piece against a top writer like Tim Denning is because the lesser writer envies his success. Certainly, that would be one reason. Another would be that the writer doesn’t understand principles of critical thinking and falls prey to the ad hominem fallacy.

Yet another reason would be the one I just provided two paragraphs ago: when a top writer is effectively an employee of the platform, criticizing that writer’s mindset amounts to criticizing the platform’s predominant culture. Again, not all top writers would be vulnerable to that line of criticism: Haque and Wildfire are overtly critical of neoliberalism, which means they don’t write as propagandists for Medium’s big tech culture. I don’t read Denning so I don’t know whether he fits this bill, but certainly Awosika’s fair game.

An empty threat

Here’s the egregious part, though: Awosika says,

Even if you are just criticizing someone’s writing, just know that you’ve just caught the attention of all the top writers for the absolute worst reason.

When I got started on Medium, top writers started to notice my work when I grew on the platform. They helped me get better at writing, promoted my work, and even struck deals with me.

If you take the time to write these pieces, you’re going to miss out on that love. We want to help you guys.

We know how hard it is to make a name for yourself when you’re just starting off.

Why make the process even harder by actively trying to make enemies with the people who wield the most influence on the platform?

Did you catch that? He’s saying that even if you’re not engaging in a personal attack but are criticizing a fellow writer’s writing, that’s foolish because you’re making enemies out of those targets, whereas the top writers might have been inclined to help you as a new writer.

Indeed, Awosika points out that several times he’s “come across a writer who was struggling with Medium,” and he “gave them suggestions on how to improve.” Yet, he says, “Not once has someone responded well to my feedback or taken my advice, which leads to the reason for their lack of success. It’s not Medium’s fault. It’s theirs.”

So, some of this opposition to negativity looks like bitterness from a spurned writing coach — and this, coming from Awosika, the author of “How to Not Give a Fuck,” who says elsewhere that “Some people may think my writing is low-brow. From the bottom of my heart, I’d like them to know that I don’t give a fuck about their opinion at all.”

Anyway, speaking for myself and judging from the contents of his articles, I’d be happy to take business but not artistic advice from Awosika. Thus, perhaps those new writers who chose to ignore Awosika’s advice did so because they’re more interested in staying true to their vision than in selling out based on the dubious chances of making a living anywhere in the “creator economy.” That is, maybe those writers investigated what Awosika tends to write and they saw that he’s a hack.

Awosika seems oblivious to that possibility because, being a hack, he conflates the business interests with the artistic ones. His threat against new writers is therefore empty unless they, too, write with the goal of being hacks, propagandists, or advertisers. If, as Awosika says, you want to “practice your craft” as a writer, the opportunities for tweaking your use of the platform will be irrelevant since you can practice writing itself just as well by writing on paper and shoving the pages in a drawer. The question, then, is which craft Awosika has in mind, that of trying to make a living as an online writer, or that of exploring ideas, arguments, and explanations.

Only a hack couldn’t tell the two apart.

Do top writers necessarily deserve their success?

Later, Awosika addresses the criticism that the top writers on Medium just took advantage of the good times on the platform which have long since disappeared. Awosika points out that even if that’s true, the top writers still had to work hard and choose to be persistent, when plenty of other writers could have been on top but gave up too early. He says, “The work is the difference between you and the top writers.”

But that’s sheer neoliberal propaganda.

What Awosika ignores are the Matthew effect and the power-law distribution of success in social networks. It’s not just that Medium has changed its business model from time to time. It’s that the early adopters have the equivalent of compound interest because as the network expands, users don’t want to be left out, so instead of taking the time to search all the writers (which becomes impossible, in any case), they’re content to read what everyone else is already reading. They don’t just want to read any content, regardless of its quality; they want to read what’s popular. The writers who attract a following early on can have that audience snowball in size because of those network effects.

This doesn’t mean all the top writers are necessarily bad writers. But it means that some of them might just be hacks, meaning they have little in the way of an insightful, independent, creative perspective to offer on the issues of the day. And they got to be popular by excelling on the business side of things, rather than on the artistic or intellectual one, and because they benefited from certain network effects that depend on us acting like lemmings.

Yet Awosika’s neoliberalism implies that the market is never to blame. If you’re failing at capitalism, you’re just not good enough. You’re not working hard enough, so the system itself is blameless. As Thomas Frank has pointed out, that’s why Hillary Clinton and the “professional class” of American liberals aren’t interested in reforming American capitalism; instead, they recommend that those on the bottom of the economy should be retrained. This is an assumption of early-modern individualism or “libertarianism,” which denies the reality of systems or of emergent, collective properties.

And this is why Awosika says the work is the difference between top and bottom writers. The bottom writers don’t work hard enough, they give up too easily, or they don’t follow the advice of gurus like Awosika. What happens when you point to the structural effects that rig the game is that others may start to lose faith in the system and in the neoliberal axioms. They begin to think for themselves, to philosophize, and to question cultural presuppositions even at the cost of their contentment.

