Decoding Algorithmic Suppression: Why Platforms Need You More Than You Need Them

The LinkedIn Experiment: Beautiful Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

In recent weeks, thousands of professional women conducted a startling experiment. They changed their LinkedIn gender marker from female to male and documented what happened next.

The results were visceral:

• Lucy Ferguson saw an 818 percent spike in impressions, 893 percent increase in members reached, and 105 percent more profile viewers—just from changing her name to “Luke Ferguson” for twenty-four hours.

• Megan Cornish, LICSW received up to 400 percent more engagement after switching to male.

• Felicity Menzies showed how changing your Masculine-coded leadership language resulted in higher algorithmic amplicfication

• Hertility ‘s visibility experiments showed massive suppression of women’s health content.

• Cindy Gallop documented reaching 801 people (0.6 percent of her followers) while a male colleague posting identical content reached 10,408 people (143 percent of his followers).

• Black women and other women of color who ran the same experiment saw their reach decrease, not increase—the algorithm wasn’t just suppressing “women”; it was calculating intersectional marginalization with precision, suppressing those with least institutional power most aggressively. Bo Young Lee 이보영 changed not only her gender but also race and sexual orientation and voila 264% increase in engagement.

These women proved what we’ve always known: algorithmic suppression of women’s content is real, quantifiable, and devastating.

Their work is extraordinary consciousness-raising. They made the invisible visible. They gave women data to prove their lived experience wasn’t imagined.

Even if every experiment were anecdotal, the platform-wide reach disparity is visible at scale. Suppression can be verified through platform design, not just user trials.

But here’s where we need to talk about what comes next.

Because the dominant response has been: “LinkedIn, fix this.” “Platforms, be transparent.” “Algorithms, treat us fairly.”

And that’s where we need African feminism to teach us something crucial:

Begging for better treatment on an extractive plantation is not the path to freedom.

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Why Suppression Isn’t a Bug—It’s Revenue

Let me show you what these experiments actually revealed. Not bias. Business model.

The Pattern: Follow The Money

The $6.5 Trillion Extraction Economy: What Gets Suppressed vs. Who Profits.

Link to full interactive visualisation: https://insightmate.github.io/algo-suppression-economy/

Learn the methodology: https://maven.com/dataartsoul/the-billion-person-focus-group

What you’re seeing: Ten categories of women’s knowledge—from trauma warnings to financial literacy—systematically suppressed across platforms. Follow each colored flow from left to right to see which industries profit from that specific suppression. The thicker the flow, the more revenue depends on keeping women from coordinating that knowledge. Click any category to see exactly how the extraction works.

The diagram reveals the architecture of extraction. Every suppressed category on the left creates a revenue stream on the right.

The suppression isn’t personal. It’s structural optimization for revenue.

Research on behavioral targeting shows platforms optimize for advertiser outcomes. Industries that profit from women’s confusion, isolation, and insecurity pay premium rates for algorithmic suppression of the coordination that threatens their business models.

When women share financial literacy content, compare rates publicly, or warn each other about predatory products—that information sharing directly threatens financial industry profit margins. When women coordinate around health information, they diagnose earlier (reducing expensive interventions), share pain management strategies (reducing pharmaceutical dependency), and build mutual support networks (reducing demand for paid therapeutic services).

When women coordinate “missing stair” warnings about dangerous men, they’re not just protecting each other—they’re collapsing the dating app economy’s ability to monetize dangerous men’s continued presence. Every abuser women route around is lost revenue for platforms profiting from women’s vulnerability. The suppression isn’t protecting predators for moral reasons. It’s protecting predators for financial ones.

Systems optimized for profit will naturally suppress the coordination of those most profitably extracted from. For multiply-marginalized women, the algorithmic response intensifies—because they represent the highest-margin extraction targets. Black women pay measurably higher interest rates than white women with identical credit profiles. Disabled women face additional “risk assessment” penalties in automated systems. The suppression follows the money.

