Been seeing a new type of post online, and there’s enough of them that it seems to be part of a trend. This might just be early days of it, but I thought I’d document my observations here, and return back to it as needed. I’m loosely calling it The Mauve Pill, for reasons we’ll get into in a bit.
Examples
Or this rather lengthy blog post:
https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever
(There’s more, I’ll try and pull them out of the bookmarks shortly.)
What are the points in common of The Mauve Pill?
- Anti-“content” – not as a style, but as the wholesale rejection of “content” as a meta-descriptor for various media, or thinking it is a new term rather one that has been in use since the 1960s (at least)
- Anti-AI, either in general or rejecting that it can have good uses
- Performative “left” politics, but without grounding or reflection (ie “against all”)
- Uncritical assessment of new technology
- Adoption of “en~ification” (which is not a new thing, really, just capitalism by another name)
- A belief in the Dial-up Pastorale – not recognizing that the web was corporate from early on
There’s likely more, but these were some of the constellation of ideas I was observing.
Why Mauve?
Well, truth be told, I needed a color. We kinda ended up here by process of elimination.
Red and Blue are already taken, and Blue has connotations besides.
Red pill: These were people who, in the parlance of the community, had swallowed the “Matrix”-inspired “red pill” and seen “the truth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/books/review/ellen-reeve-black-pill.html
Blue is staying asleep, stuck in the matrix.
However, maybe there’s another option?
I hear ya, Zizek. What other options do we have?
Black is taken too. Elle Reeve covers this in depth in her 2024 book of the same name, looking at “the black pill of nihilism” and how that has led to the pipelining of individuals to the alt-right movement.
So we need to find another option:
Silver? Would this stand for cyber, all shiny and chrome? Nah. Doesn’t seem to fit with what we’re observing.
Gold? Does this just mean (monetized or capitalized, or maybe just crypto)? In which case, no, this won’t work.
Rainbow? No, Pink, no? These have obvious associations which don’t apply here.
Green would be eco-friendly, perhaps? Brown might be too? Again, not sure either would apply in this instance.
Orange would be labour, perhaps? Or other worldwide movements, and as such it feels that this is taken.
So let’s go with Mauve. It kinda reminds me of old 4 color CRTs, visually close to the magenta provided by the CGA video standard, along with Cyan, White, and the black of the background.
Is it a problem?
A little, as it takes spaces in the discourse about dealing with current problems, but is as divorced from reality as some of those other “Pilled” movements.
There may be points where they (the authors of mauve-pilled content) identify an issue, but the pilling leads them to come to very odd conclusions, or looping in irrelevant examples in their train of thought on their posts.
And I notice that I may agree with some parts of the argument, or even the conclusion, but there’s enough fallacious, irrelevant, or specious reasoning in the logic chain that I feel that the end result is suspect.
So I gotta examine my own facts, knowledge and assumptions (which is fine, you always gotta check yourself), and then I end up questioning what I know?
Except, “I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit”
It’s like: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, which means you (probably) don’t know what you’re talking about”
And it’s a problem because it’s “pilled” – posts along these lines get positive reinforcement from other pilled members of the community, and that leads them to think they are correct in their (flawed) analysis, further entrenching them in their idea and unable to be reasoned out of it by an expert in the area (f’rex me; see above – I know a little bit).
So because it occupies space, it closes off rational discourse about the subject, and we end up endlessly have to talk around whatever the Mauve-Pilled topic is online for the next decade or so.
There are literally bigger issues to deal with right now.
It reminds me of the Dial-Up Pastorale articles I was noticing last year, and I think many of them could fit within this trend. The DUP dialog has certainly continued, gaining steam and more attention as more people seek alternatives to large platforms. There is still a large amount of platform illiteracy involved there too – BlueSky, Surf/Newsmast and especially SubStack are not any better than the alternatives people are fleeing to them from; the switch just hasn’t been flipped yet to commodify the userbase. (Though the time may finally be coming for SubStack due to their current content policies.)
This commodification is one of the things they appear to share in common in another way: they all engage in what I like to call “Commodified Curation”, the provision a non-algorithmic internet experience. Curated, if you will. Right now they appear to be mostly benign, lying somewhat dormant within the social media ecosystems they’ve attached themselves to, but eventually the worm will turn, the switch will flip, and we’ll see the various stages of commodification and monetization take place once again.
We’ll return to both #commodifiedcuration and #platformilliteracy in the near future. For right now, the question is what to do about The Mauve Pilled?
I think for now it’s worth highlighting that it is a thing, and seeing if there are other examples. How much of it is just the zeitgeist, and how much of it is resistant to discussion. Much of what I’ve seen feels non-rational, like the other pilled groups, and as the saying goes: “you can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into”. Give or take; it’s been a while since I’ve read Jonathan Swift.
If there’s going to be any engagement, it’ll likely start small. I’ll let you know how it goes here, and we’ll try and collect it for a future podcast episode.