Cringe at Scale: The LinkedIn Chronicles

I’m a huge hypocrite. I’m a recovering LinkedIn cringe poster.

I used to post the cringiest of cringe posts to Linkedin because my boss told me it’d help our company generate leads. More recently I posted about my 1 year of sobriety with a format I knew was conducive to increasing engagement.

The first line is short and sweet and encourages viewers to click “read more”. Once I have them hooked I then waste their time by spacing out the post with single sentences followed by spacing. This increases “dwell time” which is the strongest indicator that the LinkedIn Algorithm takes into account when promoting quality content.

I disagree with the engineering team on this one as I often spend hours looking at posts like the one below with burning rage, wondering how such an obvious humble brag fooled close to 800,000 people.

I am a merciful lord, look at how this peasant begged for forgiveness, and rather than wield my power for evil, I chose to spare the poor boy!”

I stared in utter disbelief at this post for 30 minutes. I kept waiting for the punchline, praying it would be satire. I spent even more time navigating the 35,000 comments looking for people who would call out this unapologetic self-aggrandizement. No one came to my rescue. People couldn’t help but congratulate Ben for conducting himself as a decent human being.

Linkedin, the professional social network, is corporate cringe at scale. Remember how in 2019 when going into the office was an everyday thing and there would be a 30-minute calendar invite at 5 pm for “Josh’s birthday celebration”?

Especially if Josh was your boss, you’d sing your little heart out and maybe even throw in a “How old are you now?!” with the enthusiasm of a diabetic at the Wonka factory.

After you got your morsel of cake and talked about either the past weekend or the upcoming weekend, you might pat Josh on the back and say, “Hey bud, 1 year closer to retirement, haha!” You’d then walk back to your desk at 5:30 pm after the mandatory fun was over and pretend to work for 30 more minutes to make up for the lost time “celebrating”.

“YOU WILL HAVE FUN AND YOU WILL LIKE IT”

Linkedin is that “party” with gasoline thrown onto it. The Book of Revelations warned of this hell. They used stronger words like “Lakes of Fire” but you get my point.

Why is the sitcom “The Office” so popular?

“The Office” gives viewers permission to laugh at the absurdity of pointless bureaucracy and overzealous colleagues willing to go to any length for a promotion. The acting along with the writing is brilliant, yes. But the show plugged at the heartstrings of the burnt-out white-collar workforce.

Most people resonated with Jim who was one of the few characters allowed to break the 4th wall. He stared into our living rooms whenever Dwight would attempt to maneuver his way to an extra $6,000 in base salary (adjusted for inflation) that came with the “Assistant (to the) Regional Manager Title.”

Linkedin is a great case study demonstrating what happens when this environment is extrapolated from just one office to all the offices operating as a hive mind. The so-called “gurus” thrive just by showing up and shouting vague platitudes. This is learned behavior.

This quote here is about not trusting the government but can be easily applied to this discussion. These humble brag posts are dishonest. Suppression of your true self in any form is dishonest.

Corporate settings don’t allow folks to flourish based purely on merit. They require suppression of certain personality traits, which is where our purest form of talent comes from. Only it’s not seen as suppression, it’s labeled “professionalism”.

In a truly competitive setting, these things wouldn’t fly. You don’t become the best at anything simply by being the most active on a Slack channel or hacking the Linkedin algorithm. You can certainly become the loudest, but not the best.

This makes people act weird. You can’t fully express yourself, so you talk in a different language. One that levels the playing field. Since this type of communication is standardized and difficult to tweak, employees are measured on quantity rather than quality.

Linkedin’s “top voices” are filled with people shouting from the rooftops to be nice to employees, remain positive, and then copy and paste inspirational quotes from the internet to back up these arguments that no one would ever disagree with.

HOT TAKE ALERT!

There is hope, however. I cannot see this lasting much longer. With the increased automation of administrative tasks, being a real human is going to be more in demand than ever before.

I don’t have revolutionary aspirations of overthrowing our titans of industry. I simply continue to show up as my authentic self in every situation hoping that it will pay off one day.

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