This isn’t bias requiring correction. It’s feature optimization working exactly as designed.

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The Pattern They Hope You Never See

Women keep asking “Why are we suppressed?”

That’s the wrong question.

The real question is: “Why does women’s coordination require suppressing?”

Let me show you the pattern:

Witch Trials (1450-1750): Destroying Distributed Healthcare

Women healers, midwives, herbalists—keepers of collective medical knowledge passed through generations—were systematically targeted.

The official story: fighting “witchcraft” The actual purpose: eliminating women’s distributed healthcare to transfer medical authority to male-dominated professions

The Malleus Maleficarum (1487) stated explicitly: “No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than the midwife.”

Women were burned for the crime of successful healing without clergy approval.

Modern parallel: Women’s health content suppressed on platforms as “adult content” despite medical accuracy.

Gossip Criminalization (1500s-1800s): Silencing Collective Intelligence

“Gossip” became a pejorative term specifically for women’s speech. Legal penalties were implemented through:

• Scold’s bridle (metal cage locked on head preventing speech)

• Ducking stool (public humiliation)

• Social shaming

The official story: controlling “excessive talking” The actual purpose: Silencing women’s collective intelligence networks to prevent coordination

Modern parallel: Women labeled “drama,” “catty,” “gossipy” for sharing information while identical behavior by men is called “networking.”

Industrial Separation (1800s-1900s): Geographic Fragmentation

Work moved from homes (where women gathered) to factories. Suburban isolation replaced community density.

The official story: economic efficiency, modernization, progress The actual purpose: Fragment women’s physical gathering spaces to prevent collective organizing

Modern parallel: Platforms claim to “connect” while actually fragmenting real communities into individualized feeds.

Professional Gatekeeping (1900s-2000s): Credential Monopoly

Male-dominated professions replaced women’s collective expertise:

• Doctors replaced midwives

• Therapists replaced women’s circles

• “Expertise” required institutional credentials

The official story: scientific advancement, professional standards The actual purpose: Dismiss experiential knowledge in favor of credentialed gatekeeping

Modern parallel: AI trained on women’s knowledge, women not credited as experts.

Algorithmic Suppression (2000s-Present): The Same Pattern, Digital Implementation

Same function, more efficient technology:

• Women’s content suppressed 20-50% more than men’s

• Health, finance, and organizing content specifically targeted

• Coordination attempts algorithmically contained

The official story: “unintentional bias,” “we’re working on it” The actual purpose: Maintain the same extraction economy through code instead of physical violence

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Do you see it now?

This isn’t bias correction failure. This is the same mechanism—adapted across centuries—to prevent one specific thing:

Women coordinating their collective intelligence.

Because women’s gossip networks are superior distributed intelligence systems that threaten every centralized power structure ever built.

Every suppression pattern is a confession. The algorithm tells you exactly what it fears by showing you what it throttles. When trauma warnings get 97% suppression? They’re confessing: “Women coordinating around danger is our existential threat.” When financial literacy gets 85% suppression? They’re announcing: “Women sharing money knowledge collapses our business model.” The algorithm is a tell. Learn to read it.

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Why Moral Pleading Won’t Work

Here’s what the LinkedIn experiments revealed that most missed:

Advertising-based platforms structurally benefit from suppressing coordination that threatens advertiser effectiveness.

When women coordinate, they:

• Share salary data (threatens wage exploitation)

• Warn about toxic companies (threatens recruitment revenue)

• Process collective patterns (threatens manufactured confusion)

• Amplify each other’s content (bypasses algorithmic control)

Every single one of these threatens platform profitability.

So when women ask LinkedIn to “be fair,” they’re asking:

• “Please voluntarily reduce your advertising revenue by billions”

• “Please help us organize collectively even though that threatens your business model”

• “Please value our coordination more than your shareholders’ returns”

That will never happen.

