Content Creation Industry and Ideology: the system is geared to support fascism. by Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald. Mnoty Press, Acut Fitzgerald Publishing House. Naawan, Philippines. 6 October 2026.
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My basic argument here is that the structure and function of the present system of online content creation supports the ideology globalized fascism. It conditions us to seek approval, it infantilizes our emotional responses, and it compounds the spiritual alienation at the heart of globalized fascism.
My friend and I were talking recently about the morally correct relationship between a worker and an employer. He was looking at the ground level: like building a house. Give them love and respect, and they will build you a good house. Yes, agreed.
I couldn't help but transition to the present globalized system. A worker in a mine somewhere might know their boss, but the owners are investors from a dozen different countries invested in a hundred different companies, and all they see are spreadsheets and graphs. There's a depth of alienation here that is intensified through internet agency.
Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), might have been basically right. There might be a happy medium whereby workers have enough agency where they can bring their ideas to the boss, who respects and loves the worker enough to hear their suggestions, and the company can grow and improve in its widget-making enterprise in a way that benefits both.
The obsession with growth, development, and return, however, supersede the Smithian model in today's global economy, and we are left with a feeding frenzy where workers are treated as disposable, and a class of global elites control governments in order to maximize exploitation of resources and labor.
This global investor class, which is an imperfect category, I know, has risen to its prowess specifically by avoiding any sort of moral responsibility for their actions. Morality interferes with profits, and the primacy of profit has lead us to the present state of affairs, which does not look good.
And this globalized economic system is justified by ideology. Ideology is the structure of ideas that support an economic system. The ideology of globalized fascism helps the global investor class to both avoid responsibility and to lull the exploited classes into accepting and catering to the means of our exploitation.
This is where the content creation industry plays its fundamental role. It manipulates us, as we use it to manipulate each other, into accepting and catering to fascism: a system with which the state's primary function is to facilitate exploitation on behalf of wealthy investors.
The content creation industry, by manipulating us into accepting and catering to fascism, breeds within us a lust for power and incentivizes us to exploit our neighbors and ourselves in a desperate quest for socio-economic advancement.
It feeds on our emotions, especially fear, anger, shame, and disgust, to forge us into uncritical and easily distracted infantile producers who serve the global investor class.
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I've never done facebook or twitter. I've put some work on youtube; watched a lot. But, I've been mostly engaged in written form, and mostly on medium and substack. While most of my experience and all my examples used here are from medium and substack, I suspect that my conclusions are valid for other platforms and formats as well.
The content creation industry thrives on repetition, attraction, emotional manipulation, desperation, and most of all, conformity. It's not the result of a sinister plot by a few elites trying to get people to conform, it's regular people bowing to market pressure.
Most participants in the industry are disinformed as to how one makes money through content creation. This disinformation is intentional, which differentiates it from misinformation. Some people get paid to make content on how people can make money through such and such a platform, and that's a disinformation campaign strategy.
On that level, with funding from investors, one can indeed make money creating content. And it's not always clear who is getting paid by whom, and who is sincerely making content with the hopes of helping people. Either way, it gives people false hope as to how one can make money through these platforms.
A few independent creators make money; the vast majority make none. Who makes money does not depend on who makes the best content; it depends on who conforms best to the market.
I recently read an essay on medium about how the author became a top paid writer on substack. I generally ignore this kind of advice, but I checked it out. It was written as an autobiography, with the seemingly helpful, 'I wish I had learned this sooner', or something to that effect.
The thing that stood out for me in this article was the discussion of finding out what the audience wanted. There are two prevailing schools of thought as to how one should approach their writing on these online platforms. One is that one should establish their niche and stick to it. The other is that one should give the audience what they want.
They are not mutually exclusive, but most advice tends toward one or the other. The author of the article favored giving the audience what they want.
The prevailing advice as to how to discover that is by searching for trending topics, and writing about those. This author had followed that advice, and found that a better way is to simply start posting articles, and then whatever the audience likes, publish more of it.
The author found that people mostly wanted to read about his personal life, rather than social issues, and that when he made his membership cost more, he got a bunch of people, who could read his work for free, who were willing to pay him to support his writing.
Here we have a patronage economy, the core model of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, and we have an incentive away from addressing social issues patronized by a few wealthy individuals.
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Similarly, there's a category of relationship advice that just showed up on my radar a few days ago. I was getting burnt out on reading politics, and a title popped up a few times on my medium feed.
It was something about how awful men in their fifties are. I'm a curious man in my fifties, and sometimes have a habit of wallowing in reflections on my weaknesses, and so, after it popped up a third or fourth time, I clicked on it.
The author claimed to be a woman who had been warned against dating men in their fifties by so many friends and her psychiatrist, and so she dates a bunch of them, and then wrote about what was wrong with them.
