Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation)

This is a blog post version of the talk I delivered at Software Should Work 2026. Shoutouts to Isaac Van Doren for running such a delightful conference and nailing it first try, and for infecting us all with his charming enthusiasm for Columbia, Missouri.

Part 1: The Pill

When I gave this talk, I warmed up the crowd by asking the audience who liked the 1999 film The Matrix. Roughly half raised their hands. But the kicker was the followup question, "who has never seen this movie?". 10 brave youngsters raised thair hands to audible gasps.

In this movie, there's an iconic moment where our hero, Ted "Theodore" Logan, is presented with two choices, the red pill or the blue pill.

The question is essentially "Do you want to know an uncomfortable truth?"; the blue pill means "no" and the red pill means "yes".

To the audience, the answer is obvious. If the main character chose blue, the credits would roll before anything happened. But the metaphor is so strong and the cinematography kicks so much ass that the scene influenced our culture and language to the point where people who haven't even heard of the film say the phrase "based and red-pilled".

Let's talk about the "black pill".

It comes from "incel" culture. The word is a portmanteau of "involuntary" and "celibate". Basically, young men who had trouble dating started complaining about it together on the Internet. So far, so good, but an unfortunate feedback cycle emerged. Those who used the space in a productive manner, such as brainstorming, encouragment, mentorship, etc., tended to shape up, mature, work through their problems, and, to put it bluntly, get laid. At that point, they didn't really feel like sticking around and commiserating anymore, so they left. This was a natural filtering process. Thus, when new, impressionable youngsters entered the community, they were greeted only by miserable, hopeless, antisocial losers. Over time the culture became so toxic that the accepted wisdom became, essentially, "Give…