The Tyranny of LinkedIn Must Be Stopped

I cannot get this website to leave me alone.

Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In recent months I have been trapped in a hellish spiral of my own making, tormented by a foe that I granted power to many years ago. I refer, of course, to the website LinkedIn.

I joined LinkedIn in 2012, I think. Perhaps 2011. I was a new college graduate, I was looking for jobs, social media was new and exciting. I wanted to put myself out there. At one point me and two of my colleagues at the Santa Barbara alt-weekly newspaper where we worked had a competition to see who could get the most “connections” in a week. Over the years, I popped back into the site to update my profile occasionally, but at some point, I realized that I had never actually gotten anything remotely useful from LinkedIn, let alone a job. The colleague who won the connections competition went on to work for the White House so fair play to him on that. For me, though, it was time to go. A few months ago I deleted my account.

At least, I think I did. If you want to help out, go to LinkedIn right now and search for my name. I think there’s a dentist in Australia or something with my name but that’s not me. If you find me, that’s bad. That’s very bad. I do not want to be on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is a prison you can never escape.

The primary source of this constant irritation is my current browser’s automatic sign-in integration with Google. This is useful for me in some contexts, like when I look stuff up on maps or forget my passwords to food delivery websites, but incredibly destructive solely in the context of LinkedIn because every time I visit the site it logs me in and creates a new account. That’s right. I think — think — that I am free, because when I deleted my last account and then went back to the site I think I clicked “cancel” fast enough to stop the automatic sign-in. But I don’t know, and I sure as hell won’t be going back to LinkedIn to check.

The reasons that I hate LinkedIn are not particularly deep. I find it soulless and weird, a constant repository of sans-serif corporate culture and utterly joyless posts. There is no reliable or interesting way to actually interact with people on it, as its interface is still roughly what Facebook was in 2006, and all of the messages that I get on there are either unwanted or outright spam. The useful features, like being able to see someone’s employment history and connect them with other people in the same network, are behind a paywall I do not care to access. Most of all, going on there just makes me vaguely sad. Every time I see people I remember as vibrant, idiotic, directionless college students, zooted off of bad weed and Sailor Jerry, posting long paragraphs about their recent promotion at a marketing agency. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, and many of them are happy and kind individuals who I still care for very much, but I don’t want to associate my memories of them in any way with the term “webinar.”

In the grand scheme of things this does not matter at all, of course. There are much more consequential things going on in the world, which I’m sure you will read about on this blog and many other sites in the future. But this tiny annoyance has been eating at me for months: one small symptom of just how entirely our lives have been subsumed by the automated processes of companies seeking to monetize our data. I mostly cannot bring myself to care about this — it’s simply too much for my limited emotional bandwidth to process, and my general digital hygiene is atrocious — but in moments like this it sort of sinks in. I cannot leave LinkedIn. I will never be free from the remnants of profiles past, I will never be free from sin. There is no absolution from the words and details and thoughts and records I have sent out into the world.

That’s good, in some contexts. I’m glad that no matter what happens to “www.splinternews.com” I will still have archived versions and .pdf files of the best work that I did there. I’m glad that I have a platform on this website to fire off half-considered diatribes to a friendly audience of mostly like-minded people, even the ones who wear Hokas. But it does bother me a little bit at how pervasive an only conditionally-useful site like LinkedIn can be, how easily these for-profit companies gladhand with little nuggets of our personal information, signing us in with one-touch, hands-free, AI-assisted widgets and rewarding us with persistent bags of “cookies” and other digital detritus. None of this, I think, will ever deprive human beings of the intangible facets of self that make us feel and experience the physical world, but as so much of my life takes place through a computer screen, I hate the feeling that I can never fully separate from something. It’s like getting something sticky on your hands and never being able to wash it off. You can do all the things you can do, your life is not significantly impeded in any way, but everything you touch will be a little worse off. Every person you meet now will have sticky hands too.

I guess my hope is that one day we will be able to find a way to engage with other people online without a constant morass of passwords and accounts and profiles. I’m just one guy. I’ll email you my resume if you want. Now, if anyone knows what happened to my MySpace account from roughly 2007, that one I’d actually love to have back.