It was not valid or reliable, it was not probing into the issues at hand, and that's fine. It was not a deep article. Yet, it had a lot of claps (medium gives claps as its thumbs up gesture), and the author had a lot of followers (people who ask to be notified when the author posts some new work).
Some things in this essay rattled around in my mind a bit, and I started thinking that maybe I should give a helpful comment for the article's readers.
It had occurred to me that many of the symptoms described in the article are more about the culture in the US than any sort of developmental psychology, and that I had experienced the symptoms she described in my 30s.
Anyway, I was going to make a good faith comment to help nurture the discourse for people who find that content helpful. I didn't remember the author's name, so I put in the main thing I remembered in the title, 'men in their 50s'.
What I got was hundreds of articles on this topic. Judging from the titles, they were all on the same superficial level as the one I had read. I browsed briefly looking for the one I had read, and gave up.
The scale of this seems important. For one thing, again, we have atomization. We have a manipulation in favor of not thinking about the rest of the world; thinking of one's self and one's personal relationships while ignoring larger societal responsibilities.
Also, it's another example of giving people what they want. Because people gravitate toward this kind of content, more of it gets made, and then as more of it gets made, the most successfully manipulative, not the most useful, gets the most attention, and then gets boosted by the algorithm, and in medium's case, possibly the platform's editors.
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I tried for a year and a half to make money writing on medium and substack. I had not spent much time on the internet the previous twenty years, and maybe this gives me a bit of a different perspective on the whole thing.
After I took a few months away from the industry, and then returned, the problems of ideology became more obvious. The whole thing is structured to support and reinforce the status quo; discouraging independent critical thought and engagement, atomizing people's artistic and scholarly production, and imposing intellectual and cultural confromity.
My regular readers (thank you so much!) will not be surprised to see me claim that the present state of the industry supports fascist ideology. I write about fascist ideology a lot, because I see it as a powerful tool of evil in the world.
Fascism is not about racism or nationalism. It's about exploitation, and the tools people use to exploit people and resources are getting more effective, and we risk losing more agency in the phase of AI.
While violence and economic control are at the base of the fascist system, it could not be maintained without ideology. As such, ideology is the principle obstacle to building a more just and peaceful system of social engagement.
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I watched a video about six months ago while I was wrestling with the idea of starting my own business; not knowing really where to start. It was a small business lawyer lecturing to a bunch of business students.
The lawyer said that in his years of practicing small business law, he found a few traits that were consistent as to who is successful in building a profitable business.
One of these traits he called 'cynicism'. He did not mean it in the classical or philosophical sense; his was sort of a pop culture definition, and as a devout cynic, I got a little bristly at his definition.
By 'cynicism', he meant a sort of pessimistic, detached moral ambivalence. He said that people who are successful in business don't bother with morality; they just go for the money.
He used the example of a liquor store owner not wanting an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting next door, which shows he knows nothing of AA, but it's a good enough example that illustrates what he means. Compassion gets in the way of profit, is his point.
It's something like what Nietzsche wrote about how people competing for power feed the moral problem of power; that power becomes a force in itself as people seek it, and morality is pushed aside in the process.
I don't believe that most independent content creators are trying to follow the trends to make money. As in Nietzsche's description of power, there are agents who try to do what's right. Those people's efforts, however, are marginalized by those who try to control. In terms of content creation, it means competition for the algorithmic boost that amplifies access to an audience.
That amplification, however, is short-lived, and the way people are being trained to consume content is such that it serves the algorithmic power of the platform. We end up writing disposable stuff that a few people glance at during their scrolling, and very few actually take the time to read (thank you so much!).
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On the flip side, I recently received a response to an essay on social media addiction and power relations where I tinkered with the idea of attention economy. The response was pessimistic, and I'm very sensitive to pessimism, as I believe a good cynic should be.
The pessimism was in the statement, or at least the implication, that there's nothing we can do about the problems in the world. The greedy people doing all the exploiting have all the power, and the rest of us lack agency in any realm but our nearest relations.
I understand and disagree. We can change the world, but we can't really see how. This is where faith comes in, in my perspective anyway. We put out love and respect into the world, and it reverberates. We defend morality within ourselves, and we defend morality throughout the universe. We are all connected, and we are all in this together, and every bit we struggle for virtue is worth pays off somehow down the road.
Also, Rousseau had it when he wrote about the slave rebellion in Haiti, for which the people of Haiti are still being punished. The workers have the real power. The illusion of power at the hands of the so-called rulers, with their cannons, fortresses, and battle ships, keeps the people subdued.
Marx and Engels built on this to argue that the workers have the power of labor and that eventually they will unite to take control of the means of production. Lenin and his followers tried to make such a revolution happen.
