Everyone sounds the same. On LinkedIn as a post-human theatre
Every time I go on LinkedIn, I feel something akin to anthropological curiosity. It's a showcase of ideal self-inscriptions. Somewhat depressing. Caught between that unbearable neutral-epic tone and the feigned enthusiasm. And now, layered on top of it all, the omnipresent filter of AI’s syntactic correction. Everyone speaks in exactly the same voice.
I refuse to believe no one notices this. What’s actually interesting is that they do, but they “play dumb” and join the game anyway. Because the platform’s performative logic (displaying, projecting, signaling alignment with certain values) rewards that homogeneity.
There’s a kind of tacit agreement: we all know that no one talks like this in real life, but we act as if they did. A sort of post-human corporate theatre, where what matters isn’t saying something real, but saying it the way it’s supposed to be said so it performs well with the algorithm. I think it’s even a subtle form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu would’ve had a field day with social media); if you want to exist there, you have to speak in that register.
Today, LinkedIn is the best example of how authenticity can be replaced by an algorithmic choreography that flattens and neutralizes all difference. If social networks are stages, this one in particular is a casting room.
Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt, said Cicero: “For many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue”.1 Two thousand years later, LinkedIn turns that diagnosis into a style guide.
— E.
In On Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia, ca. 44 BCE. Loeb Classical Library, vol. XX, Harvard University Press, 1923).↩