Algorithmic Institutionalism
The future of media on the Right
Our identities are increasingly formed by algorithms.
Every year that passes, demographic change transforms America and her media habits. We still have a great deal of the population that consumes media in a traditional fashion, but that change is speeding up, and soon it will be at a tipping point. The younger generations are entirely digital native, and even those who aren’t are increasingly sorted by the same forces.
When you consume most of your information on social media, like X/Twitter, the primary gatekeeper is the algorithm. You may arrive at a piece of content that is hosted somewhere: someone’s podcast, an article in the New York Post, or just a long tweet from someone that interests you, but the algorithm is what controls this. Very quickly, it learns who you are and what you want. In short time, it controls how you consume most of your information, sorting you into an algorithmic silo with other likeminded people.
In this way, we are all sorted into buckets. And because of algorithmic precision, those buckets can be much more niche and focused than ever before. No longer are we limited to “Republican” or “Democrat.” The algorithm can sustain a dozen distinct audiences that would have been impossible to maintain a decade ago.
What This Is Doing
When the primary driver of the information you consume is the algorithm, the primary driver of the type of person you become IS the algorithm. What you believe, who you trust, who you support. These were formerly questions answered by big, wide institutions like newspapers or political machines, but that role has shifted, and now belongs to the algorithm. In this environment, the institutions are leaning increasingly on the algorithms for relevance.
In this dynamic, our primary institutions are no longer brick and mortar, or even digital publications, but algorithmic ones. The algorithm is the institution. It is also terrain that someone else owns, which means building on it requires understanding that the ground can shift.
Consider 2024. An assortment of disparate podcasts (and some steering from campaign voices like Alex Bruesewitz) delivered young male voters to Trump in numbers that the RNC’s infrastructure could never replicate. No one at a think tank or a cable network decided to build it, the algorithm built it, sorting young men who watched Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz and Adin Ross into our coalition.
This is why you see the weaknesses of our current political operations, and media. Societal change is accelerating, and narrative change is accelerating. The control that legacy gatekeepers had over nearly every element of this process is slipping. The gates of the gatekeepers close, and people simply build roads around them.
Conservative gatekeeping, in particular, seems to create the conditions with which it destroys the gatekeepers. The more rigidly the old guard defines who belongs, the more talent and energy flows into the algorithmic institutions that don’t require their permission.
What This Means for Media
Media is one of the most impacted areas of this shift. We now live in a world where creators have the tools to make content very easily on platforms like X, Substack, and YouTube. You no longer need an institution to be discovered. Audiences shrink dramatically and still support their respective niches. The algorithmic institutions, though smaller than the old coalitions, grow their own creator economies with durable audiences.
The institutional outlets remain, and they should, and they will. Legacy prestige and huge resources are definite advantages. The ability to fund long investigations, maintain dozens of writers and editors and producers and content teams, and convene audiences at a scale no individual creator can match are not trivial things, and the new media ecosystem is worse for pretending they are. But new media is now competing on substance and the best independent work is as compelling as anything coming from the institutions.
Where before, a creator or media figure needed institutional affiliation for legitimacy and distribution, they are now doing it on their own—or even creating newer, more nimble outlets. Because they are more involved with and products of the discourse, and because there is often more talent than the institutions can absorb, they find themselves with relevance and a real audience. Being an independent creator is now a very compelling path for both recognizable and insurgent media figures alike. The major outlet-to-Substack pipeline is practically written in stone, as seen with the WaPo layoffs.
What we now observe is that the big companies are and will continue to rely on this relevance. Lomez and Rufo and Doyle get shows on The Blaze. The White House brings roundtables of new and independent media to discuss major issues. The Ruthless guys signed with Fox News. And of course, the flagship example: Bari Weiss turned a controversial resignation at the New York Times into a Substack valued at $150 million and control over CBS News. Increasingly, and this trend will accelerate, institutional media will rely on new media for talent and relevance. Right now as a sort of farm league, but in the future I expect it to become an active partnership with roughly equal weight.
Why Substack Is Part of This
It must be said: Substack is a huge part of what enables all of this. There are other platforms that do what Substack does, but people default to Substack, and it’s a genuinely good product. It has combined the network power of social media with the infrastructure required to build your own media project easily and from scratch. It has been heavily embraced by so many established figures because the product works.
Substack is positioned to be the platform where the next generation of media is built. The structural advantages are real, because the moat is established.
But,
What Is Holding It Back
As of this writing, Chris Rufo and Mike Huckabee are the only conservatives in Substack’s Top 50. The rest of the leaderboard is dominated by a wave of anti-Trump Substacks launched by former mainstream media figures since the election, largely repackaging the same slop from their former employers. Whatever you think of this content, the structural result is that Substack’s discovery and ranking system produces a bland liberal monoculture at the top. Conservative creators, no matter how talented or how engaged their audiences, are functionally invisible within the platform’s own ecosystem.
Substack’s leadership has been committed to free expression, but the leaderboard and recommendation systems, by aggregating everything into a single ranking, reward the largest existing audiences rather than highlighting the best work within specific communities. No marketing project to highlight the work being done will offset this structural invisibility. The algorithm that is reshaping identity formation across the internet is, on Substack, still sorting people into one big pile.
I’m confident that the fix is ideological subcategories. Not to build better silos, but so we can deliberately replace invisible algorithmic sorting with visible, chosen ones.
With subcategories in the rankings, conservative creators become visible to conservative readers who may now only see a list of everyone they hate at the top. More creators across the political spectrum would be drawn to the platform because they can actually be discovered. Left-of-center writers benefit too because a heterodox liberal or a genuine policy nerd could actually break out of the tired, top heavy resistance blob and find their own audience in a subcategory that reflects what they actually do. Readers get more granular discovery. More content that is more engaging and diverse. Debate naturally ensues across adjacent subcategories, which drives more engagement and more use.
There is more to be done than just adding subcategories and doing a little ranking revision. Substack should give creators real customization, like the ability to make a publication look entirely like its own product and not like a Substack (still stigmatized as a blog.) The ecosystem’s moat is established, so why not give the keys to creators so that they can build something in an afternoon that looks truly professional? Once you do this, the remaining stigma around the platform dies. It reinforces the already-kingmaker brand by making it invisible, the most powerful thing a platform can do.
What Comes Next
The right has a new generation of creators building outside of the old gates and yesterday’s rules no longer apply. The algorithmic institutions are where identity is increasingly being formed and where the next generation of political and media leadership is being shaped.
The painful cycles of consensus and debate that once took a generation to sort out now take just a few years. Political identity is outgrowing the institutions that used to contain it, and becoming harder to control from the top down. The old coalition model where a few institutions define what people believe and everyone falls in line is beginning to give way to something more contested and ultimately more productive. And the talent pipeline is inverting: institutions will recruit from creators, not the other way around.
We’re building for that future—come write for us.