LinkedIn Is A Toxic, Capitalist Meme Generator 👊🏻
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
LinkedIn's stated mission is to make working professionals "more productive and successful." With over 750 million members, that narrow goal translates into a platform where people are unsurprisingly centered on either getting a job or highlighting their jobs successes. It's Facebook for job hunters and capitalists. Most go there to share their new positions, promotions, and hustles, leaving all the messy complications of life at the door.
Social media has always been inauthentic. All platforms encourage people to curate a persona along certain aesthetic and political lines, but the values promoted on LinkedIn are f@cking toxic. They are all about glorifying the grind. "8 years ago today I had four dollars in my bank account," creator Shay Rowbottom posted to viral success in 2021 "Keep going. 👊🏻."
LinkedIn is a place where, for the most part, the terrors of our system are massaged away so that viewers can instead consume advice on working harder, faster, better, and more smartly. To participate and be successful on this platform, you have to find a way to fit your problems into the marketplace or be deemed a bad worker.
Something I would like to stress before diving into the messiness of LinkedIn is that, contrary to many of the tropes we will be talking about, most people are simply working to survive. There has been a lot of conversation about how people want meaningful work and might even take a pay cut to get it, but when I look at polling data, that's not the primary reason they are at their current jobs. In poll after poll, people pretty consistently indicate that providing for their lifestyles and families is a huge reason why they are there.
It may be evident to some, but it still bears mentioning: we all need money to survive. Most of us have to take a job to get money, even if it doesn't align with work we consider meaningful. Add to this the fact that wages have stagnated and healthcare and housing costs have risen, and you might begin to understand why most Americans do not like their current jobs.
Why be happy about something you were forced to take to cover your basic needs, and barely accomplishes even that?
The typical LinkedIn post covers none of this reality. Many LinkedIn influencers aren't interested in trying to systemically understand why the state of work is so bad for most people. In fact, most want to ignore discussions of "politics" altogether. "Politics should not be discussed on LinkedIn. Keep it clean folks!!" wrote one user recently. The platform is even implementing a "no-politics" feature, which it defines as limiting content related to "political parties and candidates, election outcomes, and ballot initiatives."
This desire for no politics, however, goes against our human instincts. Under one definition, politics is how we make decisions about our community's collective resources. It's unreasonable to assume that users on this or any platform will never want to express opinions on something so fundamental to their lives, even if some consider such things "unprofessional." As one conservative LinkedIn user wrote in a viral post: "politics invades every facet of our lives."
Indeed we have seen a glaring exception to this "no-politics" rule with Russia's War against Ukraine. Users have been very opinionated on this issue. "I hate mixing politics and business. But killing innocent people can't be ignored," wrote one "apolitical" user on why his business was cutting ties with partners in Russia. LinkedIn, the company, has been surprisingly vocal about this situation too. It recently referenced the whole situation in its blog. Their Global Growth Manager even posted a pro-peace image on his feed that has generated quite the stir among users.
In other words, LinkedIn is a non-political platform, except for all the cases when it's not. The "no-politics" crowd ignores the fact that even they have a political framework. Overwhelmingly, these users proselytize about the values of working hard and pushing through. "no pain, no deals. know pain know deals" cheekily posted Scott Leese. This is essentially the belief in a "meritocracy" or a system governed by people who are selected to power based on their ability.
Contrary to what users like Leese may say, this way of thinking is very political. Meritocracy emphasizes individual responsibility at the expense of looking at structural problems — something with enormous political implications because it basically justifies people's social, economic, and political positions in life. You get somewhere based on how hard you work, regardless of all the structural barriers in your way.
LinkedIn users who follow this political belief can get very defensive when it's criticized. "Those who think they're ENTITLED need a solid throat punch," begins a post from conservative Erin Whitehead about how people need to stop complaining. She continues. "You aren't even entitled to feel good about yourself. You have to earn that shit. 👊🏼" This example may sound extreme, but it highlights a pervasive feeling throughout the site. The consistent advice seen on LinkedIn is to either suck it up or stop complaining. "Suck it up, Have a Great Week and…#KeepGettinAfterIt, y'all!!👊" advises another user (side note — what is up with the overuse of the fisted hand emoji?).
