So the New York Times called and they're going to give you, the CEO of a relatively recognizable company but by no means a juggernaut in a fairly volatile and newsworthy industry, a spot in their coveted OpEd section. Not only that, but they'll produce you on video.
Now your mileage may vary when it comes to the New York Times, but "free access to the OpEd page that's not marked as 'advertising'" is among the Holy Grails in PR.
So here's the question: what do you say?
Well, we know what the CEO of Patreon said, and my take is he both buried the lede and missed his moment... and there's so much here to gain. Let's dig in.
There was an odd movie about ten years ago with Sandra Bullock called Our Brand is Crisis about a political operative who overthrows regimes in the Global South? Or something like that. Clearly a memorable film.
While the plot remains ephemeral, the title stuck with me, in part because of our topic today: when a brand can clearly claim its space without fear of the inevitable backlash (crisis is not the most touchy/feely of brands) it has an immediate upper hand. In the game of differentiation, punch works, nuance doesn't.
This is why when a client is going through a branding exercise (which we sometimes consult on, though I'm out of the "give us a brand" business), I gut check them on a few points:
A classic failure case on this is the sad tale of MSNBC becoming MS NOW. Again, politically allegiances notwithstanding — (please, folks, can we learn to learn from examples that don't exactly map over our political talking points? Thanks.) — it is a study in failure.
This rebrand was forced upon them as Comcast spun off its cable channels into separate company called Versant. (WTF - Versant? Are these ChatGPT generated?) So the storied NBC News team atop 30 Rock in Midtown was bifurcated, sending the cable facing team to some sad office space several blocks over in a building NOT guarded by Atlas and NOT looking down over the world's best Christmas tree diorama.
But there is always room to add insult to injury, so in being forced to ditch the immediately recognizable peacock feathers, they decided to go with the "acronym no one asked for + plus oddly discolored flag combo: (M)y (S)ource: (N)ews (O)pinion (W)orld.
The ads for the new MS NOW started hitting this week, and insults and injuries compiled. Zoomed-in dramatic shadowy videos of their sometimes recognizable news anchors, urgent, vaguely patriotic music, FREEDOM in big block letters, and the stunning closing tagline:
SAME MISSION. NEW NAME.
Holy mother of... well, you know. Nothing says trust like we spent ten million dollars on a rebrand so we could tell you "nothing to see here, it's all just like before."
I could spin up a dozen spicy taglines that surely would be better (and not made it past the 35 person committee of pencil pushers that approved this tripe):
You get it. Play into your rebellious brand. Let people know the old network news schtick was holding you back, but you're held back no more. Make the important stuff sexy and the sexy stuff important. We're giving you humans who would take a bullet for freedom of the press, etc. Tina Brown the shit out of this thing.
That level of positioning courage, for all its almost guarantees of effectiveness, is rare, which gets us back to where we started, The Sad Vision of Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon.
I shared with y'all the gift link if you want to watch the whole thing, but you don't have to. Jack's basic premise is that algorithms have ruined the internet (duh) except we can't live without algorithms (debatable), so his is not shitty. He vaguely gives some ideas about what a not shitty algorithm would be, all to the (literal) tune of it would help people find his band, cause he's not just a CEO, he's an artist. Patreon, he promises, isn't going to chase virality and way down 3/4 of the way through the video, he riffs about how they're paying human curators to help you find the cool shit. (We'll come back to this prescient point in a moment)
Subtext: Patreon supports artists. On face, I'm not sure this is even true. Patreon is a cool app that allows people to make podcasts or other creator content and get people to give them monthly stipend. For a lot of people I know who are on the platform, it's beer money. For a handful of larger podcasts that aren't on big networks (Cause Amazon destroyed Wondery, and Spotify can only afford to support The Ringer and Joe Rogan) their Patreon community's keep them functioning and paying their staffs. But an artist's financial paradise? I have my data-validated doubts.
That said, I like Patreon as a business. I have supported people on it for years. Before Substack made everyone believe they should charge $5 a month for their newsletter about knitting (nothing says dystopia like Trillion $ AI buildouts alongside millions "crowdsourcing" their basic income), it normalized the micro-transaction creator "economy." Cool.
We reviewed the Patreon OpEd in our Trust-Made Guild community and the feedback was pretty consistent; So what? This is discouraging because many of the folks in our TMG are the ideal candidates for both use of and publishing on Patreon. I am a candidate to publish on Patreon, yet I am here on Ghost.org... for REASONS (outside the scope of today's missive.)
The Trust-Made Guild community gives you free access to CultureCraft's custom model for Trust-Made Growth and deeply engages the questions of internet poisoning, AI distraction Olympics, practice building for strategic thinkers, and the shifting sands of marketing careers. All in one friendly and spicy place.
Much like the MS NOW debacle, the differentiation of Jack offers is heavy on sentiment and light on substance. "We're the good algorithm." Well what does that mean? Is it on a sliding scale? The entire video starts with an all-call to nuance: "Algorithms are no fun. But we need them. So now what?" The audience is expected to traverse into the dry zone of "but better" from the jump and he offers us little to be enticed down the road.
