The Game of Pretending Not to Know You're Playing a Game. Part 2/6: The Creators Who Enable Their Own Imprisonment.
Maya started her YouTube channel to fight algorithmic manipulation. Three years later, she's using the exact formulaic structures she set out to expose.
"Big Tech isn't just invasive, it's predatory," she declares in her latest video, hitting 2.3 million views. The irony cuts deep. That sentence follows the precise "X isn't just Y, it's Z" pattern that research shows appears in over 500 million social media posts daily.
She knows this. She's studied it. She's even cited the research.
She uses it anyway.
Maya represents the most insidious form of digital Stockholm syndrome: the conscious collaborator. She understands the psychological mechanisms at work, recognizes her own manipulation, and continues participating because the alternative is digital death.
Welcome to creator Stockholm syndrome, where awareness of the cage becomes part of building it.
The Invisible Checklist
Maya doesn't follow a written formula when she scripts her videos. But watch her process, and the algorithmic preferences reveal themselves like invisible ink under heat.