Yet it's also not true that LinkedIn influencers are always positive (there is a lot of talk of failure on here), but it's usually very individualized. For example, influencer James Carbary shared a humble brag about botching his first TedX talk. Likewise, we could talk about marketer Adam Goyette mentioning how he sent out the wrong email to 1 million people. These men are admitting to bad things that happened to them, but in a way that both highlights their current successes and takes on all the responsibility for their failures. The implicit narrative is to keep working in spite of defeat. "Here's to kicking fear in the mouth and doing things that scare us anyway," James Carbary continues, highlighting how individual perseverance is what is needed to power through.
We see this individualized philosophy color even the most radical comments on the platform. "I can promise you that your health is far more important than your finances or your job," begins author and cancer survivor Scott Leese in what sounds like a very revolutionary statement….for LinkedIn.
On its face, it's an opinion I very much agree with. We should care more about our health than our jobs. However, even this proclamation is only looked at through the lens of what you as an individual can do in the marketplace. Scott continues: "Money comes and money goes. Our lives are irreplaceable. Sell from a place of gratitude, resiliency, and determination. Lead from a place of selflessness, safety, empathy, and fulfillment."
Not only do his final few lines betray the fact he is far more concerned with selling in the marketplace than his health, but by telling people to focus on health as an individual choice, he's being very toxic. Scott ignores all the problems with our healthcare systems and frames healthcare as something an individual can choose to do independently of that system. You know, just choose to be healthy, yall.
This is your casual reminder that over half of all bankruptcies are the result of medical issues. Most Americans can't focus on their health because they don't have the option to — our system bleeds them dry first.
The majority of content on LinkedIn frames the individual as at fault, especially in the workplace, where the dynamic between capitalists and workers is underplayed. "People don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses," author Brigette Hyacinth lectures on one of LinkedIn's top posts. She, in essence, is arguing that there are no power dynamics within the employee-employer relationship, just people who disagree. When unhappiness towards an employer or industry is posted on the platform, creators like Hyacinth treat it as a relationship between two people, rather than one between a lower-status individual (i.e., the employee) and a person representing an even more powerful class or entity (AKA the boss).
This blindness means that most solutions are only viewed through an individualistic lens. "Treat your workforce as valuable as you do your customers," warns LinkedIn marketer Chris Williams, delivering a solution that boils down to company leadership being nicer. This comment is tone-deaf, and LinkedIn is filled with disingenuous posts like this one asking bosses and companies to treat their workers better, while ignoring all the power imbalances that ensure these requests will never be listened to. Companies that do awful things such as union-busting and wage theft don't need a stern talking to. They need to be mobilized against.
Granted, it's not wrong to ask for better pay and more respect from your boss, but what is often divorced from these suggestions are solutions such as unionization, greater regulation, or any answer that would try to increase the power of workers as a group. Few commenters are looking at this systemically. While I might have been able to find the occasional center-left content creator on LinkedIn (Robert Reich, for example, reposts much of his work from YouTube there), most were disgruntled individuals with little influence. Users who were passing around memes and petitions that never gained traction.
It was far easier to find a conservative criticizing leftist policy than to discover anyone who self-identified as a leftist or progressive on LinkedIn. For example, it was effortless to come across dozens of conservatives lamenting AOC’s Tax the Rich dress at the 2021 Met Gala, but few sharing it in earnest or even criticizing it from a leftist perspective. "…tonight [AOC] wore a dress that says "tax the rich" to a Met Gala dinner that costs $30,000 a ticket," chastised one conservative user, among many.
I ran dozens of similar searches for terms like leftism, unionization, liberal, single-payer healthcare, socialism, and more, and while they generated some results, they were far from viral. Conservative memes on work routinely won out in the end, which reveals something fundamental about the platform — this is a conservative site.
When I look at LinkedIn at a distance, I see a conservative, capitalist meme generator. A platform that incentivizes a toxic environment, where everything is framed through the lens of the individual. Users are implicitly encouraged to describe their jobs in the best possible light, while simultaneously ignoring the systemic problems that make work in America so difficult (e.g., poor wages, low union membership, massive corruption, deregulation, etc.).
The culture on this site seems clear: if you can't get your boss to agree to improve your work conditions, then it's on you as an individual to either work through it or leave — the realities of the market be damned.
Say what you will about Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok — at least these platforms have some diversity of political thought. LinkedIn is an unending churn of capitalist propaganda. While conservatives have spent so much time lamenting that social media has a bias against them, they clearly have a home on LinkedIn.