And as an unofficial spokesman for Medium, Awosika can’t have that.

Is the free market a meritocracy?

Next, though, Awosika tries his hand at responding to this very criticism: “This is where all the ‘genius writers’ with no audience or body of work to show for themselves chime in,” he says. “They claim their lack of success on Medium is due to the platform and its readers failing to recognize the artistic integrity of their work.”

And Awosika’s response to them? “The truth is simple: no one wants to read their shit.” Moreover, he says, “When it comes to earning money, the market decides what’s good and what isn’t. Some writing works for commercial purposes [better] than others.”

This is a glaring example of neoliberal propaganda which runs together business and art, as if the two weren’t often opposed to each other. First Awosika says no one wants to read the writings of these so-called genius writers, which could mean that they’re not geniuses at all or at least that their writing is poor on artistic or philosophical grounds. But then he shifts to the business issue, which assumes the priority of earning money, and Awosika’s real point seems to be that the market determines something’s worth.

The neoliberal fallacy there is the assumption that economic worth is the only kind, or that noneconomic worth is always smoothly translated into economic terms. Awosika’s faith in the free market may be adorable, but it’s hardly defensible.

Does the fact that McDonald’s food is more popular than what’s served at a local mom and pop restaurant mean that the former is simply better (e.g. healthier) than the latter? Does the fact that Adam Sandler movies make more money than those of indie auteurs mean that Sandler has more of an artistic vision than they do? Does the fact that more people know the name “Kim Kardashian” than “Kim Jung Gi” mean that she’s a superior artist? Does the fact that Awosika has more readers than I do on Medium mean that everything he says is more likely to be true than what I say (or would that be a fallacious appeal to popularity)? Does the fact that fallacies are more common than critical thinking skills mean that the former are logically better than the latter? Does the fact that Americans chose Donald Trump as their president in 2016 mean that he was the best person for the job?

No, the flaws of such bottom-up decision-making have been understood since two and a half thousand years ago when Plato and Aristotle criticized democracy for being susceptible to demagoguery. True, two heads are often better than one, but groups are vulnerable to weaknesses that emerge only at that collective level. Again, out of instinct we often defer to what’s popular, or we submit to sophistry, mistaking rhetorical persuasiveness for logical soundness. Groups are subject to groupthink. And the opinions of a group of elite individuals might be more valuable than that of a more average, less reflective group. The identity of the heads that are being combined to arrive at this collective judgment matters.

Awosika points out that Medium tried to impose elitist editorial judgments and failed because the mass of Medium readers wants independent content, not content delivered from the top-down. I agree, but that doesn’t mean popular independent writers are all authentic artists rather than sell-outs. Moreover, even with a flurry of independent publications, some content may be more likely to succeed, given that there’s no such thing as a perfect, free market with no top-down interference. Again, the algorithms likely have their say, too, in promoting and in burying certain contents.

One glaring example of Medium’s thumb on the scale is its selection of categories to offer for Top Writer status. According to this list of eligible categories or “tags,” Philosophy and Religion aren’t eligible even though there are more stories published in those categories — 119K and 65K respectively — than in some of the eligible ones such as Cooking, Diversity, Feminism, or Future. The selection of Top Writer categories looks like a branding exercise: Medium wants to highlight some topics and bury others.

According to the author of that list, Top Writer status influences the curation process. If you’re a top writer, she says, “You’ll be more visible for Medium’s curators. They see that you’re an expert in your field and publish consistently.” And “This helps you to get curated and chosen for further distribution.” So that’s Medium boosting writers for writing in subjects that are more consistent with Medium’s liberal, big tech-friendly, politically correct brand.

Moving on, Awosika says, “We don’t want snobs telling us what kind of content to consume. We’re capable enough of figuring out what art is on our own.”

Yet here’s a top writer telling writers what they should and shouldn’t do on Medium. Isn’t it elitist to appoint yourself as a guardian of the platform, and to write mainly on how everyone should go about writing? If readers can figure out on their own what to consume, why is Awosika telling them what they shouldn’t consume, calling it the “cesspool of negativity”? Isn’t he thereby tampering with the free market, which would blow up his implicit defense of Medium’s neoliberal culture?

His confidence in neoliberalism is such that he goes on to say, “If you’re truly a genius, people will recognize it.”

This would mean that capitalism and democracy are meritocratic, that you get what you deserve in such relatively open competitions. Certainly, these competitions have the upside of including relatively open searches for talent, whereas a police state that censors politically incorrect thought is liable to shoot itself in the foot or to create a brain drain.

But again, “free” societies have different downsides. For one thing, demagogues, charlatans, and other parasites can prey on that openness. Authentic artists and geniuses go underground if they fall out of the fashion generated by the corrosive influence of parasitic sophistry.