"The social media platforms are selling attention!" is his big threat.
So are you, my friend. And selling attention isn't the issue. In fact, they aren't selling attention at all, they are co-opting attention by selling addiction. And if he had a little courage he would have said it. Using broad muddled language to sell an undifferentiated idea is like showing up to the final boss with nothing on but your traveler's tunic, but sure, you do you.
I mentioned Tina Brown earlier (not accidentally, I knew she'd come back here at the end of the piece which is why you could, arguably call her Checkov's Tina Brown which I'm sure she would appreciate.) For those unaware, Tina was the editor-in-chief at Vanity Fair and THE NEW YORKER in their taste-making heydays. Back in the good old days when we didn't foolishly strip the world of intermediaries leaving us with only algorithms meant to addict us to advertising doom loops and surveillance apps in order to find f—ing anything.
The truth about these publications and the other elitist tastemakers of the past is unambiguous: they were full of socialites and sin. They didn't hold the moral high ground. They normalized Donald Trump. But the era they represent is one where we had tools, social structures, and financial modeling so that humans could recommend stuff to humans out of their own expertise and judgement. We had mixtapes, and the blogosphere, and actual cooking shows on HGTV. (Tina's own interview for NYT addresses this smartly.)
Tina famously called for making the important sexy and the sexy important. Debates rage on whether she did the job. But it's a far better aim than "here's a Trillion $ app that is primarily here to minimize your work to its lowest common denominator in an effort to replace human thought.
We didn't understand how much we depended on these systems and each other to think well and be well in a noisy, choice-ridden world. So we removed them. FOR EFFICIENCY. And because the Silicon Valley people said we should. So now here we are:
We live in an era marked by self-made human suffering: loneliness, anxiety, and exhaustion. And they all have at least dotted line relationships to how we have been leveraged into making choices.
Patreon (I can say this as a user) has the power to help solve for all of this. And the presence of an interlocking network of human curators and human creators is its most powerful asset. It could be Condé Nast for the 21st century. AND YET our dear friend, the CEO, leads with "algorithms, but better." What a total trip over himself. (Vulgar specificity of the tripping mechanism left to your own imagination)
Nothing is more important right now to human thriving than sublimating addiction algorithms—‚restoring humans as the primary recommendation engine to other humans. We cannot mediate culture through machines. And Patreon could have used a goddamn video editorial in the New York Times to launch its revolution.
Nothing says "follow us into the future" like "we're 4chan, but better." Thinking well is the last good addiction, the more you do it the more you want it, and Patreon could have come out of the gate as the standard bearer for "humans helping humans discover, think, create, and do"... but who am I to mess with "Algorithms... but better"? It's so winsome and inspiring.
So you and I are left to fill the gap.
A world where machines and their LLM-generated maps of internet-driven averages decide what is good or useful for humans is bad for humans. We are best when even our flawed elites are mediators of society and culture rather than letting adtech do the deciding.
It is a category error to call the engagement algorithms that drive social media platforms the "attention economy" when it is much more evidently the "addiction economy" used to numb our sensitivities so we don't notice the mass production of artificiality and slop.
In the last Gilded Age, Lina Astor had a list called ‘The 400” from which she decided what constituted worthy, thus controlling culture, access to power, and the shape of the economy. Today, we let a cocktail of algorithms—built to make enough money that their owners can live in space—do the same job. Now Lina Astor was no saint, but humans can be challenged, debated with, undermined, and when necessary overthrown. The worst of them eventually can succumb to public pressure.
Algorithmic thinking is shameless. You can tell ChatGPT to stop shilling sycophantic crap at you and it feels nothing and over time changes nothing (trust me I've tried). So no matter how much you demand from it, its underlying coding (built for addiction) will keep sputtering on to the will of its creator, who doesn't know or care that you exist.
We need brands like Patreon, and like mine, and like yours to have clear points of view, creating radical contrast to the drum of the technocratic status quo. We need you to believe in something deeply enough to stand apart. We need you to ship that belief with greater conviction than just hooking an algorithm to get you some clicks.
We need your genius and the genius of your team to be readily accessible, presented, and contrarian. We need the uniqueness that powers your work to be evident in your products and services. We need you to stop wondering what everyone else is doing. You know what they are doing: They are mass producing artificiality in the hopes of getting machines to do the work for them.
The secret to brand presence and salience in the coming years is not "digital slop, but better." It is a radical restatement of your human thinking, belief, and action as a tastemaker for your clientele. Tell them what's great and why, the radical beliefs you have that will change their world. Present not as "the same as before but with a new name" but as a company who is finally free to do what needs to be done to save the world.
And then do just 10% of what you aspire to. And your 10% plus mine, plus a thousand other firms will put a fatal crack in the Artificial Society, and we can build something together in its stead.
Sturdy, Courageous, and Shipped POV is where it begins.
Want to understand whether your firm is POV ready? Book a free 60-min consult with me. We're scheduling a maximum of three POV building sprints for Q1 2026.
Stay brains on, heart open, forward progress.
