Ed Harris would like to connect with you on LinkedIn
Capitalism’s last refuge from reality.
Here’s something I’ve wondered for a while: If you became famous on a social network that was full of bots that were programmed to treat you like an A-list celebrity, would you use it?
Like, you post a single emoji and a selfie on Truman, the new social network from Meta that looks indistinguishable from Twitter or Threads. It gets three million likes. Not artificially, where the like counter goes up on its own; three million different bots, who are also interacting with each other, actually click the like button. You post a dumb joke; it’s shared 800,000 times. You wade into politics; everyone starts talking about what you said; important people are debating each other in your replies. Someone makes a remix of your post; four million people watch it. Your posts become memes; trends; hashtags; a verb. You get thousands of new followers, every day. People start mentioning you in conversations that you aren’t a part of; they want your opinions; they wonder what you think; they develop a parasocial relationship with you. Cute people slide into your DMs. Truman is an entire world’s water cooler; everyone is there; it is as sprawling and endless as Twitter—trillions of interactions, billions of people, eight million stories—but here, you are one of its main characters. When Buffett speaks, the market reacts. When Kendrick drops, we dissect every lyric. And when you speak, legions of avatars like and respond.1
But none of it is “real.” There are no human beings on the other side of your screen. When you log out of Truman and step into some other world—into your living room with your family; out at an actual, physical coffee shop or bar; on other social networks, populated by an entirely different set of accounts—nothing crosses the chasm. What happens in your Truman stays on your Truman, and what happens in everyone else’s Truman stays in theirs.
If you could join that social network—that matrix, in which you’re rich, someone important, like an actor—would you? Would you post on it? Would you feel good when the bots liked what you said?
What if every other bot on Truman was its own unique AI agent? What if there were a billion of them, interacting with each other, having millions of conversations about things that aren’t you, and you were one of a few hundred popular accounts that they followed? What if they were all trained to have their own personalities? What if each of them was designed to mimic the personality of a real person, and to act like that person acted? What if it wasn't a simulation of a social network, but a simulation of an entire world, as seen through a social network?
What if the AI agents weren’t explicitly told to like you or your posts, and were instead just instructed to read them, and respond in whatever way the human that they represented would? What if Truman only gave you an audience—millions of engaged followers—but you had to earn their admiration?
What if there was only one Truman network? What if Meta could only afford to run one billion-bot social network, and you won a special lottery to be the only person at the center of it? What if your popularity on Truman was unique, because you were the only person in the world who was on Truman?
What if other people could join your Truman network? What if it was populated by AI agents that followed you, but it was also populated by real people who followed you too? What if you couldn’t tell how many of each there were, and you didn’t know who was who? What if the bots were dogs?
What if there were no bots at all, and Truman was instead full of people who were paid to read your posts? What if you weren’t interacting with AI agents that were programmed with code, but with people who had been programmed with money?
What if the people weren’t actually paid, but felt professionally obligated to like your posts? What if their core directive was commercial quid pro quo? What if Truman was an insular game of artificial influence, powered by an unspoken understanding that the whole thing is a ouroboros, a circular reference error, a corporate Klein bottle of content, a place where people promoted everyone else’s posts in hopes that it would somehow help promote theirs? What if the people on Truman were real, but their motivations were manufactured?
What if Truman wasn't named after a fake character who lived at the center of a fake world, but was instead called something more plausibly genuine, like The Hub, or IndustryIQ, or WorkLife?
What if it was called LinkedIn?
Social-affect capitalism
Ten years ago, LinkedIn, which was bought by Microsoft in 2016, was a résumé and a rolodex.2 It was a career fair for tryhards, a website that you never logged into unless you were either looking for a job, looking to fill a job, or looking up how old someone was.3 Now, it’s a true social network, for work. There are feeds; there are posts; there are likes and followers and influencers. And while Microsoft shares very little about how many people use LinkedIn, it seems to be having a prolonged moment of popularity. It’s no longer a passive professional portfolio that gets updated once every few years, but a place where people post regularly, and a website—and app!—that we idly scroll through like we used to scroll through Facebook 15 years ago.4
But calling LinkedIn a social network for work probably isn’t specific enough. Work is on other social networks too: TikTok is where we complain about our work; Twitter is where we get in food fights about our work. LinkedIn is for…advertising our work? It’s our work lives, oversaturated in Lo-Fi. Nearly everything on LinkedIn is either a press release or a corporate blog post for our personal brand: “Official” announcements of job changes; sharing “major news” about our employers’ moves eight pixels to the northeast, and across some contrived equator, on the Gartner Magic Quadrant; AI-authored appreciation posts for the hardworking team that hosted a webinar; 300-word algorithmically-optimized stories about the best advice we ever got, or a recent moment of gratitude, or some other answer to the question, “What is your biggest weakness?”
