A novelist wakes up some mornings feeling the rush — the pull to work fast, to produce, to win. He's been thinking about the engines we attach to our projects, the motives that drive us. And then he names his own, plainly: "the engine that propels me is the engine that doesn't want to be anybody's friend, and doesn't want popularity."1 Not because he can't write well — he's quick to say there's nothing wrong with his craft, he can write a short-story collection in under sixteen years if he has to. It's that none of the other engines — the ones aimed at being liked — produce what he needs. "None of those other voices produce the horrifying deceptive intimacy that I need to tell my stories."1
Then he says where the conviction comes from, and it stops being a writing tip. He grew up in a post-dictatorship society, and anyone who grew up in one knows a particular fact: "the axis of like is how dictatorships survive."1 Becoming popular is part of what a dictatorship hijacks to keep itself in power. His own father was a Dominican military police apparatchik — not just emblematic of that culture but, in his word, almost its embodiment. He lived inside a world where it was better to be liked because your shirt was ironed, better to be liked because you had good posture, where being-liked was the currency a military regime ran on, "the way a military dictatorship is like Reddit — everybody believes they're going to be the Reddit article that gets pushed all the way up."1
So for him, to write from "the same toxic axis that made the dictatorship that completely disfigured my family and my society" was simply not going to happen.1 He needed to tilt a different way — to build a relationship with readers "determined by things more complicated than whether you like me or not," where the content of what he said might be worth discussing regardless of how anyone felt about the person bringing the news.1 This page is about that recognition: that the wish to be popular is not a neutral creative fuel but the same lever authoritarian power runs on, and that some artists deliberately refuse it as a political act.
Popularity-as-the-axis-of-dictatorship is the claim that the like-response is a control mechanism, and that an artist who organizes their work around being liked is plugging into the same system a dictatorship uses to govern. The "axis of like" is the novelist's name for the dimension along which a society can be steered by managing who and what gets approved. A regime doesn't only rule by force. It rules by making approval the universal currency — by teaching everyone that the path to safety, status, and survival runs through being liked by power and by the crowd power shapes.
The artist's refusal is not contrarianism for its own sake. It's a recognition that the engine of being-liked, when it drives the work, produces a particular failure: it can't reach what he calls "the horrifying deceptive intimacy" his stories require. The intimacy is horrifying because it tells the truth about people, and deceptive because the reader is drawn close before they realize what they're being shown. You cannot generate that while optimizing for the reader's affection. The affection-engine and the intimacy-engine pull in opposite directions. To be liked you have to flatter, soothe, confirm; to achieve horrifying intimacy you have to unsettle, expose, refuse to comfort.
The deepest layer is biographical and political. His father was the axis — a military police apparatchik who embodied the like-economy of a dictatorship. To write from the wish to be liked would be to write from the same toxic axis that disfigured his family. So the refusal of popularity is, for him, continuous with the refusal of the regime. The alternative he wants is a relationship with readers built on something "more complicated than whether you like me or not" — a relationship where the content is the thing under discussion, not the likability of the messenger.
The mechanism is the universalization of approval as currency. Force is expensive and visible; approval is cheap and self-administering. A dictatorship's deepest efficiency is getting the population to police itself through the wish to be liked — ironed shirts, good posture, the right opinions — so that everyone competes to be approved by the system and, in competing, reproduces it. The novelist's Reddit image is exact: everybody believes they'll be the article pushed all the way up, so everybody internalizes the upvote logic, and the upvote logic is the regime's logic wearing a friendly face.1 No one has to be coerced into the like-axis. They volunteer, because being liked feels like their own desire.
This is why the like-axis is more powerful than force. Force creates resentment and resistance. Approval creates complicity that feels like freedom. The person chasing likes experiences themselves as pursuing their own goal, never noticing that the goal was installed by the system and that pursuing it strengthens the system. The dictatorship survives not despite people's desires but through them.
Transposed to art, the same structure appears. An artist optimizing for the like-response experiences it as serving their audience, building their career, doing good work. But the optimization quietly routes all their choices through the same axis the regime runs on — say what gets approved, avoid what gets disliked, shape the self for upvotes. The novelist's insight is that this is not politically neutral. The like-axis in art is the same axis, scaled down, and an artist who lives on it has accepted the regime's operating logic at the level of their own practice.
His counter-move is to build relationships with readers on a different axis entirely — content rather than likability, discussion rather than approval. The point is not to be disliked (that's just the like-axis inverted). The point is to make the like/dislike question irrelevant to the relationship, so that what's exchanged is the substance of the communication, evaluated on its own terms, with the messenger's likability removed from the equation. That removal is what frees the work to reach horrifying intimacy: with no stake in being liked, the writer is free to show the reader something true and unflattering.
