Of all the most nerve-wracking and intimate things you can do for someone, writing a LinkedIn post for them is most certainly at the top. You would be remiss to think of this task as an easy one; to do so would be the height of naivety. Imagine this: a loved one gets a promotion, and they entrust you with the responsibility of announcing this promotion to their ‘network’ on LinkedIn. The stakes of this situation are presented to you with great urgency, and you are instructed to carry it out with the utmost care so as not to anger the ‘algorithmic gods’ of the platform.
The artistic decisions to be made for this announcement are simply too burdensome: Will you be delighted, thrilled, or honoured to share this? Who will you thank and in what order? How long is too long for a post like this? How will you strike the balance between bragging and being humble without making this balancing act too obvious? Should you share three things you have learned from this experience to enlighten the masses? Is it appropriate to start a post by saying ‘Here’s what most people get wrong about getting a promotion’? Should you say ‘onwards and upwards,’ just for the sake of it?
LinkedIn and its algorithm are a well-oiled machine that runs on the fuel of fear. Everybody making a post is desperate for attention and terrified of standing out too much for that attention. We want our post to be the most unique but also the most like everyone else’s. The aforementioned questions might sound like a joke, but we have all tried to answer them in our own attempts at making a LinkedIn announcement. While it is true that every social media platform takes on a life and language of its own, there is something distinctly disturbing about the way this has happened on LinkedIn.
This is in large part due to the rise of AI-generated ‘slop’ on the platform, which has become so prevalent that LinkedIn’s VP and executive editor released a statement in May claiming that they are taking steps to ‘crack down on automation tools, dial back on generic content, and strengthen authenticity’.
Mostly, however, it is due to the fact that this ‘performance’ is a means to an increasingly competitive end: getting a job, or keeping a job. Most companies, especially in the tech industry, encourage and require their employees to have active LinkedIn profiles where they either engage with the AI-generated ‘thought leadership’ content of the company or must create their own. This pressure to be part of an imaginary LinkedIn rat race is everywhere in Pakistan, which has led to everyone sharing more or less the same generic ideas in a seemingly endless loop which we are all then made to scroll through for eternity.
They all follow LinkedIn’s ‘large blank spaces between each sentence’ format, the aim of which is a false sense of drama akin to the climax of a film:
‘Let me explain.
The real issue wasn’t the concept.
It was the timing.’
There is also the ‘short, unnecessary question answered in a short, ridiculous answer’ format:
‘My family? I didn’t have one.
Help? I didn’t need it.
Marco? Polo.’
And there are, of course, the inescapable ‘Here’s’ sentences:
‘Here’s the thing…’
‘Here’s what we get wrong about…’
‘Here are three things…’
‘Here’s what you need to know about…’
The examples of LinkedIn language and its nonsensical nature are endless, and there is no dearth of content on LinkedIn that pokes fun at it. There are search engines like Kagi which have AI translators that can convert anything into ‘LinkedIn Speak.’
Supposedly, we are all in on the joke. There are now virtual assistant jobs specifically for creating and commenting on ‘thought leadership’ content that is gaining popularity in countries like the Philippines, where employees are expected to generate comments using ChatGPT and leave them under posts made with ChatGPT. As one virtual assistant puts it in a report by Rest of World:
‘It’s all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people.’
If the inauthenticity of all this is so well-known, why is everyone agreeing to do it anyway? It is a performance of nonsense that we can all laugh at and agree is bogus, but one we cannot help but be a part of. We still carefully curate an online profile for LinkedIn; we consider paying 5000 rupees for LinkedIn Premium so we can finally find out who viewed our profile; we make ‘delighted’ announcements about our achievements in the tone and tenor the algorithm rewards; and most of all, we all type — through gritted teeth — ‘Congratulations!’ and ‘Well-deserved!’ to our peers who probably did not deserve it.
This creation and maintenance of an online identity for what many of us imagine will be a potential employer is, at best, very complex and, at worst, detrimental to our relationships with ourselves and with each other. We are all in pursuit of a ‘personal brand’ on LinkedIn, and many of us work tirelessly towards it day and night, each hashtag a metaphorical brick in the metaphorical empire LinkedIn is allegedly going to help us create. While there is so much to question and explore in this negotiation of identities, the central question that emerges is a human one: What do we lose when we become these people?
Author and activist Naomi Klein writes in her book Doppelganger:
‘The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything — liking, loathing, sharing — and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers…’
Klein writes in the context of social media in general, but her idea of ‘digital doppelgangers’ of ourselves scraped together from the meaningless but meaningful morsels of selfhood we sacrifice at the altar of LinkedIn is deeply resonant. The most harrowing part, perhaps, is that while these are cheapened replicas of ourselves, these digital identities are also cheapened replicas of each other. We all sound the same in LinkedIn’s choir, and so our data-fed imitations imitate each other. It is an echo chamber, and the more time we spend in it without acknowledging a profound loss, the worse we are for it. As Klein puts it:
‘It is shaped by external perceptions, interpretations, and predictions about us. In this way, it has a great deal in common with a human doppelganger: a person whom the world confuses with you but who is not actually you and yet can impact your life in profound ways.’
Now more than ever, it is exhausting and demoralising to constantly witness this endless performance of a fictitious identity on LinkedIn, and we can be certain that this will only get worse. We will all continue to laugh at it cartoonishly until it turns into a grimace, because after all, we all want to get promoted and use the same hashtag one day. We love this joke, but the joke is always on us.
In a world where language evolves and devolves constantly, there is often less vocabulary than required for the acknowledgement of these innate losses. Opening the LinkedIn app and feeling like you will suffocate under the weight of something you cannot name is an experience we are all becoming, and are going to become, more familiar with. It seems that this inexplicable grief for oneself and others is part of the current world order, or the new prerequisite for entry-level jobs. Until something — or someone — changes, it is conceivable that we will continue to give one another dead-eyed looks from across the room when we hear the dreaded ‘ping!’ of a LinkedIn connection request being sent or accepted. We will also continue to consider LinkedIn Premium and click on ‘celebrate’ for a post that ought to be censored, and we will decide, finally, on ‘onwards and upwards’ — just for the sake of it.