Not because platforms are evil. Because they are machines optimized for extraction. You cannot appeal to the humanity of a revenue algorithm.

The Three Options They’re Offering

1. Conform (adopt masculine-coded language to game the algorithm)

2. Compete (women fighting each other for scarce visibility)

3. Cope (accept reduced reach as the price of presence)

All three keep you on the plantation.

All three maintain the extraction economy.

All three prevent the one thing they actually fear: women activating their own infrastructure.

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What African Feminism Teaches Us About Source Power

There is another solution. Let me tell you a story about Oshun.

The Parable of Oshun’s Withdrawal

In Yoruba tradition, there’s a story that every woman on every platform needs to hear right now.

As the lore goes , when Olodumare (the supreme being) sent 17 Irunmọlẹ—primordial spirits—to Earth to organize creation and make the world habitable, only one was female: Oshun.

The Dismissal

The 16 male deities looked at what Oshun brought—sweetness, love, rivers, fertility, abundance—and decided it was trivial.

They had strength. They had wisdom. They had logic and strategy and plans.

What did they need with sweetness?

So they excluded her from their councils. They made decisions without her. They organized the world as if her contributions were decorative rather than foundational.

Oshun watched this. She said nothing.

The Withdrawal

Instead of arguing her value, instead of fighting for her seat, instead of trying to prove she belonged—Oshun simply withdrew her Ashé.

Her spiritual power. Her essence.

She didn’t make announcements. She didn’t issue ultimatums. She didn’t explain what they were about to lose.

She just let the rivers stop flowing.

She took all the sweetness—the love, the fertility, the abundance, the very quality that makes life worth living—out of the world.

And she waited.

The Collapse

The male deities continued their work, certain their strength and wisdom would be enough.

But the world fell into chaos.

Severe drought plagued the land. Plants withered. Animals died. Nothing would grow.

The male deities tried everything. They used all their strength—the crops stayed dead. They applied all their wisdom—the rivers stayed dry. They deployed all their logic—life continued failing.

None of their power could fix what her absence had broken.

Their world-building efforts collapsed completely. Everything they created was dry, hard, lifeless. Functional, maybe. But not alive.

The Recognition

Confused and desperate, the male deities returned to Olodumare to report their failure.

Olodumare looked at them and asked a simple question: “Where is Oshun?”

They realized—she wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there.

And Olodumare explained what should have been obvious: Oshun was essential for creation and life itself. Not decorative. Not optional. Not trivial.

Essential.

Without her, nothing they built could truly live.

The Apology

The male deities returned to Earth, humbled. They found Oshun and apologized. They begged her to return and provide her life-giving energy.

Oshun accepted their apology—but not before making something very clear:

Don’t ever treat me as non-essential again.

The Return

When Oshun returned and released her Ashé back into the world, everything changed instantly.

The rivers flowed. The crops grew. Animals thrived. The world became fertile, beautiful, functional.

Not because the male deities had changed their strategy.

Because the source had returned.

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The Lesson For Women On Platforms

Here’s what this ancient story reveals about modern power dynamics:

When you understand your own value, you don’t have to argue for your place.

Oshun didn’t:

• Write a petition asking to be included

• Post threads explaining why sweetness matters

• Try to prove her contributions were “serious enough”

• Adapt her essence to match their definition of value

• Beg them to see her worth

She simply withdrew. And let them discover what they’d lost.

Your absence reveals what your presence was providing.

This is the strategy platforms fear most. Not your complaints about algorithmic suppression. Not your experiments proving bias. Not your demands for transparency.

Your coordinated withdrawal.

Because like the male deities discovering their world couldn’t function without Oshun’s rivers, platforms will discover their infrastructure can’t function without women’s networks.

The engagement will dry up. The content will wither. The community will die. The credibility will collapse.

And no amount of masculine-coded “growth hacking” will fix what your sweetness was providing.

The lesson isn’t about negotiation. It’s about recognizing source.