On one hand, I get it. There are 950 million wallets on LinkedIn. Many of us want to sell them stuff. If you can get famous on LinkedIn—which you can, mostly by posting on LinkedIn—you can sell them stuff on easy mode. Post about something relentlessly enough, and people will eventually buy it. Cringe is a category creator.
On the other hand, this sort of social-affect capitalism—commercials, presented like conversations—makes LinkedIn an awfully strange place. Unlike other social media networks, nothing on LinkedIn is spontaneous. No post is just a thought, or the beginning of a genuine discussion. Instead, everything feels planned and scheduled; every interaction is something between politely professional and suspiciously enthusiastic; every message is awkwardly formatted to be maximally viral.5 The only two emotions on LinkedIn are bittersweet endings and very exciting beginnings. It’s not socializing; it’s editorial calendar crosstalk.6
What’s even weirder, however, is how isolated LinkedIn is. It’s a vault, locked on both sides. If something blows up on Twitter or TikTok, it crosses over into group chats, into other social networks, into the New York Times, on to TV, and into conversations at parties and in people’s homes. Twitter isn’t real life, as they say, but the two are definitely intertwined.
But what goes viral on LinkedIn—like this post, which was viewed five million times—stays on LinkedIn. The only things from LinkedIn that make their way into the broader discourse are posts that are mocked for being so LinkedIn.7 And there is no reporting on the latest trends on LinkedIn, because there are no trends on LinkedIn. There are no trends on PR Newswire either.
As rare as it is for things to leak out of LinkedIn, it seems even harder for things to break into LinkedIn. Elections, assassination attempts, sports and cultural phenomena—none of it breaches the LinkedIn firewall. The gyre stays tight; the centre holds; no matter what anarchy is loose in the real world, LinkedIn’s posters plow ahead with their regularly scheduled podcasts and anodyne takes. Outside of LinkedIn, we are electrified; on LinkedIn, we’re pacified. Pop culture doesn’t exist. Politics don’t exist. The debate about Silicon Valley’s rightward pivot doesn’t exist.8 The Olympics don't exist—unless, of course, you can spin them into a way to sell a workshop on Connected Leadership™.
Moreover, nobody brings their fame to LinkedIn. Global stars monetize their celebrity by selling skincare products on Instagram; they feed their egos by getting attention on Twitter; they sell their souls by marketing their memecoins on TikTok. But who exploits their fame on LinkedIn? If anything, the ultimate status symbol on LinkedIn is not needing to be on LinkedIn. Elon Musk is not there. Jeff Bezos is not there. Tim Cook is not there. Oprah is, and has posted four times in 12 years. LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Stephen King, Stephen Colbert, Charli XCX, Traci Chapman, Anna Wintour, Magnus Carlson, and Griff9 are not there.10
And that’s perhaps the most damning thing of all about LinkedIn: It’s missing the important people. It’s the happy hour at a corporate conference, but all the speakers and VIPs are at more exclusive events. It’s a hollow networking event for the rest of us; the performative socializing of the riffraff. We grandstand for one another, become “Top Voices” by pumping out platitudes that junior people will think is smart and senior people will agree with, and hope to eventually become rich or famous enough that we’ll one day get airlifted out of LinkedIn and dropped somewhere better. Because how many people want to be here? How many people actually use LinkedIn just to talk to other people on LinkedIn?
Faking for likes and digital hugs
Well, maybe a lot, in a way. Because there might be another way to look at LinkedIn that is a lot more wholesome, and a bit more hopeless.
When I’ve asked people why they use it, the most common answer is that it’s a good sales channel. The second most common answer is that it’s free of the political and social drama that’s typical on sites like Twitter and Instagram, and is a place to talk to professional colleagues in professional tones. In other words, it is a place where being boring, at least by social media standards, is still rewarded with likes and comments.
