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How the Toxic Positivity of LinkedIn Serves the Status Quo
The poisonous online spectacle of hustle and grind threatens our mental health and forecloses the possibility of real change.
“The Spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It’s a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.” — Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
In theory, Facebook made it easier to connect with friends, family, and people you never intended to know after high school. Instagram lets you curate a highlight reel of your life, sharing beautiful photos and videos of your best moments with friends, family, and people you didn’t intend to know after high school. LinkedIn… uh.
LinkedIn isn’t as much about connecting and sharing with any of those people as it is about masking the transactional and often cutthroat nature of at-will employment. LinkedIn feeds are a runoff stream of personal branding, full of professional connections posting inspirational quotes, motivational image macros, course completion certificates, life mantras, employee anniversary celebrations, and unintentional corporate cringe galore. It sometimes feels like every post on the world’s top professional networking site is an…