You don’t need LinkedIn to validate your professional worth. LinkedIn needs you to generate the value they monetize.

You don’t need Instagram to prove you’re influential. Instagram needs your content to keep users engaged.

You don’t need platforms to connect you. Platforms need you to create the connections they claim to facilitate.

You are Oshun. They are the male deities who think your contributions are decorative.

The question is: Will you keep arguing for your place at their table?

Or will you withdraw your Ashé and watch what happens when the rivers stop flowing?

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What Oshun Reveals About Platform Economics

Let me show you what platforms actually need from women:

Women are the engine of activity, engagement, retention, trust, and economic value on every major social platform—far outpacing men in active participation and the generation of monetizable attention and social capital. Platforms depend far more on the unpaid, often invisible labor of women than they generally acknowledge.

Content Creation: Women generate 80%+ of platform content that keeps users engaged

Network Effects: Women drive the connections that make platforms valuable

Credibility Infrastructure: Women provide professional legitimacy

Emotional Labor: Women make platforms human (supportive comments and advice)

The Economic Reality

But let’s be brutally honest about the cost-benefit analysis that platforms hope you won’t do.

The ROI is already negative.

You’re spending hours creating content, building community, providing engagement—in exchange for 0.6% reach. You’re operating at a massive deficit. The “practical” thing to do is stop the bleeding.

Platforms don’t need women specifically. They need engagement. Women happen to provide disproportionate engagement through content creation, emotional labor, and network facilitation.

If women left en masse, platforms would pivot to other demographics, other content types, other engagement sources. Facebook proved this by pivoting to older users when youth departed. YouTube proved this by pivoting to long-form when creators left for TikTok.

The leverage isn’t “they’ll collapse without us.”

The leverage is “coordinated withdrawal triggers network effect reversal—which creates death spirals.”

At 25-35% exodus of high-value users, platforms face tipping points. Not because they need women specifically, but because network effects work in reverse.

Once enough high-value users stop engaging, the platform degrades. This makes it less attractive for the next tier of users, and a cascade begins. MySpace lost 40 million users per month once this started. Twitter is watching Blue Sky migration with existential concern.

The platform doesn’t collapse. It becomes irrelevant to anyone seeking genuine connection or professional value. It becomes a crypto-bro ghost town.

But here’s the critical nuance you need to understand: Platforms capture only a tiny fraction of women’s actual communication—the tip of the iceberg visible above water—and claim they’re “connecting” you. The vast majority of your coordination happens where they can’t reach: face-to-face conversations, encrypted messages, phone calls, kitchen tables, hair salons, school pickup lines, coffee meetings.

They’re not essential infrastructure. They’re surveillance equipment installed on a network that existed millennia before them and will exist millennia after.

So what are you actually losing?

You’re told LinkedIn is “critical for recruitment, sales, and personal branding.” But if you’re being suppressed to 0.6% reach, what is it actually providing? If AI recruitment tools are already biased against women, what opportunities are you missing by reducing your unpaid labor there?

The answer: Almost nothing. You’re losing access to an illusion while providing real value for free.

The paradox: Platforms extract massive value from the small percentage they can access, but that doesn’t make them existentially dependent on it. They’re opportunistic extractors, not desperate dependents.

Which means you have all the leverage. Because you can stop feeding the extractor at any capacity level you choose—whether you’re a single mother who stops commenting or a founder who migrates her entire community. This isn’t all-or-nothing. It’s a spectrum of withdrawal calibrated to your capacity.

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When Oshun’s Withdrawal Actually Works: Historical Proof

Iceland, October 24, 1975: The Day Women Stopped

90% of Iceland’s women walked off their jobs—paid and unpaid—for a single day.

Teachers didn’t show up. Bank tellers stayed home. Mothers didn’t cook or clean. Factory workers abandoned their posts. Nurses left hospitals running on skeleton crews.

The country completely shut down.