I can’t help but wonder if that’s also part of the attraction of LinkedIn: It’s a social network where we can all feel popular, even in our khakis and corporate drawl. It’s a perpetual online work trip, where everyone feels professionally obligated to act like friends.
Over the last twenty years, we’ve all become addicted to our jobs and to checking our email. Our lives have moved online. We slowly erased our personalities and replaced them with our professional brands. We lost our friends to our phones, and we are lonely.
For some people, Twitter and other online communities can fill that void. But it’s hard to get popular on Twitter or Instagram—you have to be clever, funny, and engage in the political and social drama that a lot of people seem to either want to avoid, or have no knack for.
LinkedIn offers us a deal: Don’t really be yourself; don’t talk about taboo things; put up a professional headshot; feign excitement about your new role managing enterprise IoT applications on the edge.11 Do all that, and LinkedIn will reward you with likes and digital hugs, with messages and DMs, and with a stream of notifications that make you feel connected and important. Sure, the friends you make might be superficial; they might be there to sell you stuff,12 or to “expand their network,” or because they’re community advocates and paid evangelists for a company that’s identified you as a likely buyer. And their likes and comments might be nudges to draw attention to themselves. But a like is still a like; people are viewing your profile; when you talk, something talks back. The conversation is real, even if the motivations are more suspect.13 And as dozens of AI-friend apps are proving, that’s worth something.
Offer up your personality and a few self-promotional posts, and LinkedIn will make you feel like a celebrity. It will turn you Truman Burbank—except Truman got to be himself. In this social network, you have to be an actor too.
There are already some apps that are like this, though they tend to be more like role-playing games, where you try to become a famous singer or something, rather than being convincing simulations of real social networks. Still, even that is apparently addicting enough to make some people lose their minds.
And this very cool visualization. I had something like 30 connections when that thing came out, and when I tried to create my graphic, LinkedIn told me it only worked for people with at least 50, which might’ve been the first and last time I had an emotional response to anything I saw on LinkedIn.
Why do I believe this? Vibes. The yard signs. I don’t care what the data says; I’ve seen a lot of people on LinkedIn while they’re sitting in a coffee shop at noon on a Wednesday, and there’s no way that those people would be any more likely to use the internet’s job board than anyone else.
The old way of writing is dead.
People have short attention spans now. Your writing needs to capture them immediately.
And keep them on the edge of their seats.
When we write, we often try to sound formal and important. But academic studies have found that people lose focus when they have to read complex paragraphs; long words make them tired; they get distracted by arcane punctuation.
Are you bored yet?
Don’t write paragraphs like that. Write paragraphs like this. Paragraphs that crackle.
This is, apparently, how you keep an audience on LinkedIn.
With one-sentence, three-emoji paragraphs. 💯🚀💡
With paragraphs that sound
Truss.
But mostly, write paragraphs that take up lots of space in a feed.
And #DontForget, #Always #HashtagEverything, and @at @mention @a @long @list @of @people @with @big @followings.
KnowYourMeme has only five—five!—LinkedIn-related memes, and most of them are from people parodying LinkedIn.
Of course a bunch of VCs group-thought their way into supporting Trump all at once, and of course they literally topticked the market with their investments in his campaign.
Her new album is out! and Tears for Fun is a banger! Go listen to it! Stop reading a ridiculous blog post about LinkedIn and go feel something!
Tim Duncan might be? And Steph Curry is, but for the same reason all of us are: To sell stuff and promote his podcast appearances.
And man, sometimes they do it in weird ways.
Is this bad? Probably, but it could be worse. I’d rather us all become friends with salespeople and dystopian AI-powered tamagotchis than turn to some of the other communities that are often attractive to people who are quietly desperate for social connections (though I’d prefer the third option of burning down social media, but a fight for a different day).
Also, as an aside, that horrifying AI friend company’s website is friend.com, but their Instagram handle is @friend_necklace. It seems possible that Instagram doesn’t let people use @friend as their username, but it makes me wonder: Are premier Instagram handles now more expensive than premier domains? Which costs more, benn.com, or @benn?
Glad you’re back, Benn! I work completely remote and have a mundane life but after reading your piece I’m pursuing my new dream of becoming a SQL influencer. Thanks for the inspiration!
Great smart intro that escalates to "LinkedIn"! Exactly my feelings.