This is why self-help therapy is more popular than philosophy in bookstores, in popular culture, and on social media. Demagogues prey on people’s emotions, selling claptrap to make people feel good because the truth often hurts. Far from always elevating the discourse, free societies have a penchant for doing the opposite. And self-help promoters like Awosika are on the wrong side of that issue.

A middle class of artists

Lastly, Awosika rejects the idea that Medium should “‘pay a living wage’ or ‘help out the middle-class writers.”’

Actually, the criticism is that there is no middle class in the creator economy. More generally, the relevant criticism of capitalism is that it succumbs to the natural pressures that made the gross inequality in ancient societies so persistent. The creation of a middle class is artificial, not natural; this class must be sustained by governmental redistribution of wealth, which is another way of saying that laissez-faire capitalism is self-destructive or regressive. If we left government out of the business of redistributing wealth to maintain a welfare state and the rule of law, we’d have neofeudalism, an aristocracy of the wealthiest one percent that would preside over a mass of indebted wage slaves who, inspired by the myths of modern progress, would likely revolt in short order.

In any case, Awosika says, “Medium isn’t a charity or an employer. No one should complain about how fair or unfair the platform is. Instead, we should all create our best work, put in the effort to succeed, and let the chips fall where they may.”

But that’s dumb for several reasons. First, Awosika is effectively telling writers to think of themselves precisely as employees of Medium, to avoid criticizing the platform, and to sell its neoliberal ethos. In Awosika’s words (with my emphasis), “Just like you shouldn’t litter all over the neighborhood where you live or start gossiping about your neighbors, you shouldn’t do anything that’s going to spoil the culture or reputation of the platform.”

Again, that’s how a top writer who’s practically a Medium partner would think because he or she makes a living on the platform, which makes that writer an employee or a virtual co-owner. However, just as slaves shouldn’t have to think like their masters, the exploited mass of artists in the creator economy needn’t refrain from criticizing the system that exploits them.

Second, of course folks are entitled to complain when something’s unfair. That’s not to say we have the right to change something we don’t own, in which case the complaints may fall on deaf ears. But we have freedom of speech in free societies, so once again Awosika is being too cavalier in presupposing the merit of his positive-thinking, self-help mantras.

Third, Medium’s not a free market since there are algorithms at work behind the scenes that add to or subtract from the collective judgment of the contents’ value. Thus, the image of “letting the chips fall where they may” is misleading (because its sophistical and propagandistic).

I’d agree with Awosika that a socialist economy could reduce the incentive to produce great work. Each type of economy and government may have its respective advantages and disadvantages. But Awosika’s not offering an objective analysis here. He’s apologizing for the dubious way that top creators may succeed on the big tech platforms. These platforms are designed not to promote excellence, but to addict their users. Why think the results of such interactions should be immune from criticism, as if they flowed from a perfect market which even neoclassical economists realized is utopian?

Awosika says, “Play the game to win. Don’t try to change the rules. You can rise up the ranks of Medium.” And “Medium isn’t a dead-end for new writers. Any one of you can still become a top writer if you’re patient enough to make it happen.”

Once again, we see here the neoliberal conflation of opposite values. What’s “the game” that Awosika’s saying writers should play? Making a living as an online writer? Or being a lover of ideas, an intellectual who pursues knowledge and artistic purity for their own sakes? Only a hack would conflate the two.

And I’m pretty sure critics of Medium and of the creator economy more broadly understand that they can’t “change the rules.” The criticism, after all, is that the rules are determined by unaccountable, too-big-to-fail big tech conglomerates.

Moreover, just look at the sophistry of that last line of Awosika’s. He says “any one of you” can become a top writer. That’s the manipulative language of an advertiser who says, for instance, that if you take this medicine, your health can improve by “as much as” fifty percent (even though only one out of a million tested patients may have shown such a dramatic result).

Any single new writer might eventually become a top one, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the odds of that happening in every single case are extremely low. Moreover, saying that any new writer can become a top writer is very different from saying that every new writer or that many of them can do so. If there’s no middle class in the creator economy, given all the network effects that generate the massive inequality that prevails, the egalitarian outcome is impossible if left up to such a self-corrupting laissez-faire system.

Who’s being a baby?

Awosika concludes by associating critics of Medium with the most cynical of trolls. Supposedly, these critics are responsible for ruining things because of “the strange way people can find themselves negatively behaving behind a computer screen.” What Awosika wants is for writers to “write your best stuff and see what happens,” and to “just have enough self-esteem and respect to act like a grown-up” if your attempts should fail to gather much of an audience.

I wouldn’t defend all possible criticisms of the creator economy. Of course, some such criticisms may be baseless or crude. But Awosika’s reversing matters when he accuses those critics of not acting like grown-ups.

Indeed, it’s neoliberal consumer culture that’s infamous for being infantilizing. And wanting to suppress criticisms because they hit too close to home and endanger the cozy cult of positive thinking that’s part of the ethos of the professional liberal class is immature, given philosophical standards of intellectual integrity, honour, and creativity.