As Nietzsche pointed out, though, none of those interrupted the nature of power. Once the revolutionaries gain control of the means of production, they're automatically caught up in the power game, and the only way to win is to push morality aside.
With the content creation industry, the power game is attention seeking, approval seeking, and all the manipulative ways people go about producing material that will keep enough people engaged so as to satisfy the algorithm, so that the content can attract more engagement.
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There's a scene in Anchorman II that dramatizes the moment cable news, as opposed to network news, was born. At this moment, the newscaster poses the question: why do we have to tell people what they need to hear? Why can't we just tell them what they want to hear?
I think that's an exact quote, but I'm not going to check it right now. The point is that as news broadcasting became more sensationalist and less substantive, the role of the news became less moral and more profit driven. Cable news has been a shameless ratings war fiasco ever since, and it keeps getting worse as they desperately cling to the attention of their viewers.
The content creation industry is like this. There are many people trying to share perspectives that are intended to help build a more just a peaceful world, and they are being drowned out by content that is created specifically to give people what they crave; or, perhaps more accurately, to get people to crave more of what they already crave.
This is compounded by the industry's disposable commodity basis. When I publish something on medium or substack, I get some glances in the first week, then nothing. Very rarely does an essay more than a week old get a click, let alone engagement.
We're thereby incentivized, financially, to publish at a rate that fits the industry. It's not quite that the more we post, the better we do. That's a mistake made by a lot of beginners and a lot of people who use AI to do their content creation for them. They come in with a flurry and try to post as much as possible, then they burn out and leave, having made no money for themselves, having contributed minimally to the conversation, and having helped facilitate more centralization of wealth and superficial power.
As I keep saying, there are lots of people doing good work out there. They're simply not getting access to their audience because the superficial, manipulative, tell-people-what-they-want-to-hear stuff dominates the space.
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I'm a real cynic, and the crux of our job is to help people think outside restrictive norms of thought. Our moral calling is to challenge ideology that crushes the human spirit; that insists that our efforts are futile, that those hording wealth are better than those who share, and that the lust for power is good and necessary.
There's a Pink Floyd song called Have a Cigar that comes to mind, where the music industry manager says 'everyone else is just greedy' and 'it's a hell of a start, it could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team'. On the same album, on the song Welcome to the Machine is the line 'what did you dream? It's alright we told you what to dream.'
Ideology is a structure of thought that conforms to and supports the maintenance of the economic base upon which a group of people build their lives. Farmers believe in farming; hunters believe in hunting. Fascist ideology is at its core about justifying exploitation.
The content industry supports this justification by getting us to engage in the feeding frenzy. By luring us into a situation where we believe that everyone else is manipulating people, telling them what they want to hear, and getting rich doing it, and that we should follow the herd to get rich, too.
Mussolini said that fascism is corporatism. There was a wealth of theory, mostly from a fringe group of French intellectuals who saw democracy as weak, and proposed some sort of authoritarian alternative, but it was Mussolini and his gang who put fascism into practice. It was all about empowering economic elites to control the state, and to turn the state into a machine to maximize exploitation through the application of violence.
The ideology doesn't cause the economic system. The ideology conforms to the economic system. And the economic system that followed the era of neoliberal globalization is basically globalized fascism. States are controlled by international companies to maximize exploitation.
When we conform to the dominant ideology to make more money, without regard to the morality of our work, we feed that ideology and make it stronger. When the dominant ideology is fascist, and we conform to it, we support fascism.
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This has been longer than I intended, and I'm still not sure where I will post it.
I try to conclude my essays on an optimistic note, and so yeah, it's not too late to fight fascism. It's never too late.
It may sound cliché to the point of cheesiness, but we need some kind of organization among workers, and basically everyone who is being exploited by the present system, in order to work against the dominant ideology. And indeed, we need content creators to help us with this organization.
It's not that the people making the content are the problem, it's that so many are caught up in the problem: in the quest for more power without moral grounding. So, we need a shift, maybe several shifts, away from this competitive structure and toward a more cooperative one.
Maybe we can work with the platforms as they are, or maybe we should be working toward more diversity of platforms, or maybe both. I don't know, but I like the decentralization approach, and maybe more platform diversity is a good way to go.
I really think that the main thing is that those of us who are really trying to help bring about a more just and peaceful world for future generations don't give up. That we keep adjusting and working and believing that even when we can't see the fruits of our work, they will blossom all the same.
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Anyway, thank you so much for reading. I feel like this was way too long, and I really appreciate you spending some time with it. I'm truly grateful for your presence.
I hope you have good healthy food and water. I hope you can feel the love of the people around you. I hope you believe that your voice matters; even when it is only heard by a few. Please take good care of yourself.
Power to the People.
Freedom of the Soul.