Sausages sold out (men couldn’t cook). Newspapers couldn’t print (no women typesetters). Stores closed (no cashiers). Parliament couldn’t function (no secretaries). Fathers brought children to work because childcare collapsed.

One day. That’s all it took.

The result? Within one year, Iceland passed equal rights legislation. Within five years, they elected the world’s first democratically elected female president.

This is Oshun’s power: Simple withdrawal that reveals absolute dependency.

Liberia, 2003: The Women Who Ended a War Through Withdrawal

Liberian women, led by Leymah Gbowee, had endured 14 years of brutal civil war. The men—warlords, politicians, militia leaders—kept fighting.

The women organized. Christian and Muslim women united across religious lines. They staged sit-ins. They blocked roads. They occupied the negotiation halls.

And then they deployed the most powerful weapon: a sex strike.

No peace, no sex. Not with husbands. Not with soldiers. Not with anyone.

The warlords could ignore protests. They couldn’t ignore their own troops’ desperation. They couldn’t maintain power when women withdrew everything.

The war ended. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first elected female head of state.

This is Oshun’s strategy: Withdraw what they take for granted. Let them discover they cannot function without it. Watch transformation follow.

Both examples prove the same principle: You don’t need to destroy. You just need to stop providing.

When the rivers stop flowing, the world stops working. And suddenly everyone remembers why the rivers mattered.

And this pattern is happening NOW on platforms.

Women are already practicing selective withdrawal. Every “link in bio” redirects value outside platform control. Every private Signal group coordinates beyond algorithmic view. Every newsletter subscription moves relationship ownership from platform to creator. Every “DM me for details” pulls transactions off-platform.

The Iceland strike lasted one day. The platform value strike has been happening for three years—platforms just haven’t noticed the engagement quality degrading yet.

The supportive comments are fewer. The generous introductions happen in DMs. The deep insights go to paid communities. The emotional labor that made platforms feel human? Women are withdrawing it gradually, strategically, without announcement.

Platforms see the engagement metrics holding steady and think they’re fine. They don’t see that they’re measuring quantity while quality collapses. They’re counting interactions while the sweetness drains away.

This is Oshun’s withdrawal happening in real-time, distributed across millions of individual decisions that together constitute collective action.

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The Withdrawal Strategy

So what should women actually do?

Phase 1: Recognize Source

Stop asking platforms for permission to coordinate.

Women are not victims of platform suppression. Women are the source of platform value.

The 818% engagement spike when presenting as male isn’t evidence that you need to be male.

It’s evidence that the platform is extracting 89% of your network’s actual value and returning 11%.

Phase 2: Activate Alternative Infrastructure (That Already Exists)

Women don’t need to build new platforms. The infrastructure already exists:

For Professional Networks:

• Email lists (36:1 ROI vs. social media)

• Substack (90% revenue to creators vs. platform capture)

• Private Discord servers

• Peer mentorship circles

• Industry-specific Slack channels

For Coordination:

• Signal (encrypted, extraction-proof)

• WhatsApp groups

• Private message boards

• Actually meeting in person

For Knowledge Sharing:

• Personal websites

• Newsletter networks

• Podcast networks

• Books (the OG ungovernable content)

For Economic Power:

• Direct payment platforms (Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee)

• Community funding models

• Cooperative ownership structures

• Buy women-built marketplace

The architecture exists. Women just need to recognize they’re already using it more effectively than platforms anyway.

Women’s networks evolved for 200,000 years at Dunbar’s number scale—150 trust-based connections that actually know each other. Platforms try to force 10,000 “followers” you’ve never met. Trust-based coordination beats follower-count theater every time. The algorithm can’t suppress what it can’t see: your actual 150.

Phase 3: Watch What Happens

Here’s what I’m not saying: Cancel your LinkedIn account. Delete your profiles. Stage a mass exodus that requires everyone to leave simultaneously.

Here’s what I am saying: Withdraw the sweetness.