This page is a sibling of Success Breeds Closed Handcuffs and the success-poison cluster — all of them are about engines and the ones that corrupt the work. Where Success as Creative Poison tracks how a past win installs the wish to please, this page diagnoses the wish-to-please at its political root: the like-axis isn't just a creative liability, it's the operating system of authoritarian control. The two pages stack — Knausgaard shows the wish-to-please ruining the work from inside; the novelist shows what that wish is plugged into once you trace it all the way down.
It pairs directly with Waiting for the Voice to Die (the same novelist, same essay). There the move is to outlast the momentum-voice; here the move is to refuse the popularity-engine on principle. Both are refusals of the audience's pull, and both come from the same artist's deep distrust of working from external approval.
It also leans on Audience Shielding Hacks to Forget Reader. The novelist's "relationship determined by things more complicated than whether you like me" is audience-shielding given a political justification — you remove the like-question from the room not as a productivity hack but as a refusal of the axis that disfigured your family. The shielding pages give technique; this page gives the deepest reason to use it.
The case turns on a single move: the novelist taking a creative preference and tracing it to its political source. He starts where most artists stop — "the engine that propels me doesn't want popularity."1 Plenty of writers say something like this; it usually means little more than a pose. What makes this case load-bearing is the next step. He doesn't leave the refusal as taste. He grounds it: "I grew up in a post-dictatorship society, and anyone who's grown up in a post-dictatorship society knows that the axis of like is how dictatorships survive."1
Then the personal stake, which is the page's spine: "my father was a Dominican military police apparatchik."1 The like-axis isn't an abstraction to him; it's the medium his father worked in, the regime that disfigured his family. The ironed shirt and the good posture are the small, intimate textures of how the like-economy reached into daily life — you were liked, and therefore safe, for performing the regime's preferred surface. This is the detail that converts the concept from a writing-tip into a testimony. He has felt the like-axis as power, from inside a family shaped by it.
The Reddit analogy is the case's moment of generalization.1 He pulls the dictatorship's like-economy forward into the present and names the platform logic we all live inside now — everybody believing they'll be the article that gets pushed all the way up. The implication lands hard: the upvote economy is structurally continuous with the dictatorship's like-axis. We're all living on the axis his father administered, just with a friendlier interface.
The resolution is the alternative he names: a relationship with readers "determined by things more complicated than whether you like me or not," where "the content of my communication would be in itself worthy of discussion irregardless of how you felt at an emotional level with the person bringing the news."1 This is the constructive half — not just refusing the axis but specifying what to build instead: a content-axis, where the messenger's likability is deliberately removed from the exchange.
The post is written and your thumb hovers over publish. There's a familiar little calculation running — will they like this, will it land, is this the version that gets pushed up. You notice the calculation. You sit with where it comes from. You think of an ironed shirt, a man with good posture being liked into safety by a regime, and the calculation suddenly looks less like ambition and more like obedience.
You don't delete the post to spite the like-meter; that would just be the same axis turned inside out. Instead you ask a different question of it: is the content of this worth discussing on its own terms, whether or not anyone likes me for saying it? You read it again with that lens. Two sentences were there to be liked — they soften something that shouldn't be softened. You cut them. What's left is colder, truer, less flattering to you and to the reader.
You feel the small fear that comes with that — the fear of being disliked, the fear bred into you by a world where being liked was survival. You let the fear sit there without obeying it. The relationship you want with whoever reads this isn't going to be built on their affection for you. It's going to be built on whether what you said was worth their thought.
You publish. The number ticks up slowly, or doesn't. You've already stopped watching it, because you tilted a different way, and the work in front of you is the only thing in the room.
You've been captured by the like-axis when:
The corrective is to build the relationship on a different axis: make the like/dislike question irrelevant to the exchange, so the content stands on its own and the work is free to be unflattering.
The evidence is one novelist's account in interview, paraphrased through a video essay.1 He's self-identified by his self-descriptions (a Dominican-American writer of short-story collections, a father who was a Dominican military police apparatchik — clearly Junot Díaz, attributed carefully). The biographical claim about his father is his own and is the source's load-bearing detail; it should be held as his testimony, not independently verified here.
The strongest tension is the risk of self-flattery built into the position. "I refuse popularity" is a claim that conveniently makes the speaker sound principled and brave, and it's available to any artist whose work isn't popular for other reasons. The cynical reading: refusing the like-axis is a story you can tell about unpopularity to make it feel chosen. The novelist partly inoculates against this by insisting his craft is fine — it's not that he can't be liked, it's that he won't organize around it — but the claim remains unfalsifiable from outside.
A real conceptual tension: is all wish-to-be-liked an extension of the dictatorship's axis, or only its weaponized form? Ordinary human warmth, the wish to connect, the pleasure of being appreciated — these are not obviously authoritarian. The novelist's frame risks pathologizing normal social desire by tracing every like-impulse to a control mechanism. The defensible version is narrower: the like-axis becomes a control mechanism when approval is made the universal currency of safety and status, not whenever a person wants to be liked.
