Linkedin Isn't a Real Place

Brief Preface

I’ve accumulated years of false starts when it comes to writing about where culture meets business—spotting what’s coming before anyone cares. My track record is solid. My timing has been bad. I’d see something five years out, assume everyone else saw it too, and decide not to add to the already existing yaddabytes of data. Then I watch someone else package these observations at the peak of the adoption curve and get booked on podcasts about it half a decade later. But I don’t want to go on about regrets. I’m going to properly relaunch my observations but this time for Linkedin—my current obsession.

Screenshot from X.com CCRU is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England, most known for accelerationism. You’ll read more about this in the next update.

Linkedin is not a real place.

I’ve been obsessed with LinkedIn for months now. Not because it’s useful, but because it’s become much stranger than where I left it several years ago. It’s always been a place of performative professionalism, but now, the platform appears to have algorithmically optimized humans into content bots using the same templates beyond the standard AI-suggested “congrats” replies. I literally can’t tell the AI thought leader template posts apart. Those are then followed by a deluge of day-old Twitter takes reheated for new audiences. People post for “someone” but really they’re posting for LinkedIn itself. Little prayers offered to Mammon’s admin.

This surreal experience is what draws me to it. Disrupting the flow of the timeline is too easy and the cracks are beginning to show— Someone doxxed themselves as a Milady the other day. But also the increase of memes creeping just outside the Overton window and the meta joke posts. People seem to be opting out of the performance or perhaps attention economy arbitrage is circling its next victim.

Another possible theory is the real Linkedin athletes have moved on to offer fractional C-suite services in the Upwork economy while others stay behind to fight for lightbulb reactions and “need to know what marketing girly pitched this” replies.

My bet: We’re about to watch LinkedIn morph from Facebook for wagies into X-lite.

Since you’re still reading, go and subscribe to my Substack to get this in your inbox and read the rest of future posts. It’s just $5/mo. and I intend to provide cultural insights to help you make sense of this dizzying world that you won’t find anywhere else. Up next: “The Tucker interview” and how this further evidence of a new class of “radical centrists.”