A quick tour of Medium profiles will reveal a certain numbing pattern: Medium members represent themselves (with exceptions of course), as gurus, geniuses, futurists, entrepreneurs, health-coaches, pundits, and perhaps worst of all, poets. If an alien anthropologist were to study earth based on the self-identifications of Medium members, the alien anthropologists would think we were living either in a utopia, or a joke. Medium has become a forum for self-branding; a medium for fake expertise. The poets are mostly abysmal, the self-help writers… well… are self-help writers; the pundits are pundits (pale echoes of the pale echo of TV punditry). As for the spiritual gurus — they have no shame; if they had reached enlightenment then they wouldn’t be promoting it online. Personally, I like Medium, but mostly because I am a contrarian, and by comparison, most of the writing on Medium makes my own work seem better by comparison.