The Puzzle of Why Zulie Rane Blocked Me for Criticizing Her Sales Advice

And some lessons we can learn from it

I didn’t expect I’d be needing to write a follow-up article on Zulie Rane, the popular writer and YouTuber who specializes in explaining how to succeed as a freelance writer.

But it turned out there’s more to the story.

Zulie Rane’s Questionable Presumption

Earlier, I took issue with some advice she gave in a YouTube video. She assumed that some writers are held back by the fear that their writing isn’t good enough to be sold. That assumption rankled me because it leaves out the contrary, more plausible scenario, which is that many writers, particularly the more intellectual, philosophical ones, are burdened with the knowledge, rather, that their writing is too good to be sold.

You see, what Rane’s pro-capitalist message assumes is that the marketplace isn’t flawed, that if you’re failing as a writer, for example, it’s because there’s something wrong with you: you lack the salesperson’s mindset, as she puts it, and you haven’t learned to be okay with the art of selling.

In linking the writer’s full trust in the value of her work with the adoption of a salesperson’s mindset, Rane comes perilously close to presuming also that the writing that sells the best is the writing that has the author’s deepest confidence. The writing that fails to sell well is hampered, she assumes, by the author’s lack of full confidence in her work. Specifically, this failing writer is supposed to lack the confidence that her writing is good enough to earn money.

What I pointed out in my earlier article, then, is that that presumption is likely quite false, and I gave a counterexample, citing the old dichotomy between platonic philosophy and sophistry. There are surely writers who are plenty confident in the value of their work, and what they doubt is the validity of the marketplace; they doubt it’s sufficiently meritocratic. They doubt the merit of the salesperson’s mindset since they fear that you can lose touch with your muse if you taint your craft by resorting to manipulative sales tactics.

That’s the deeper internal conflict to consider, not the contrived one Rane presents in her video, about the paradox of writing a lot because you admire your skills, but fearing your writing still isn’t quite good enough to deserve anyone’s money.

The deeper conflict is between:

• engaging in a potentially subversive artistic process, one that involves tapping into the unconscious and emerging with unflattering truths that might be better off hidden from society rather than offered up on a platter with salesmanship
• betraying the artistic calling by learning the dark arts of rhetorical and emotional manipulation, specious advertising, unseemly self-promotion and self-aggrandizement, SEO savvy, and the like.

The deeper worry, I said, is that the sales mindset is antithetical to the artistic one. The former is liable to puff up your ego, whereas artistic greatness and writing as an act of truth-telling should be humbling.

Some writing, therefore, may be too good to be sold since a focus on selling art can falsify the message, and in any case the public may find the message off-putting. After all, we often prefer not to be challenged, especially in our off-hours on social media. Some art, though, is challenging. Indeed, true art may arguably consist of just such carefully crafted, challenging messages, whereas a message that sells the best may typically be propaganda that flatters the vanity of consumers.

A Mysterious Blockage

After making that case in “How Zulie Rane Whitewashes the Selling of Stories,” and after receiving much interesting feedback in the comments, on a lark I searched Medium to see whether Rane had taken any notice of my article. I thought the chances of that were quite low even though I tagged her name in the article, which would have sent her a notice of it.

(The chances were low because, like any Medium superstar, Rane’s flooded with comments and notifications. You can see in her YouTube videos that the number appearing on the green “bell” button on her Medium homepage is in the many thousands. So she evidently doesn’t check her notifications — and she couldn’t do so without making that a fulltime job in itself.)

Yet when I then searched for Rane on Medium I was a little shocked to discover that she’d blocked me.

I don’t think I’ve ever read one of her Medium articles, so technically she did me no harm. But there’s a problem here to be solved and there are broader lessons to be learned from Rane’s choice of response.

I don’t begrudge Rane the right to block whomever she wants. But with that right comes a responsibility. We can abuse our rights, and then we deserve to be criticized.

Yet neither am I interested in attacking Zulie Rane personally. I don’t think her content and her brand are without merit. Her meta focus on how to turn social media into a business doesn’t interest me since I prefer to explore ideas at an intellectual level in my reading and writing. But of course, there’s value in having a resource of such tips available to those who want to try to earn a living as a content creator.

The Racket of the Creator Economy

Mind you, as I argue elsewhere, I think the prospects of such success are meager and illusory for the majority of content creators. There’s shady optimism out there about the so-called creator economy, purveyed by the likes of “The Startup” (for which Zulie Rane sometimes writes).

The real business in cyberspace is the same as in regular old runaway capitalism: in using the few superstars in the field like beacons of opportunity, the economy attracts the masses to try their luck, whereupon most fail in part because the marketplace can’t possibly enrich all comers. But the lemmings pay their entrance fee, and the profit flows to the apex of the power pyramid.

Yanis Varoufakis calls this “technofeudalism,” and it’s the implosion of the mythic kind of capitalism which is supposed to reward everyone with precisely what they’re due as long as they’re selfish or “rational” enough to pursue their private interests.

