i want to be the antichrist of LinkedIn. Anne Hathaway meme. bro, honestly. i open the app and it’s just people feeding each other AI slop until the whole thing feels like a massive human centipede. one person posts the template, everyone else chews it up, adds “couldn’t agree more”, and passes it along with a headshot and a lesson about resilience.
every tiny event has to become a professional origin story. went for a walk? leadership lesson. got rejected? actually, gratitude. your team had a normal Tuesday? “i’m humbled to share”. it’s like nobody is allowed to just have a day anymore. everything has to be content with a takeaway.
not every awful thing is a networking opportunity
i saw someone post about his friend being in a coma, with what looked like an AI-generated paragraph attached. and i just sat there thinking: what the fuck are we doing? someone’s friend is unconscious, and somehow the first instinct is to turn it into a post for the feed. make it polished. make it moving. make sure it says something about life, leadership, perspective, whatever gets the right people to react.
maybe i’m missing context. maybe he was trying to honour his friend. but watching someone else’s worst moment get packaged into a neat little engagement story felt horrible. a person in a coma is not a metaphor for your career. their family and friends don’t owe the internet a tidy paragraph to make your post feel profound.
the performance is the product
that’s what gets me about the whole site. it’s not just that people use AI to write a post. it’s that the post is already a performance before the AI gets involved. the carefully vulnerable anecdote, the sentence that sounds like a mic drop, the little moral at the end. then everyone claps in the comments because they’re also waiting for their turn on stage.
and the AI makes it all feel even more like it came off a conveyor belt. same rhythm, same fake-big feeling, same “here’s what this taught me” ending. you can almost hear the auto-generated applause. a feed full of people trying to sound like people, using a machine to help them do it.
the “see more” ambush
and the clickbait, bro. “i got gunned down at JPMorgan.” then LinkedIn cuts it off and gives you that little see more like you’re opening a police report. you click, and the big reveal is: “just kidding!!!”
that’s not a story. that’s a bloke using the idea of being shot to make you tap a button. it’s engagement bait wearing a suit. i know the whole point is to make you stop scrolling, but that doesn’t make it less embarrassing. you got me to click, congratulations. now i’m annoyed and you’ve made your workplace sound like a hostage situation for likes.
i know people use LinkedIn to find work and share things they’ve actually made. fair enough. that’s useful. i’m talking about the weird theatre where every human experience has to be turned into proof that you’re insightful, employable, and ready to lead a team of seven.
i don’t want to turn grief into a brand lesson. i don’t want to congratulate a stranger for having a “powerful perspective” on a crisis that isn’t theirs. sometimes something terrible happens and it’s just terrible. sometimes a good thing happens and you can be happy without writing a carousel about it. god forbid we let anything stay ours for five minutes.
so yeah. antichrist of LinkedIn. let people have a life that doesn’t need a call to action. stop making every feeling audition for a job. and if i see one more AI post ending with “thoughts?” i’m closing the app and going outside.