Big Followings, Bigger Silences
When celebrity voices like Glennon Doyle + Justin Welch contaminate spaces and divert needed voices
The migration from one platform to another — like LinkedIn to Substack — is often framed as a search for creative freedom.
But what happens when the same hierarchies, polished with politeness and cloaked in disruption-speak, follow us?
This essay examines how feminist niceness and bro-scale ideologies converge to marginalize decolonial, intersectional justice work, repackage it, and profit from it while rendering the originators invisible.
Why This Structure Matters
This piece is organized around five core sections — Effect, Premise, Harm, Better Questions, and Summary — to help us slow down and see what’s really happening beneath the surface of everyday narratives and power dynamics.
By naming each of these parts clearly, I’m not just offering analysis — I’m inviting you into the practice of critical thinking, discernment, and pattern recognition.
We are often taught to react or accept things at face value. This structure is a way to challenge that — to build habits of pausing, questioning, and getting to the root of the harm so we can imagine something better.
Read with curiosity. Use these frames in your own conversations. Let’s practice naming what’s real — and what’s possible.
"If you didn’t chase her off the app..."
Effect: Legitimate critiques of power imbalances are framed as "meanness," gaslighting those raising harm.
Premise: When Glennon Doyle joined Substack, concerns from BIPOC and marginalized creators about platform equity were dismissed with comments like "if you hadn’t chased her off the app..." implying that critique is inherently hostile and self-sabotaging.
Harm: This frames the real work of accountability and justice as aggression. It deploys white feminine fragility to protect power while asking marginalized people to prioritize politeness over survival. This keeps platforms safe for extractive fame while dangerous for truth-tellers.
Better Questions to Ask:
Who benefits from framing critique as conflict?
What does it cost us to center tone over substance?
How do we shift the conversation from preserving individual comfort to addressing collective harm?
Summary Line: Tone-policing dressed as concern reinforces extraction by erasing the labor of those who dare name it.
The Bro-Scale Machine
Effect: Justice-oriented work gets buried under optimization, scalability, and algorithmic virality.
Premise: The bro-entrepreneurial wave on Substack from voices like Justin Welch (and similar platforms) idolizes "scaling impact" but measures impact through clicks, subscriptions, and hype cycles — not through transformation, care, or liberation.
Harm: These creators mine justice language for aesthetics while ignoring its demands. They "platform build" on the backs of ideas they didn't originate, then exclude the originators. Their hustle looks disruptive, but it's just neoliberalism with a hoodie.
Better Questions to Ask:
What would it look like to value depth over reach?
Who gets centered when we measure influence in numbers?
Can liberation be scaled without being commodified?
Summary Line: Scaling without soul creates platforms that reward replication over revolution.
Politeness as Strategy of Control
Effect: The politeness imperative silences those speaking hard truths, making room only for "digestible" justice.
Premise: Calls for "kindness" or "constructive dialogue" often emerge when those in power feel discomfort, not when actual harm occurs.
Harm: This dynamic protects dominant identities while infantilizing marginalized ones. It displaces substance with civility and conflates discomfort with danger. Real accountability is framed as "toxicity," pushing justice workers to self-censor or leave.
Better Questions to Ask:
Who decides what counts as polite?
What conversations are made possible — or impossible — by this?
How can we center honesty and care over optics?
Summary Line: Politeness weaponized against truth becomes a tool of erasure.
The Myth of Platform Neutrality
Effect: New platforms promise neutrality and opportunity, but simply replicate the same gatekeeping dynamics.
Premise: Substack and similar spaces sell themselves as open-access alternatives, free from traditional media constraints. But attention economies and follower migration patterns privilege whiteness, maleness, and capitalist fluency.
Harm: Marginalized creators are asked to play the same rigged game: build an audience, go viral, prove you’re "worthy." The metrics may shift, but the exclusion persists. Platform migration does not equal liberation if the framework stays colonial.
Better Questions to Ask:
What power dynamics travel with platform shifts?
How can we build ecosystems instead of empires?
What does ethical tech look like beyond monetization?
Summary Line: Platform migration without power redistribution is just colonization with a new logo.
Closing: Recalling the Summaries
Tone-policing dressed as concern reinforces extraction by erasing the labor of those who dare name it.
Scaling without soul creates platforms that reward replication over revolution.
Politeness weaponized against truth becomes a tool of erasure.
Platform migration without power redistribution is just colonization with a new logo.
Call-In: We deserve more than digital reboots of broken systems. We deserve platforms rooted in care, redistribution, and truth.
Let’s stop confusing reach with relevance, politeness with justice, and disruption with decolonization.
Let’s name what’s happening, so we can build what we actually need
Because We Can’t Scale Liberation from Polite Extraction, Bro Optimizers, and the Systemic Erasure of Justice Work.
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