So “The Startup” and Zulie Rane’s enterprise encourage content creators to stay the course even if turns out that most writers, musicians, YouTubers, and visual artists keep making far less than minimum wage, the creator economy being a subset of the insidious gig economy.

The inequality here has been widely reported, as in this Axios report: “The creator economy was supposed to democratize media, but it turns out that a small portion of creators still reap the most revenue for their work across multiple platforms.”

Due to a hack of Twitch, for instance, we know that in 2021, “the top 1% of all streamers earn more than half of all revenue on the platform,” and that the vast majority of Twitch streamers make less than $120 a year. Elsewhere, Axios points out that, “The top 1% of podcasts receive 99% of downloads.”

As Harvard Business Review points out, “On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017,” and on Spotify, “artists need 3.5 million streams per year to achieve the annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker of $15,080.”

When you see the same grotesque inequality throughout the creator economy, on all social media platforms, and this inequality doesn’t just reflect differences in the products’ quality, you know there are structural barriers to the prospects of making these platforms more meritocratic.

See, for example, Clay Shirky’s prescient assessment from 2002, that the imbalance on social networks such as weblogs predictably conforms to “power law distributions.” There’s a snowball effect such that minor advantages of any kind in some contents can lead to exponential growth in that creator’s popularity.

“What matters,” says Shirky, “is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.” Moreover, the larger the network, the more pronounced the inequality because the greater number of users glom onto the superstars’ success like curious bystanders who just want to see what the fuss is about. And because the inequality is generated by many individual preferences, any unfairness in the distribution isn’t easily fixed — just like in an old-fashioned free market.

This is also called a “scale-free network” because the superstars that break free from the pack can no longer be ranked with the rest of the nodes; there’s no common scale for measuring the distributions of success. Mechanisms that have nothing to do with merit, such as preferential attachment or fitness to a niche can account for this structurally-generated inequality.

We can apply, for example, Shirky’s point about “agreement” to platforms like Medium, in which case articles that conform to public expectations or that flatter, reassure, or manipulate the readers may have an advantage which enables their authors to rise exponentially in popularity. The readers’ interests, biases, or limitations naturally supply the niche, so countercultural or otherwise challenging messages could be at a disadvantage, meaning their authors are less likely to break through the threshold for superstardom, regardless of their writings’ quality or importance.

Gossiping Behind the Scenes?

In any case, there are more harmful things that can be done on social media than adding to the creator economy’s hype, such as promoting white supremacy or child pornography. And Zulie Rane has evidently figured out how to exploit a niche, so she has some genuine knowledge to impart.

Still, what’s the meaning of her act of blocking me? What does it reveal about the optimistic take on the creator economy which Zulie Rane purveys, when she resorts to this draconian response instead of engaging with the criticism?

To be clear, I doubt she read past my article’s title. Indeed, she may not even have gotten that far. One of the commenters on that earlier article is a popular Medium writer named Carlyn Beccia. Beccia rudely and unjustly called me a pseudointellectual for allegedly attacking Zulie Rane’s person. I pointed out that I did no such thing but had responded directly and precisely to the assumption Rane made in her video.

Granted, my earlier article’s title says that Rane “whitewashes” the matter, which could be taken to imply that I’m calling her a deceiver. What I had in mind is that her case is suspicious for leaving out the commonplace alternative explanation that I present; regardless, her video doesn’t consider the anti-salesmanship view at all, so her pro-business stance on the obstacles to succeeding financially as a freelance writer amounts to spin.

Regardless, in resorting to that hot-button word in the title, I was effectively following Rane’s advice to opt for emotionally triggering titles. The article itself is substantive and not directed personally at Zulie Rane. The article talks about Platonism, Sophists, Bodhisattvas, capitalism, and so on, not about Rane’s possible motives.

But I raise this exchange with Beccia for two reasons. First, it’s possible that Beccia knows Zulie Rane, was offended by my article and by my forceful response to her personal attack on me, and poisoned the well with Rane, telling Rane there’s this rude fellow writing nasty stuff about both of them on Medium. And maybe that’s why Rane blocked me. Honestly, I don’t know how else Rane found out about me or my article, unless she routinely searches Medium for mentions of her name.

Blocking as Anti-Intellectual

Second, Rane’s blocking of me disproves Beccia’s defense of Rane. Beccia said in her comment on my article, ‘You can be both an “intellectual” writer AND have broad appeal, as Ms. Rane does so well.’

Sorry, but there’s nothing intellectual about blocking someone as opposed to engaging with that person’s fair, substantial criticism of what you’ve said. I’ve blocked a few people in my time on Medium but only because all they did was write pure spam in my comment sections, advertising for bitcoin and the like. As an undergraduate I read Plato and ever since I’ve had a healthy respect for philosophical dialogue. So for me it’s a matter of honour to respond to criticism, to try to understand the nature of the disagreement, and to learn what I can from the exchange.

