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Welcome to your Sunday Love Letter by Kelly Diels
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Here's What's Happening This Week at KellyDiels.com:
It's my 53rd birthday this week,
so I'm having a 53% off sale
for 53 hours...
Technically the birthday shop doesn't open until Mar 14. But you're here, you're reading this, so I'm not going to quibble or make you wait.
Go ahead, go get your early access. The shop is live.
(Tell me what you think of the shop because I built the shop's Wordpress plugin myself!
I wanted you to be able to buy multiple products at once AND get a payment plan on the whole thing -- and I could not find a platform that would do that, so I made one!!!
Should I sell it? Did I just invent a side quest business for myself?!)
NOW ENROLLING → Surface Your Methodology — March Cohort Now Open. If you have deep expertise that you can't quite explain — the thing you do automatically that your clients rave about but you struggle to put into words — this is the program where we surface it, name it, and turn it into something you can sell. Learn more and join here. WE START WEDNESDAY and yes it's in the birthday shop too :)
FREE -- Figure out What to Build, When. Find out what's actually missing from your business infrastructure — and what to build next. Takes five minutes. Changes everything. Take it here.
This Week on House of Cultural Influence
This week I was obsessing about what shapes our decisions and how I think we're overemphasizing character and underemphasizing conditions
My friend, Tracye Warfield, is a speaker, author, and the creator of High Pressure Reset™️ — a practical framework for the high-capacity humans who are holding everything together for everyone else and have not exhaled in a while.
If you are the strong one in every room, Tracye built this for you.
Her 90-minute live virtual High Pressure Reset workshop is where you actually get to put the weight down, think clearly, and find your way back to leading from calm strength instead of constant strain. Early bird pricing is available now. PS I'll be there soaking up all her tips because when let me tell you I need them tooooooo.....
ok, onward to your Sunday Love Letter
hello,
The first time I tried to follow the standard marketing playbook, my body said no before my mind had an opinion.
I tried anyway. I would sit down to write the pain-point email and get three sentences in and close the laptop. I would start a launch sequence and send two emails and go silent for six weeks. I would write my about page, delete it, rewrite it, delete it again. I would design and redesign the website instead of sending the thing. I would tell myself I wasn't ready yet, that I needed to get clearer on my niche, that I had a mindset problem, that I was bad at marketing. I would start again. Collapse. Disappear.
I concluded the problem was me.
I had, at that point, already survived childhood sexual abuse. I know grooming when I see it. I didn't have that word for the marketing tactics I was being handed. I just knew, in the gut, in the place that knows before the mind does. And I yet kept telling myself that I was the problem for not being enough of a killer to crush it with my marketing.
Then came the email.
A very large Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand — someone I had followed for years, learned from, championed, genuinely admired — sent an email in the days after a black man was killed by police and not indicted. She knew we were in pain, the email said. She had something that might help us transform that pain into something productive.
Hope rose in me. Real hope. Finally, I thought, one of the leaders I had built so much from was going to use her considerable platform and her considerable reach to say something that mattered.
My husband and children are black. I have a ringside seat for the daily, relentless, ordinary dehumanisation that is the non-lethal end of the spectrum that ends in murder with impunity. I have sat in school offices five times in one school year because a child kept calling my daughter the N-word. I have watched my husband be pulled over for no reason by a police officer who, when asked if there was a problem, said maybe. I have been present for The Talk — when my husband taught our teenage son what to do with his hands when, not if, he gets stopped by police. You know, the real driving lesson that happens before the driving lessons can begin.
So when that email arrived, I clicked through with my whole heart open.
The video wasn't recent; it was months old. It was about how to manage your feelings when a difficult coworker upsets you.
I set down my phone and while it looked like nothing was happening, what was actually happening was that my entire internal cosmos collapsed into a black hole. Everything exploded, imploded and showed itself.
My world never looked the same again. Thank goodness.