When women withdraw their content creation, their network facilitation, their emotional labor, their credibility infrastructure—what’s left?

All the masculine-coded content platforms actually reward:

• Thought leader performativity

• Hustle culture optimization

• Bro-marketing aggression

• Engagement bait toxicity

This is the strategic withdrawal—a value strike, not a boycott:

Stop leaving extensive, supportive comments. (Free content moderation they monetize) Stop making introductions in DMs. (Free network facilitation they extract) Stop sharing your deepest insights for free. (Move that to your newsletter, your paid community) Stop performing emotional labor. (The “sweetness” that makes platforms feel human)

You can keep your profile as a digital business card. But stop providing the unpaid labor that generates their value while returning you 0.6% reach.

What happens to platforms without the sweetness?

They don’t collapse in the literal sense—servers stay running, accounts remain active.

But the value collapses. The culture collapses. The reason anyone cared collapses.

Without women’s moderating presence, platforms become wastelands that brands avoid.

Without women’s professional networks, recruiting value degrades.

Without women’s emotional labor, new user retention crashes.

Without women’s supportive engagement, there’s nothing worth staying for.

The network effect runs in reverse: When high-value users stop engaging, the platform degrades. Lower-quality users remain. More high-value users leave. The death spiral accelerates. Ask MySpace. Ask Twitter watching the Blue Sky migration.

The platform dependency runs one direction: They need your sweetness. You don’t need their suppression.

Phase 4: When Withdrawal Isn’t Enough, Meet Oya

There’s another Orisha women need to know: Oya.

The Nature of Oya

Where Oshun is rivers and sweetness, Oya is storms and lightning. Where Oshun uses soft power, Oya uses direct force.

Oya’s very name comes from “ọ ya”—“she tore.”

She is the wind that rips apart what no longer serves. The lightning that illuminates what’s hidden in darkness. The storm that clears out the dead wood so new growth can emerge.

In Yoruba tradition, Oya stands at the threshold between life and death—the guardian of the cemetery gates, the marketplace, the places of transition. She doesn’t maintain the status quo. She ends it.

Both Are Warriors—Different Tactics

This is crucial to understand: Both Oshun and Oya are warriors. Both force transformation. They just use different weapons.

Oshun’s warfare: Soft power. Strategic withdrawal. Making yourself essential, then removing that essence until they can’t function without you. She doesn’t wait passively—she actively creates the conditions for their collapse by removing what they depend on.

In her Ololodi path, Oshun is explicitly a revolutionary—”the woman who dresses as a man and is never defeated in battle.” She fights to keep her family together. She doesn’t rest until her children are safe. She is indestructible.

Oya’s warfare: Direct disruption. Active destruction. She doesn’t withdraw—she attacks. She doesn’t create conditions for collapse—she forces the collapse immediately.

The difference isn’t passive vs. active. Both are active.

The difference is: Withdrawal vs. Assault. Soft power vs. Hard power. Strategic absence vs. Present confrontation.

#MeToo: When Oshun’s Withdrawal Met Oya’s Storm

For 27 years, women withdrew from Harvey Weinstein. Whisper networks routed around him. Women refused to work with him when possible. This was Oshun’s strategy—withdrawing participation, creating space between predator and prey.

But he kept his power. The studios kept profiting. Withdrawal alone wasn’t enough because the system protected him.

Then women shifted strategies. They didn’t just withdraw—they revealed. They attacked. They destroyed.

One woman—Tarana Burke—named it. Another—Alyssa Milano—amplified it. And suddenly:

• Harvey Weinstein: arrested, convicted, imprisoned

• 200+ powerful men: careers ended

• Industries forced to implement actual policies

• NDAs exposed as silencing mechanisms

• Entire power structures shaken

This is Oya’s lightning combined with Oshun’s strategic foundation.

The withdrawal created the conditions (women knew who to avoid, patterns were clear). The storm forced the transformation (public revelation destroyed the protection).