Open question: the alternative axis — relationships built on content "more complicated than whether you like me" — sounds clean, but is it achievable, or does the like-response always smuggle itself back in? Even discussion-of-content generates approval and disapproval. Can the axis really be removed, or only de-prioritized?
Second open question: the Reddit analogy claims continuity between dictatorship and platform logic. How far does it actually hold? A regime's like-axis carries the threat of violence behind it; a platform's carries only obscurity. Is the structure genuinely the same, or does removing the violence change what kind of thing the like-axis is?
The novelist's popularity-refusal and Knausgaard's success-poison (Success as Creative Poison) converge on rejecting the like-engine and diverge on why. Knausgaard's objection is aesthetic and personal — pleasing makes the writing bad, and he learned it by ruining five years. The novelist's objection is political and ancestral — the like-axis is the regime's axis, and writing from it would betray the family it disfigured. Knausgaard arrives at the refusal through craft failure; the novelist arrives through inherited political trauma. The two routes meeting at the same destination — don't let being-liked drive the work — is itself evidence that the conclusion is robust: two artists with nothing in common reach it from opposite directions.
He converges with Tyler (Success Breeds Closed Handcuffs) on refusing the audience's grip, and diverges on the audience's nature. Tyler's audience is a pressure that closes you off; the novelist's audience is a political relationship that can run on one of two axes. Tyler wants to stay open despite the audience; the novelist wants to re-engineer the terms of the relationship with them. One is about internal freedom, the other about the structure of the bond.
Behavioral-mechanics — Groupthink Exploitation and Social Conformity Leverage. This is the operator's-manual counterpart to the novelist's political testimony. The behavioral page describes how social conformity is leveraged — how an operator exploits the human wish to be approved by the group to steer behavior, manufacturing consensus so that going along feels like the person's own choice. The novelist describes exactly this mechanism from the target's side and at civilizational scale: the dictatorship leverages the like-axis so thoroughly that an entire society polices itself for ironed shirts and good posture. Read together, the two pages show the same lever from both ends — the operator who pulls it (behavioral-mechanics) and the artist who recognizes he's been raised inside its pull and refuses it (creative-practice). The structural parallel is precise: conformity-leverage works because the wish-to-be-liked is pre-installed and self-administering, which is also exactly why the novelist says it can't be argued away, only refused at the level of which engine you let drive. The insight that neither page reaches alone: the only reliable defense against conformity-leverage is not better judgment in the moment (the leverage operates beneath judgment) but a prior change of axis — building your relationships and your work on something other than approval, so the lever has nothing to grab. The behavioral page tells you how the lever is pulled; the creative page supplies the one durable counter, which is to remove the surface it pulls on.
History — The Okhrana Surveillance Architecture. The Okhrana page documents how imperial Russia ran control through pervasive surveillance — watching, registering, monitoring, so that the population internalized the sense of being observed and self-corrected. Set beside the novelist's like-axis, the two reveal the two faces of authoritarian control: surveillance is control by being-watched, the like-axis is control by wanting-to-be-liked. The Okhrana makes you behave because you might be seen; the like-economy makes you behave because you want to be approved. The novelist's contribution is to show that the softer mechanism may be the more total one — surveillance creates resentment and resistance (you know you're being watched and you resent the watcher), whereas the like-axis creates complicity that feels like your own desire (you don't resent wanting to be liked; you experience it as yourself). The parallel produces an insight neither domain gives alone: a regime that can shift its control from surveillance to the like-axis has upgraded from a system people resist to a system people volunteer for, and the modern platform economy — the Reddit-article fantasy — represents that upgrade running at scale without any regime at all. The historical page shows control imposed from above and watched; the creative page shows control internalized as desire and reproduced from below. The two together describe how authoritarian logic survives the fall of the dictatorship: the surveillance ends, but the like-axis it trained into the society outlives it, which is precisely what "post-dictatorship" means in the novelist's mouth — the watchers are gone but the wish-to-be-liked-into-safety remains.
These two handshakes converge on the page's hardest claim: the like-axis is a control technology, and it is the more durable of the two because it doesn't require an operator or a watcher to keep running. Surveillance needs the Okhrana; conformity-leverage needs an operator pulling it; but the like-axis, once trained into a population, self-administers indefinitely — which is why an artist raised in its aftermath treats refusing it as the live political act it is.
The Sharpest Implication
If the like-axis is a control technology that outlives the regime that installed it, then the platform era has achieved what dictatorships could only dream of: a like-economy running at total scale with no dictator required. The Okhrana needed agents; the Dominican regime needed the novelist's father. The upvote economy needs no one — it's the like-axis fully automated, self-administering, experienced by every participant as their own desire. The novelist's refusal, framed as a response to a dead dictatorship, may actually be the most urgent contemporary creative stance there is: the like-axis he escaped didn't die with the regime, it migrated into the infrastructure we all now live on, friendlier and more total than the version that disfigured his family.
Generative Questions