I am not telling this story to indict the person who sent that email. She is not the point and never was. What I understood sitting there having a silent nervous breakdown — what I suddenly understood — is that architecture produced that email. The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand formula, with its particular logic about what builds reach and reputation and revenue, produced a response to black death that was, functionally, extractive. The system got what it always gets: views, comments, appreciation, clicks. White women get celebrated for saying a little something safe at no cost to themselves. Architecture doesn't need villains. It doesn't need bad intentions. It runs just fine on ordinary people doing what they were shaped to do — including white women participating in white supremacy without ever intending to, because the architecture of whiteness makes that the path of least resistance. The system is indifferent to your values. It just keeps producing its outputs.
Everything I had been separately noticing — the lifestyle marketing, the positivity culture that shunned struggle, the feminist language deployed by non-feminist business practices, the unconscious buying triggers running underneath the conscious empowerment messaging — coalesced in that moment into a single thing with a name. The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. Not a bad actor. An architecture.
So I had a word. It was a start and a necessary stepping stone.
Jeff Walker, one of the online marketing elders, developed what he called the Product Launch Formula in the early 2000s and codified it in a bestselling book. His formula became, arguably, the operating system underneath most online business models — traced through Frank Kern, through Eben Pagan (whose other identity was David DeAngelo, a pickup artist who built an empire teaching men to exploit women's psychological vulnerabilities for sexual access), through Tony Robbins, through Brendon Burchard, through Marie Forleo's B-School and Kris Carr and Lisa Sasevich and thousands of their students who became coaches who trained their own students. A lineage. A transmission. An industry.
Walker's specific insight — he calls it "the final piece of the puzzle" — was that humans don't make purchasing decisions rationally. They make them emotionally, subconsciously, through what he called mental triggers: "There are a number of mental triggers that influence those decisions and behaviors. These triggers are always working just below our consciousness, and they exert enormous influence over how we act." He learned this from Robert Cialdini's book Influence, which Cialdini wrote in order to help readers protect themselves from unscrupulous marketers. Walker read it as a manual.
The specific building blocks. The makeover story: I was just like you — stuck, broken, insufficient — until I discovered the thing that changed everything. Deployed as intimacy, engineered as contempt. The free gift that isn't — the weaponised reciprocity sequence designed to create debt from a gift the recipient never requested, exploiting the justice instinct in humans, the deep wiring toward fairness and reciprocal relationship, and turning it into a mechanism for extraction. The manufactured authority: Walker teaches this through a story of a teenage boy who directed traffic with a flashlight during a jam and got his car through because the other drivers obeyed the signal of authority — and Walker's lesson is that it doesn't take much to manufacture the appearance of authority; the appearance is sufficient. The scarcity sequence. The countdown timer. The open cart and the closed cart. The last-day emails, plural. The pain-point opener that locates the wound and presses on it to manufacture urgency. The testimonial stack. The community trigger — people buy to belong. Each element a tactic. Together: a complete operating system, running on millions of people daily, spreading through an industry that described itself as empowerment.
Predtech.
Hypocognition is the condition of having an experience you cannot name. Not ignorance — experience. Something is happening to you and through you and around you, and you can feel every inch of it, and you have no language for it, and without language you cannot fully think it or argue it or refuse it or build an alternative to it. Without the word, the experience routes inward and becomes a personal failing. You were the problem. You were too sensitive. You were imagining things.
Think about what the word gaslighting did when it entered common usage. Before that word, women experiencing it were told they were crazy. The word arrived and a whole population stopped blaming themselves for their own confusion. Think about what emotional labor did: Arlie Hochschild coined it in 1983, and suddenly invisible unpaid work had a name, a claim, an argument. Before it had a name, women were just difficult, demanding, ungrateful. Think about what coercive control did in courts and in law: before it became clinical and legal language, domestic abuse victims couldn't explain what was happening when there were no bruises. The category didn't exist. You couldn't see what you couldn't name, and courts couldn't protect what they couldn't see. The word created the category and the category created the possibility of intervention. Think about what love bombing did.
The word doesn't create the phenomenon. It makes the phenomenon visible and nameable and, finally, refusable.
None of these words described something new. Gaslighting was already happening. Emotional labor was already being extracted. Coercive control was already running in bedrooms and courtrooms. The technology industries that followed didn't invent new human activities either — they built infrastructure to do existing things at scale. Fintech didn't invent extracting from money; it systematised it. Edtech didn't invent gatekeeping knowledge; it automated it. These aren't disruptions. They are intensifications. Predtech didn't invent predation. It built the operating system.