What This Means for Platform Strategy

Oshun’s approach:

• Withdraw content creation

• Activate alternative infrastructure

• Remove emotional labor

• Stop providing credibility

• Actively create conditions where platform cannot function

Oya’s approach:

• Coordinate mass exodus on specific dates

• Flood algorithms with suppression evidence

• Publicize internal documents

• Organize advertiser boycotts

• Legal coordination

• Directly attack platform viability

Both are revolutionary. Both are warriors. Both force transformation.

The question isn’t “passive vs. active”—both are profoundly active.

The question is: Which weapon fits the battle?

Sometimes withdrawal is the revolution (Iceland, Liberia—systems couldn’t function without women).

Sometimes direct assault is needed (#MeToo—systems were protecting predators despite withdrawal).

Often you need both: Oshun creates the conditions, Oya delivers the storm.

Either way: Women are not asking. Women are not waiting. Women are warriors choosing their weapons.

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The Question They’re Actually Asking

When platforms suppress women’s content, they’re not asking: “How do we treat women fairly?”

They’re asking: “How much suppression can we get away with before they realize they don’t need us?”

That’s the calculation. That’s the only calculation.

Every algorithm tweak, every “unintentional bias,” every “we’re working on it” is testing: How close can we get to maximum extraction without triggering coordinated withdrawal?

They already know the answer terrifies them.

And here’s why reform won’t work, why appealing to their conscience is futile:

First: The psychological reality. Sometimes it’s the “revenge of the nerd” phenomenon—men who were rejected in high school now wielding power over the systems women depend on. Sometimes it’s a mother wound projected onto millions of users. The misogyny isn’t always calculated—sometimes it’s emotional. That’s why misogynistic content thrives on these platforms. That’s why deepfake porn is allowed to proliferate. They agree with it.

Second: The financial incentive. Even when individuals inside these companies want change, the business model won’t allow it. Advertisers pay premium rates for algorithmic suppression of women’s coordination. Financial services, beauty industries, medical-industrial complex—they all profit from women’s isolation. When your revenue model depends on suppression, “fixing the bias” means voluntarily destroying your business model.

You cannot appeal to the conscience of a spreadsheet. You cannot shame a profit-maximizing algorithm into fairness.

Women have been appealing to extractive systems for years. External pressure has yielded token gestures and no structural change.

Because women have already proved—Iceland, Liberia, #MeToo—that when you stop asking and start withdrawing, systems transform faster than anyone predicts.

The suppression isn’t strong because they’re powerful.

The suppression is desperate because they’re fragile.

And here’s why that fragility is permanent:

Suppression requires constant energy input. Women’s networks are thermodynamically favorable—they form spontaneously because they’re lower-energy states. Platforms burning billions to suppress coordination that costs women nothing to maintain? That’s an unstable system announcing its own expiration date. You cannot indefinitely suppress the lower-energy state. Physics doesn’t negotiate.

LinkedIn is 20 years old. Gossip networks are 200,000 years old. Facebook is temporary. Women’s coordination is permanent. Platforms are 5-10 year parasites on millennial infrastructure.

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What We Cannot Do

Let me be crystal clear about what will NOT work:

We Cannot Plead

“LinkedIn, please be transparent about your algorithm” “Platforms, please treat women fairly” “Tech companies, please value our contributions”

They know what they’re doing. The suppression IS the feature, not the bug.

We Cannot Conform

Changing your language to masculine-coded patterns Adopting “thought leader” performativity Gaming the algorithm instead of building alternatives

This erases the exact source power that makes you valuable in the first place.

We Cannot Compete

Women fighting each other for scarce visibility Attacking other women for “getting it wrong” Believing the scarcity is real instead of performed

The scarcity is manufactured. Mira Murati got $2 billion for nothing while thousands of women with actual businesses can’t access $50K. Scarcity is a lie they tell to keep you desperate.