Blocking or ignoring someone because he or she levels a substantive criticism of something you said is the opposite of being intellectual. An intellectual person cares more about ideas than about people. If someone criticizes an intellectual’s argument, the intellectual will want to know about it to see if the argument needs to be improved or abandoned, or just to take up the opportunity to have a sophisticated exchange of ideas.

Obviously, then, we’re not dealing here with a contrary philosophical perspective. No, I’m up against a business. Content creation on social media is Zulie Rane’s livelihood. Perhaps, then, she figured my article tarnishes her brand, so the least she could do is mitigate the damage by impeding my ability to research her articles and thus to write further criticisms of them.

But that’s a dubious interpretation. My single, relatively unknown article can hardly have damaged her thriving business. Moreover, my article was directed against her YouTube videos which I can still watch if I want. Indeed, what would more likely tarnish her brand is word getting out that she blocks critics for no good reason.

The blocking doesn’t seem, then, like either an intellectual or a sound business decision.

The Burden of Defending a Fraud

Where does that leave us? I can think of two more likely explanations for her blocking of me, and these might apply more generally to any popular, young writer’s blocking of a much less popular one for the offense of levelling a fair criticism.

First, there’s the question of defensiveness. The stark fact is that the creator economy currently proceeds by massive fraud. The advertising or the hype is the propaganda that keeps the ruse going. We use social media outlets to the point of addicting ourselves to them, and we do so because we think the services are free and because they entertain us. Anyone can write on Medium and make a little money, right?

Meanwhile, the tech companies form monopolies that collect oceans of data on the users, enriching the top one percent of the population by flattering and infantilizing the masses, creating information silos and harmful feedback loops, promising that we can all live our dream and build a startup doing what we love such as producing “content.”

But that sales job is based on a lie, as I explained above.

What happens, then, when that lie is challenged? If there’s no defense because a fraud is a fraud and there’s no hiding the spectacular economic disparity between most users that feed the mega tech companies their data, on the one hand, and on the other the gazillionaires who run the platforms and the few superstar mascots that thrive on the exploitation, what are those superstars to do?

They can pretend the criticism doesn’t exist. They can get on with the business at hand, of marketing and spinning and churning out happy-talking content that fuels the network, attracting more users and hyped-up cyber addicts.

Our Fragility on the Dehumanizing Tech Platforms

Second, and related to the first, there’s a kind of hyper-defensiveness that’s common especially in progressive circles. I can’t help but compare Rane’s baseless blocking of me with cancel culture, and with the kind of pampering and overprotectiveness that lead the Millennials and Generation Z to be so fragile that they carve out “safe spaces” and can’t tolerate so-called “microaggressions,” like saying the wrong word or looking at someone the wrong way.

Indeed, the social media on which Zulie Rane thrives likely exacerbate this generational frailty. The younger generations that grow up with Google, Twitter, and Facebook no longer esteem face-to-face contact, and they’re used to being able to “delete” or to “cancel” people with the touch of a smart screen — because they largely confine their social interactions to the digital sphere.

I belong to Generation X. I can appreciate, then, Arcade Fire’s song, “We Used to Wait.” I remember when everyone used only bulky, spiral-corded phones that had no screens, when there were only physical libraries rather than any internet. I remember the first modems that used to screech at you when they connected. I recall the first internet forums or newsgroups, the “alt.binaries.etc,” when pictures took minutes to load onto the computer monitor.

Consequently, I can see that the philosophical and artistic mindsets may not be long for this brave new world. Zulie Rane and Carlyn Beccia say you can be intellectual and still have broad appeal. Of course that’s so since there are famous philosophers and artists who deserve their success. But if we’re talking about intellectualism on social media, we must consider the extent to which the medium is the message.

The philosopher Arthur Danto argued that the anything-goes mindset might have killed art. Elsewhere, I argue that digitization may be driving home the last nail in art’s coffin. Sure, the internet is swarming with “art,” but most of that content isn’t valued. We assume we deserve to “consume” it for free because it’s so plentiful now, like air or water. Indeed, we belittle art just by calling it “content.”

And what kind of art can be expected to prevail not just in any “free” market but specifically on social media run by tech conglomerates? As I pointed out in my initial criticism of Zane’s video, the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave us the answer: what flourishes are conflict and demagoguery that keep the users glued to the platforms. You appeal to the viewers emotionally to lower the bar, flattering or triggering them, using any underhanded tactic to keep them engaged.

None of that has anything to do with appealing to people’s best self by reasoning with them or by challenging not just their assumptions but the social structures that help shape them, including the tech platforms we take for granted.

What is the value of writing on platforms like Medium or Facebook, of writing that flows like water? Of course, clever, shameless companies can sell snow to an Inuit, just as some manage to sell water as a bottled commodity (whereas governments typically provide water as a utility).

Potable water is an instructive example, though, because it’s no longer so plentiful everywhere, due to global warming. We might wonder, then, whether artistic creativity is an ever-renewable resource or whether we can kill that spirit, too, by having to sell out artistry and intellectualism on dehumanizing tech platforms.