Dr. Dominique Riviere, Ph.D., founder of Fictive Kin Equity Lab, is the one who invented the word 'predtech'.
She dropped it, casually, in a Substack note:
"You know how we have all sorts of names for the different types of technology that exist? E.g. fintech, medtech, cleantech, edtech, etc…
Lately, I've been thinking about a new one: 'predtech'.
As in, predatory technology that follows / tracks / conditions / grooms you to accept dangerous, harmful behaviour as normal, natural, or safe..."
Ssssssh don't tell anyone but I can sometimes be a bit jaded because I've spent a decade inside this analysis and genuinely no longer expect to be surprised by any of it — but in that moment I was stopped cold by a noun.
That noun - predtech -- describes in 8 letters what I've spent ten years describing-- tracing its lineage, documenting its tactics, essay by essay, from 2016 forward. -- and why I've spent ten years building an entire counter-architecture to the thing.
I already had some of the language -- The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, for example - but the word for all of it was what had been missing.
And so when it arrived my response was immediate and visceral and invigorating.
More accurately: it was re-invigorating.It called my entire body of work into focus.
An then Dr. Riviere added: Especially since it's your writing that helped me come up with the idea.
We handed each other thet thing each of us was missing.
Another story from those formative business years: I am at a factory, consulting, and they give me a tour. We file past a bench near the exit where women in coveralls are sitting on their break, smoking. Big women. Butch women. Women who looked like they could lift things, fix things, who wore their bodies like bodies and not like ornaments. Our tour guide was the opposite in every visible way — extravagantly, effortfully, capital-B Beautiful, the kind of beautiful that requires sustained daily labour and reads, in the right context, as a credential. As we walked away, she got heated. Not a throwaway remark — heated: "I just don't understand women who don't take care of themselves. Why would you want to look frumpy and butch? Like, get your life together."
The tour guide was playing her position flawlessly. Better than most of us. The investment required is nothing less than everything she's got — professional beauty as a survival strategy is a whole-life, whole-being, all-the-time endeavour, and there is simply not enough compensation in the world. So she's always on the hunt for new sources: more applause, more approval, more women as an envious audience.
And then there are the women on the bench who are not doing what she's doing. They are are existing without performing and who have, apparently, the audacity to just be.
But our system only has two positions. Prey or predator. And the women on that bench aren't sending the signals that would fit them neatly into either category. That's the second reason our tour guide was mad, beyond her own effort at a game others were refusing: their refusal.. The refusal itself is the threat — not because the tour guide consciously reasoned this through, but because a system built on two positions cannot tolerate people who simply opt out of both. If enough people do that, the whole status architecture that she thinks she's winning at collapses and all the sacrifice, all the effort, all the unrelenting work she's done— for nothing.
That's why she was pissed at the women in in overalls, because what do butch women signal, in that system?
A world in which the extravagantly, effortfully Beautiful woman might not have a material advantage over other women.
That is not a small threat. That is an existential one.
And the tour guide was enforcing against it — for free, on strangers, during a tour about something else entirely — because the architecture had recruited her so completely she didn't know she was working.
This is predtech's most elegant feature: it recruits its targets as enforcers. It doesn't need a supervisor present; it conscripts whoever is handy in the moment.
Like my guide, I knew the architecture from the inside. I had been starting and collapsing my business for years — unable to sustain the standard tactics, concluding repeatedly that the failure was mine.
Then came that email.
And the clarity.
Everything clicked into place and I sat down and wrote what I understood: there are two positions the culture offers. Prey or predator. Everything the empowerment industry was selling was position-switching — not a different game, just better placement within the same one. The whole apparatus of the launch formula and the mastermind and the scarcity timer and the shame-based email sequence was designed to move you from prey to predator and call the movement freedom.
My refusal, written and public: I don't want to be prey. I also don't want to be a predator. I don't actually like this game at all.
That refusal is where ten years of work began.
