Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid Thursday 9th April 2026

Right. LinkedIn.

You know, I was thinking about this the other day, or rather, I was forced to think about it because some algorithm had decided that what I really needed at 7:42 in the morning, while I was still half-asleep and trying to remember why I exist, was yet another notification telling me that Kevin from Supply Chain Optimisation had “viewed my profile.”

Kevin. From Supply Chain Optimisation.

As if that’s a thing a human being should have on his business card without immediately setting fire to it and throwing himself into the sea.

And that’s the thing with LinkedIn, isn’t it? It’s not just a website. Oh no. It’s not even a social network. It’s a lifestyle. A religion. A punishment Microsoft inflicted on the professional classes after it bought them: the way a bored child buys a Tamagotchi and then slowly starves it to death while filming the screams for content.

Because let me tell you, and I will, at some length, because that’s the whole point of this form, LinkedIn used to be quite straightforward. You put your CV up. You connected with people you vaguely remembered from that one conference in Swindon where the sandwiches had the little flags in them. You may have got the occasional genuine job opportunity. It was dull, yes, but it was honestly dull. Like a municipal swimming pool in 1987. Functional. Slightly depressing. Smelling faintly of chlorine and broken dreams.

But then the enshittification began. Slowly. Like a frog in a pot of lukewarm corporate jargon.

First came the content. Oh my God, the content.

You open the app now, and it’s just an endless parade of people who’ve clearly had some sort of personality lobotomy performing what I can only describe as corporate spoken-word poetry. “Thrilled to announce…” they begin, as if they’ve just been appointed Supreme Leader of the Free World rather than moved from “Senior” to “Lead” Associate Account Manager for Regional Synergies.

And then they tell you their journey.

Their journey.

As if getting a 3% pay rise and a new mug with the company logo on it is some sort of spiritual pilgrimage comparable to Marco Polo discovering the Silk Road, except Marco Polo didn’t end every post with “What’s one lesson you’ve learned on your journey? Drop it in the comments below! ”

And the comments! Christ.

“This! ”

“So true!”

“Absolutely nailed it, Sarah!”

Said by people whose entire personality appears to consist of giving each other digital high-fives while carefully avoiding saying anything that might actually mean something.

It’s like watching a room full of estate agents trying to out-nice each other at a wake.

And then there’s the vulnerability.

You know the ones. “I never thought I’d share this, but…” followed by a story about how their dog died or their marriage collapsed or they once cried in the disabled toilet at Head Office, and then, and this is the crucial bit, they somehow pivot it into a leadership lesson about resilience and authentic workplace culture and how “we need to bring our whole selves to work.”

Mate. No.

Bring your whole self to work and security will escort you from the building before lunch. That’s the actual lesson.

And all of this is being served up by an algorithm that has clearly been trained on the collected works of every middle manager who’s ever done a TED Talk in a hotel conference room that smelled of carpet cleaner and quiet despair.

It rewards the longest, most meandering, most obviously AI-assisted posts because people have to dwell on them, you see. Dwell time. That’s the metric. Not usefulness. Not honesty. Not “did this help anyone get a job?” No. How long can we keep the punter scrolling while they hate themselves?

It’s the same logic that ruined everything else. Get good. Get popular. Then slowly replace the good bits with sludge until the users are mainlining pure performative bullshit and paying for Premium so they can see who else is mainlining the same performative bullshit.

And the job bit!

In the middle of the worst job market since the invention of unemployment, LinkedIn has the absolute gall to act like it’s helping. “Easy Apply!” it says. Easy Apply to what? To the 47 ghost jobs posted by companies that aren’t actually hiring but want to look like they’re growing? To the recruiter who messages you at 11pm saying, “This role is PERFECT for you” and then ghosts you harder than a Tinder date who just discovered you read books?

It’s like being trapped in a Kafka novel written by someone who’s done an NLP course.

And the worst part, the absolute killer, is that you can’t even leave.

Because it’s necessary.

Recruiters live there. Hiring managers check your profile. Your actual real-life career now depends, in part, on how convincingly you can pretend to be the sort of person who gets “inspired” by other people’s “thought leadership” about synergy. 

So you stay.

Like a lobster in a tank watching the others get picked off one by one, knowing your turn is coming, but still updating your “About” section with another paragraph about being “passionate about driving impactful change in the stakeholder ecosystem.”

That’s LinkedIn.

Not a piece of shit, exactly.

More like a very expensive, very polished, very well-marketed piece of shit that’s been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life and then gift-wrapped in the language of personal growth.

And we all click “Connect” anyway.

Because what else are you going to do?

Go outside?

Talk to actual human beings?

Christ. No wonder we’re all doomed.

Many thanks for reading my rant!