And the Social Engineers Behind It
LinkedIn is the world’s most elaborate game of dress-up, except it’s not children playing make-believe, it’s grown adults in business casual. Every time I see a post on LinkedIn, the most NPC wrote it, it’s just the same thing over and over: running marathons to learn about resilience, humble bragging about a useless certification and the worse those little gifs of life hacks written by toddlers of how to use a python syntax sugar.
The worse thing about it, is that recruiters actually fall for this. They drool over posts littered with buzzwords like “AI” or “blockchain.” They don’t understand any of it—they aren’t technical people. Yet, these non-technical folks are the ones who decide your future, based on how willing you are to conform to the cringe-worthy, soul-sucking spectacle that is LinkedIn.
HR as social control
You might think this setup—unqualified people hiring technical talent is unsustainable. The incentives are misaligned! right? But be aware, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a humiliation ritual.
YOU WILL COMPLY.
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.
And you will be happy.
HR isn’t here to help you—they work for the devil. The devil has outsourced the job of buying and selling souls, and HR is doing his bidding. Their mission? Strip you of any individuality and turn you into a robot that follows the ESG “principles” of their corporate overlords. In this way, they filter out the “bad apples.”
The NPC-ification of Social Media
Like all social media platforms, LinkedIn serves as a tool for social control, a function of assimilation that converges into conformity. If you use it long enough, you’ll start to adopt the quirks of its culture—just as the social engineers intended. On LinkedIn, this process is accelerated because the stakes are so high: you need a job to survive. Our monkey brains aren’t wired to handle the constant feedback loop of what’s “popular” or what works. That’s a fundamental problem with all social media—but that’s a topic for another blog post.
I used to joke with my coworkers about this. We’d spend a day on LinkedIn pretending to be average users, posting about certifications and leaving the dumbest comments on each other’s posts. “Today I realized my childhood dream of becoming an AI specialist, thanks to udemy.com!” The funny thing is, if you push the joke far enough, you might actually land a $200k job at Meta (And your assimilation will be complete).
Takeaways
- It’s over. Life is unfair.
Jokes aside, landing a job in this competitive market is tough. But don’t conform to this stupidity. Be an adult. Why put on this ridiculous performance? Everyone knows it’s a big charade, yet nobody says anything. I just don’t get it.