A friend, Lara Easburn -- she's a PhD in linguistics and a Facebook ads consultant, naturally -- told me something recently that shocked the shit out me because I hadn't fully clocked it: before I started writing about payment plan surcharges in 2016 and 2017 — the practice of charging women extra for the privilege of not having all the money upfront — they were standard, unremarked, MASSIVE (sometimes 25%-50%!!!!) and everywhere in women's coaching and transformational online spaces. Now, as Lara pointed out to me, they are rare in our spaces. Lara thinks it is because of the work I seeded about payment plans and how so many of you carried my critique far and wide. That is what naming the architecture -- the barrel rather than the bad apples-- does. The surcharge didn't disappear because individual coaches became more ethical. It disappeared because the architecture became visible enough to refuse.
The tour guide is a position-switcher who doesn't know she's in the game. The FLEB is a position-switcher who who calls it empowerment. And the whole infrastructure — every launch sequence, every countdown timer, every pain-point email written chock-a-block full of subconscious coercion — is predtech.
Dr. Riviere had the name. What I had was ten years of documentation ready to be named.
The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand was predtech with an empowerment costume. She is predtech dressed in liberation language — and empowerment is catnip, particularly for white women, which was the specific genius and the specific horror of the girlboss. Take the aesthetics of independence. Borrow the language of feminism. Sell position-switching as liberation and recruit the people you're extracting from as your distribution network, your testimonials, your proof of concept. Like Ivanka Trump at the 2016 Republican convention — weaponised white femininity operating in plain sight at the scale of national politics, years before most people were naming it in the coaching industry.
Everyone sees through the girlboss now, but seeing through the girlboss is not the same thing as being done with predtech. Look at the MAGA women in power — Noem, Bondi, Leavitt. They are FLEBs. The first rule of FLEB success is be professionally pretty, and not one of them breaks it, not for a single press conference. But it's not just pretty — it's a specific grammar of prettiness: long hair, heels, fitted, full face, a particular register of femininity that reads as disciplined and aspirational rather than threatening. That grammar does exactly what Walker's flashlight does. The teenage boy who directed traffic during a jam got compliance from other drivers not because he had authority but because he produced the right signal of authority, and the signal was sufficient. The prettiness signals manufacture authority through aspiration — if she looks like that, she must be someone worth following. The signals work simultaneously up and down the ladder: the men above read compliant femininity and reward it; everyone below reads aspirational polish and obeys it. One aesthetic. Two functions. Still marked as prey for the men at the top. Still wielding authority over everyone further down — over women who refuse the performance, over immigrants, over anyone in a feminized position. The FLEB got a security clearance. The operating system didn't change.
Predtech doesn't only underwrite the coaching industry. It underwrites the economy. It underwrites politics. It underwrites the architecture of attention itself. The coaching industry was simply the version I had a front-row seat to, the scale at which I could see it most clearly, but the logic runs without interruption from the online course to the boardroom to the island.
I thought when everyone saw through the girlboss that the analysis had done its work. I got bored. I thought the moment had passed.
I was wrong about what the moment even was.
The Epstein files.
I wrote two essays when they dropped — one about the lineage running from pickup artistry through intellectual respectability into the mainstream coaching industry, and one about what the files revealed about the worldview running underneath all of it. The connection between the coaching industry's architecture and the network the files exposed is not a conspiracy theory. It is a logical conclusion. The island — a private island designed for the explicit purpose of making certain men's access to certain women total and consequence-free — is where the worldview arrives when it has enough money and enough impunity to stop pretending. The launch formula, the mastermind, the board, the island: one continuous system at different price points, the predator/prey logic running without interruption, the same architecture scaled up until the mask is optional.
The files didn't reveal something new. They stripped the last layer of deniability from something that has been running in plain sight — in every countdown timer, in every shame-based email sequence, in every authority-manufacturing exercise, in every room where powerful men decided what women were for and built systems accordingly.
Then Dr. Riviere dropped the word. And I — the jaded woman, the woman who has spent a decade inside this analysis and no longer expected to be surprised by any of it — went still.
We are not at the end of this reckoning. We are barely at the beginning.
And now we have the name.
