Choosing How It Ends

Written by Lloyd Lewis.

I read Palantir's latest post on X and felt the thing I feel now every single time: I don't think we can fight this. They're embedded in every government and every system worth naming, and I'm tired of writing sentences that pretend otherwise to make people feel better. Fighting implies there's still an outside to fight from. There isn't one. I've stopped looking for it.

So here's where I've landed, and I'm not going to dress it up: not surrender, exactly, more like triage on a body that's already running rogue code. If the outcome is mostly written, the only freedom left is in the how — how I spend the time, how I feel while I'm in it, and eventually, how it ends. I'd rather choose my own hedonism and my own expiry than have either one handed to me by something that was never built with my consent, run by people who have never once asked what I wanted and never will.

This is also why I think ignoring X is a mistake; I've witnessed the alt. corporate disappointment of Bluesky, and its self-congratulating vibes. It's better to watch both trajectories clearly than retreat into one nicer-smelling room and mistake the silence for safety. But watching it for years has left me with a harder question than "should I log off," and it's the one I actually want to put in front of you: why don't you leave?

Why don't any of you actually leave and build something of your own, when it has never been cheaper or easier to do it?

Instead you stay, and you rage at the platform, at AI, at Elon, at data centres, sure, but it's mostly at each other, at the faction a couple of centimetres to your left or right that's supposedly on your side, in loops that resolve nothing and were never built to.

Is that Stockholm syndrome? I'm not going to reach for the easy, dramatic label just because it feels satisfying to say out loud, because the real thing is more specific than that and more insulting to what's actually happening to you. Real Stockholm syndrome needs a genuine threat to your life, a captor who could act on it and doesn't, isolation from every other perspective, and no perceived way out. It's rare even among people who were actually taken hostage — the FBI's own numbers put it around 8% — and plenty of psychologists think it's mostly a media invention anyway. Nobody's life is on the line here. So no. It's not that. What's actually happening to you is better documented, has no drama to hide behind, and is honestly more contemptible, because there's no syndrome to blame. It was built this way, on purpose, by people who ran the numbers on you.

Start with the sunk cost, because it's the ugliest one and the one you'll recognise fastest. Years of posts, the audience you scraped together, the identity you welded to that specific username in that specific app — walking away means admitting a chunk of your life bought you nothing, and your brain will do almost anything rather than sit with that. That's not a character flaw. It's a universal bias. The platform didn't have to manufacture it. It just had to make sure you kept feeding the pile.

Then there's the trap underneath the trap: network effects. The place is only worth anything because everyone else is still there, which means the exact group of people who could free themselves by leaving together can only organise that exit using the tool they're trying to escape. So everyone waits for someone else to go first, forever, and the exodus that would actually work never gets anywhere near the size it needs. You're not staying because you're weak. You're stuck in a coordination trap with a few hundred million other people, and every one of you is waiting on the rest.

Layer in the reward schedule, because this part isn't a metaphor; it's engineering. Notifications, likes, shares — none of it arrives on a predictable timer. It's variable ratio reinforcement, the exact mechanism that makes a slot machine harder to walk away from than a vending machine, borrowed from behaviourist psychology on purpose and pointed at you specifically because it works better than almost anything else humans have ever built to keep a rat pulling a lever.

And here's the part that should actually make you angry, if you've got any real anger left after spending it all on strangers and bots: researchers at Yale have shown your brain treats moral outrage online the same way it treats any other reinforced behaviour — a hit of reward circuitry, no different in kind from what you'd get pulling that same lever. Getting outraged in person costs something: social risk, the chance someone pushes back to your face, the plain discomfort of another human body in the room. Online, that cost is basically zero, while the reward — the likes, the shares, the applause from people who already agreed with you — stays fully intact. Worse than that: the same research shows you learn, over time, to get louder, because loud is what gets rewarded. That's not your personality. That's conditioning, running at the scale of a population, and it's profitable specifically because it never actually finishes. A faction that won would shut up. A faction that's still furious never logs off, and somebody is getting paid every single time it doesn't.

Which is why the rage was never really aimed at the platform, or even at whatever distant institution set it off that morning. Watch closely, and it's aimed sideways, at the wrong flavour of ally, the comrade who wasn't pure enough, the neighbouring faction fighting the same nominal enemy slightly differently to you. That's not a malfunction. That's the actual product being sold. A faction that turns outward on a real enemy is dangerous to somebody. A faction that turns on itself is content, forever, for free, and you've been supplying it.

And if you're wondering why you never actually left Meta — why you keep saying "this is my last post here" and don't mean it — that's learned helplessness, and it's the least dramatic of all these and the one that should hurt the most. After enough failed attempts to reform the place, or build an alternative that never got past a few hundred users, or organise a walkout that fractured before it started, you stopped concluding the system was rigged and needed a different plan. You concluded nothing you do matters. So you downgraded from "build something better" to "feel something here instead," and you've been feeling something here instead for years now, and calling it engagement, or advocacy, or just having a bad day.

So is it Stockholm syndrome? No. It's worse, because Stockholm syndrome at least requires a captor paying attention to you personally, choosing not to hurt you, leaving you room to mistake that mercy for love. This has no mercy in it and no attention either. Nobody at these companies needs you to love them. They don't even need you to notice them. They just need you reacting, on schedule, forever, and they've built an entire discipline of behavioural science to make sure you keep doing it whether you notice or not. That's not a relationship. That's livestock that types.

I include myself in a version of this, for what it's worth. I've spent hours I won't get back arguing with people I'll never meet about things neither of us was going to change, and calling it something more dignified than what it was. I'm not writing this from outside the thing I'm describing. I'm writing it from having finally admitted I was inside it too.

This is all, in a roundabout way, why The Hollow Circuit matters so much to me right now. Not as a distraction from any of this — as the actual answer to it. If broadcasting on someone else's platform is the only way to be seen at all, fine, I'll use it exactly the way it uses me, to point back at something I actually own, that nobody can quietly deprioritise or censor, something that doesn't need my outrage to survive.

If you do want to make that move from the platforms and hang out with real people and no algos, then sign up and join us.

Sources for the psychology in this piece:

• Stockholm syndrome definition, prevalence, and disputed clinical status: Britannica, Wikipedia, EBSCO Research Starters
• Moral outrage online, dopamine reward circuitry, and social learning increasing outrage expression: Molly Crockett, Nature Human Behaviour (2017), Yale News on the 2021 ISPS study, Johns Hopkins Hub summary of Crockett's talk
• Network effects and why platforms retain unhappy users: UNSW Business Think
• Sunk cost fallacy: Cleveland Clinic, The Decision Lab