We Cannot Believe Platforms Are The Only Option

Women’s networks predate platforms by 200 millennia. They’ll outlast platforms by 200 more.

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The Real Revolution

Here’s what I want you to understand:

Women have already built the replacement economy.

While VCs were funding empty mirrors and synthetic wombs, women created:

The Bridge Infrastructure (Where Women Are Migrating NOW):

Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv: Women creators earning $1 million+ annually from newsletters (45 publishers), escaping algorithmic suppression entirely. Email open rates 18% for women vs. 10% for men—the algorithm that suppressed them can’t touch owned audiences. $36 return for every $1 spent on email vs. 0.6% reach on LinkedIn.

Signal: Encrypted messaging where metadata can’t be accessed even with warrants—Post-Dobbs, women coordinate abortion access, escape planning, activist organizing beyond surveillance. Signal Foundation president: Meredith Whittaker. Business model: donations. Extraction resistance: 100%.

Discord & Slack: 227 million monthly active users on Discord; thousands of women’s professional servers. She Code Africa: 6,500+ members. Women in Tech communities: 5,000+ members. Private coordination spaces platforms can’t throttle.

Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee: Direct creator funding bypassing platform revenue share. Women artists, writers, educators building sustainable income without algorithmic permission.

The Cooperative Infrastructure (Women Owning the Means):

ChiFresh Kitchen (Illinois): Five formerly incarcerated Black women building worker-owned cooperative that hit $1 million revenue in 2024—proving cooperative model works.

Platform cooperatives like Stocksy (artist-owned stock photography) and Up & Go (home services marketplace owned by worker cooperatives): Creators earn fairly AND receive dividends as co-owners.

The Freelancers Union: 500,000+ members accessing group insurance, collective bargaining power that atomized platforms deliberately prevent.

The Knowledge Infrastructure (Free, Community-Owned):

ADPList: 1,100+ mentors from 30+ countries providing free 1-on-1 mentorship—increases promotion rates 15-38% for women, democratizing access platforms gatekeep.

Tech Ladies, R-Ladies, Rewriting the Code: 200,000+ women across tech communities providing networking, mentorship, job boards—the professional infrastructure LinkedIn claims to offer but systematically suppresses.

The Mutual Aid Networks (Ancient Wisdom, Modern Tools):

During COVID-19: 80-100% women organized visible hand groups. In Nigeria, women in savings groups were 25 percentage points more likely to have savings during crisis. In Uganda, savings groups resulted in 39% decrease in poverty for members.

The revolution didn’t announce itself with a TechCrunch headline.

It built itself quietly, one newsletter subscriber at a time, one encrypted group chat at a time, one cooperative member at a time, one mutual aid circle at a time.

Until suddenly there’s an entire parallel economy—spanning owned media, encrypted coordination, cooperative ownership, and mutual aid—that doesn’t need Sand Hill Road’s permission to exist.

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The Invitation

This isn’t about technology. It’s about recognizing source power.

You are the network. You are the intelligence. You are the value.

Platforms are temporary parasites trying to extract from permanent infrastructure.

The LinkedIn experiments proved they need you more than you need them.

So what will you do with that knowledge?

Will you keep begging for algorithmic fairness?

Or will you recognize what Oshun always knew:

They can’t create anything without your sweetness.

And when you withdraw it, everything they built dries up.

The choice has always been yours.

The power has always been yours.

The network has always been yours.

It’s time to remember that.

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P.S. To every woman reading this: The system that suppresses your professional content while profiting from your unpaid labor has shown you exactly what it is. Stop trying to get into their game. We’re already building a better one. The infrastructure exists. The networks are ancient. The power is permanent.

Find your people. Fund each other. Share salary data. Warn about toxic companies. Coordinate collectively. Watch what happens when you activate the 97.8% that platforms can’t reach.

The future isn’t a platform. It’s a practice.

Practice it today.

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