Roughly ninety percent of human behaviour isn't conscious or deliberate. We are overdetermined by our circumstances and our structures. The tour guide didn't choose her contempt. The entrepreneur at 11pm writing pain-point copy didn't choose her template — she was handed it by her coach who was handed it by her coach who was handed it by Jeff Walker who learned the mental triggers from a book written to protect people from exactly this. The systems ran. This is not an ethics conversation — it is an architecture conversation. Values get eaten by architecture a hundred times a day in every domain of life, not because people are bad but because that is what architecture does. You cannot out-virtue your infrastructure.
And yet: consciousness matters. Awareness is how we get free. We need the word and we need the different tools. Neither alone is enough.
One more thing that needs saying, because the conflation does real damage: selling is not inherently predatorial. Business is not inherently extractive. The predtech tactics are standard not because they work best — they are standard because they were built by people who did not care what they cost the buyer. There is another way to move people. I've been building it for ten years, right here, with you, in this body of work, and in the Copywriting for Culture Makers method I developed and certified people in.
Which is also why, when Amy Porterfield — one of the most famous women teachers of the standard online marketing playbook -- recently stepped back from the space she built, I wasn't surprised. AI is going to do the work her her courses were doing because AI is extraordinarily good at deploying known information -- which is exactly what conventional online marketing tactics are: known, documented, codifiable, repeatable. The countdown timer, the pain-point opener, the scarcity sequence — AI can teach you all of it, better and faster and cheaper than any human. The business model that predtech built is the first business model that AI will eat.
What AI cannot do is what culture makers do. AI recombines what already exists. It cannot imagine what doesn't. It cannot look at a factory tour and see the operating system of an entire gendered worldview in one eye roll and it cannot independently initiate a movement or build a counter-architecture on different founding principles. The central issue in the work you and I do are not information problems. They are imagination problems.
I know this because imagination is what kept moving in me when nothing else could. Late last year and into this year, I was in the grip of a monthslong depressive episode. I limped out of it recently only to land in the worst respiratory infection of my life. It was so bad that a secondary infection -- an actual abscess-- formed in my throat. For the last 10days I have been the sickest I've ever been in my life without actually being hospitalized. I've been on lockdown on "medical voice rest " -- that's a thing?! --and as a result, I have become one with the sofa. I've not left it for almost two weeks except to visit my bed.
"Medical voice rest" means I was literally under orders not to speak.
And the whole time I was becoming one with the sofa, silent, I was reading. Dreaming. Writing when I could. Building a WordPress plugin, as one does. Did I know how to do that? I did not. Did I figure it out because all the options I tried were unacceptable? Yes I did.
This was not an attempt to pretend away the ill, or 'stay productive' when I needed to rest; this was not overefforting or muscling through. This was being so confined that my imagination took flight and I took comfort in creating. There is a difference and it matters enormously. Creating is pleasurable, generative and genuinely, deeply satisfying to do. Even when the conditions seem impossible. Especially then.
That woman who couldn't run the system — you, me -- wasn't failing at it. She was seeing it for what it was and recoiling.
I am still on the sofa, for the record.
Still on the mend. Still medicated, still writing my ass off, building plugins, running a birthday shop on infrastructure I built myself, having the epiphany that I already built one of the antidotes to predtech -- Copywriting for Culture Makers — and deciding to un-retire it.
We don't only create when we're well-resourced. We don't only build when we're at full capacity. We cannot wait until conditions are idea (have you seen the world? We are way past that.)
We build from here. From this. From whatever this is.
We don't have to be fully healed, fully empowered, or fully ready.
We can play sick, we can play hurt — that is, in fact, what life is: a series of unfortunate, terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad, wildly suboptimal conditions.
And we don't have to run predtech to survive it. We just have to be done with it.
love + the word that changes everything,
Kelly
Some of the essay from my decade of work this essay draws on:
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Together We Rise Communications, Inc
45953 Airport Road, Unit 2B, Chilliwack, BC V2P 1A3
Important to note: just 'cuz I mention someone's work does not mean we know each other. It doesn't mean they even know I exist nor does it mean that they like me or approve of my work. Nor does it mean I endorse them unequivocally or that they endorse me. It means that there's a particular cultural thing that I'm trying to talk about and an idea or project of their's is relevant and I want to give credit where credit is due.
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