(The newsletter is back! I’m trying to make more content, Jennifer, I really am.)
My job requires me to have a LinkedIn account. I won’t go into the details, but I’m compelled to be on LinkedIn for at least 30 minutes a day. It’s not great. After six months of this, I’ve determined that there’s a good case to be made that the roots of the endless capitalistic destruction of the planet and the sanity of its inhabitants are directly explained by LinkedIn. Why? Well, you’ll have to keep reading.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Let’s start this long-overdue newsletter by looking at an example of high-quality LinkedIn content. For some reason, I’ve blocked out the names to these posts, even though they are publically available by people who desperately want to be seen and hired.
This is not performance art. In fact, this post is very much alive and well. The thing about LinkedIn is that it’s immune to irony. There are no self-deprecating jokes to break the mood. There are no “ratio’d” tweets, comment boards, karma systems, or any real method of penetrating the algorithm to find something real. Obviously, this screenshot looks utterly ridiculous out of context. Within a few short seconds, I’m sure many people, even those within my insanely elitist J-school, will have rolled their eyes.
“Could this be any more self-indulgent,” you may think. “Is this the modern version of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? A laudatory and endlessly positive account of your wonderful internship at a top Chicago marketing firm?”
That sarcastic response is just a problem of perspective—this is actually not a bad post, by LinkedIn standards. LinkedIn is a giant, hellish panopticon. Each user is at the center of a web of content curated from their friends and coworkers, all designed to propel the base ideas of corporatism and capitalism. For someone in the world of marketing, perhaps “An Ode to my Edelman internship” is totally normal. Maybe they roll their eyes at the latest post from a journalist or coder saying how happy they were about their latest opportunity. One person’s self-promotion is another person’s ironic meme.
The truth is, once you post anything on LinkedIn, you’ve already lost. There is only one rule at LinkedIn: amassing wealth for yourself is inherently good.
As an experience, the network is designed to suck you into nothingness. LinkedIn completely gives up on the time-based algorithm that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook adore. Some posts coming up on your feed were posted months ago, endlessly recycled so that you have an endless feed of job announcements, promotions, and ludicrously stupid motivational material.
Most people don’t use LinkedIn for the content, though. You’d be insane to do so, because you’d just read endless iterations of “this successful person did this” or “you should hire these people because of this.” These posts continue, even when they glorify the worst ghouls of our society, like Mark Zuckerberg.
Most people use LinkedIn as a job application platform and a way to keep your professional network straight. That is a reasonably useful tool. Other people use LinkedIn to solicit attention from hiring managers and recruiters, typically with their paid subscription service. That, too, is somewhat useful, although it often leaves people open to the most careerist numbskulls in the industry. By the time my parents’ generation ages out, LinkedIn will be the lingua franca of self-promotion and self-marketing.
But, as with many social media platforms, LinkedIn will also become a primary currency of self-worth, if it hasn’t already. Each social media platform is a representation of something that previous generations have always valued: Facebook is based on the spectacle of social circles. Twitter is the spectacle of public discourse. Instagram is the spectacle of art/memory/experience.
In all of this, the users themselves have become the product and commodity that can be sold, influenced, and shunted around to various places. In an age where metadata is the most valuable asset on the planet, LinkedIn solely serves to turn your brain into a commodity for someone else.
Now I’m going to talk about Guy DeBord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, one of my all-time favorite “nerd books” (please excuse Debord’s unnecessary male-only pronouns in the passage—I’m removing authorial intent: obviously all of this applies to everyone).
Although DeBord is a bit of a nut, I keep coming back to him because I haven’t found anything that has more accurately predicted the state of our world today. He’s a typical Western leftist theorist type, but I’ve always found him to be more of a depressed person who happened to be a Marxist rather than the other way around. It’s the work of someone who realizes that Marxism, in its 19th and 20th-century iterations, is effectively over. Written on the edge of the Information Age in 1973, it recognizes that everything is going to be completely different He’s as indebted to 1960s American sociologists like Lewis Mumford (loved by people in my Urban Politics class, ignored by the Critical Theory class) as he is to Marx himself. Like all of us would realize 40 years later, he just needs an intellectual way to cope with what has happened. This makes his work annoyingly prescient.
Take Thesis 45 of The Society, where he notes that increasing automation will only lead to the engorgement of the services sector, or Theses 173-178, which viciously lays out the problem of gentrification, or “a new architecture aimed at the poor”.
As for LinkedIn, the reality of what’s happening, according to DeBord and the Situationists, is clear.
“The more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires…This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere…The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life."
You could easily apply that to social media: the more you’re on it, the less alive you are. This also explains why some of the most popular content on LinkedIn revolves around reminding people that they are, in fact, humans with flesh and blood.
The unchallenged assumption is that most people see themselves as engines of industry or something like that. Of course, we’ve also been dealing with the fallout from this phenomenon in all facets of life, from the rigging of elections to rising rates of depression and anxiety. Yet many of these analyses are based on the fundamental assumption that humans are not products, but individual people. But…you aren’t. If you have a LinkedIn page, you are advertising yourself as a commodity. Why else would I have a manicured, airbrushed, stock-image photo of myself in a jacket that I borrowed from someone else as my profile picture? You have a bunch of skills that can be exploited, and you gladly serve them up so that people can find you.
In this age of corporate personhood, we’ve come to imagine brands as people, tweeting and interacting with us as if they were our friends. On LinkedIn, we see the other scenario—what if every individual person solely interacted with something as a brand? A basic LinkedIn feed is probably what a bunch of brands would look at in their spare time: meaningless inspirational content, ways to improve efficiency, and new opportunities to expand and grow.
But we don’t have unlimited resources. In fact, they are growing scarcer by the day. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t falling either. This transition from a person as a living being into a commodity is fundamentally incompatible with environmental realities. Yet when anyone tries to go against the destructive effects of rampant consumerism, we find ourselves exactly where DeBord is, overwhelmed, confused, and broken by the commodification being that has permeated down to the simple act of a random college student getting a job.
So, laugh at these LinkedIn posts all you want. I’ll even give you another absurd one, just for kicks.
Just remember though: a platform where the most popular content is telling people to be more empathetic itself assumes that decency, freedom, and dignity are, at best, luxury items. That’s not ideal. At all.