This piece was originally commissioned by my editor at The Atlantic at the beginning of this year—a couple of weeks before Trump took office again. I don’t think many people understood just quite how insane things would get, especially when it came to critical coverage of the tech industry and its leadership. The essay I wrote was less newsy and therefore ended up getting lost in that flood of coverage around DOGE and the like. The piece was eventually killed due to a lack of editorial bandwidth; my editor knew he wasn’t going to be able to get the essay finalized and published for several more months and we agreed to walk away from it. I’m disappointed, but I loved working with my editor and only wish it worked out.
With that in mind… I’m going to publish it here under an overwhelming weight of irony as this essay is about platforms and institutions and the tension between them. It’s a subject that
has written comprehensively about in his book Against Platforms, and I’ve discussed at length with . was also kind enough to speak with me for this piece, and I’ve included some quotes from her thoughtful perspective on this dynamic. This version of the essay is somewhere between the first and second edit, as I’ve kept some things that were initially cut for space.People like to talk about Bluesky in salvational terms, as if a tech platform can solve problems of the spirit. A recent post in the BlueskySocial subreddit featured a meme of someone breaking a pair of chained manacles above their head, like they were being liberated from bondage: “I just removed X account and create [sic] my BlueSky account,” it reads. Another user called the app an “ethical replacement” for other social media platforms, as if they were buying fair trade coffee or cruelty-free shampoo.
But while there may be fewer white nationalists and phrenology enthusiasts on Bluesky than there are on X, the dynamics are much the same on the two platforms. On social media, people want attention, and they want to convert that attention into influence. For people to put their faith in Bluesky—for people to believe that it will solve the problems they have with X by offering another way to post—reflects a kind of thinking common in Silicon Valley. The tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls the approach “solutionism,” a sort of engineer’s philosophy where, the thinking goes, messy human problems can be solved with elegant lines of code. That conviction has slowly seeped into the mainstream over the last few decades as well, forming a widespread techno-optimism. Consider Facebook, which became a platform celebré during pro-democracy demonstrations in the Middle East as it evolved from a place to share pictures and status updates to a digital chapterhouse where organizers could arrange protests and upload media. The actual impact that platforms like Facebook had on the movement’s momentum have been contested, but for many the associations between the social media giant and political freedoms were solidified. Facebook became a solution for a troubled world.
But, as the tech critic
put it in his book Against Platforms, “You can’t solve a social problem with a technical solution.” Pepi sees the faith that many people have in the power of platforms as a liberating, equalizing, or empowering force as misplaced, and the sign of an adrift population that is desperate for anything resembling a liferaft. Facebook’s role in facilitating the Arab Spring wasn’t because Facebook is actively interested in fomenting democracy; it was the result of humans using a tool in a novel way, like opening a beer bottle with a lighter. An inverted phenomenon can be seen in something like the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, where Amnesty International accused Facebook of amplifying a “storm of hatred” towards the Muslim minority by feeding users posts they were more likely to engage with, such as ones from nationalist groups calling Muslim human rights activist “national traitors.” “Often, applying technical fixes only treats the symptom, and, in failing to address the underlying cause of the problem, makes it worse,” Pepi writes in one of the book’s opening aphorisms.
A similar tension is playing out on the newsletter publishing platform Substack. The platform has no doubt been a success for some whose essays, fiction, and commentary might not otherwise find a home. Some have built robust audiences who pay a few bucks every month to read their favorite writer, and there are even Substack-native outlets with full editorial teams. But Substack is not necessarily a success on its own merits: Legacy media has been enduring a series of crises that have decimated the industry over the last two decades. Consolidation driven by private equity firms has stripmined local newsrooms and destroyed the alt-press ecosystem.
Writers are stuck on a never-ending carousel of layoffs, pivots, and reorgs, which has led both to an exodus from the industry and a desperate desire for an alternative environment. Substack has promised to rescue writers from that churn, and legacy media’s near-constant pattern of screw ups has given the platform a willing audience. Substack’s strongest advocates have argued that the platform isn’t just a website but is more a revolutionary new media ecosystem free from the decadence, incompetence, and instability that has plagued writers this century.
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