Brand Mad: Late-Stage Capitalism’s LinkedIn
The online networking platform started out as a place for professionals to find new jobs. It has lost the plot, writes Kyle Taylor
I recently came across a post from someone I knew many years ago about losing their parent.
It contained hundreds of words of raw grief. Beautiful memories. Honest pain. Then, in the final paragraph, there was a pivot: “This experience taught me about resilience in the workplace.”
Welcome to the modern online world of LinkedIn. A platform on which mourning becomes a case study in productivity; where trauma is another step on the ladder to leadership.
When it launched in 2003, LinkedIn was a clunky digital filing cabinet – an online CV holder where professionals could connect with old colleagues and follow company updates. It was only really logged into for job hunting.
Today, it is a forum to project who you are: polished, packaged, painfully performative.
Posts are longer and photos more personal. ‘Engagement’ is the metric, not employment.
It has turned into capitalism’s cringiest confessional booth – a forum where emotions, hardships, and milestones are reverse-engineered into a moment of professional learning.
If you didn’t turn your burnout into a TEDx talk, did you even grow?
The algorithm loves it.
LinkedIn posts now consist of the humblebrags (‘I am humbled to announce that I’ve won an award no one has heard of’); failure flexes (‘I was fired and it was the best thing that ever happened to me’); and the thought-leader-in-the-wild stories (‘I watched a toddler share her toy at a café and realised what it means to be a truly empathetic leader’).
They follow the same formula: the sharing of something personal; how it ties into a lesson about leadership, resilience, or teamwork; concluding with a bland inspirational call to action.
There are also the carousels – the slides full of ‘tips’ and ‘frameworks’ that amount to motivational posters wearing a business-casual blazer.
People privately complain about how insufferable it has become: the forced earnestness, the borrowed inspiration, the hustle masquerading as humility.
But we keep posting and engaging.
If your vulnerability goes viral, it brings visibility – and visibility is the new currency. It doesn’t matter if a post makes anyone feel anything real.
This is a machine that feeds on self-disclosure; through which we are punching in our stories like marking our timecards. Nuance, even dignity, is no longer a ‘growth metric’.
To make matters worse, a growing chunk of this content is not even being written by the people posting it. AI tools such as ChatGPT now churn out cookie-cutter ‘thought leadership’ at scale.
Want a post about navigating change in uncertain times? There is a prompt just for that. Several, actually.
LinkedIn’s evolution can be explained by the demand that we must all now be brands.
It is not enough to simply do a job you are paid for or proud of – you must also now present a narrative around it. Document the journey. Curate an image. Chronicle development in real time.
Professional success is no longer only about our accomplishments, but how convincingly we can perform and market this for an audience.
I don’t begrudge anyone taking part. In effect people have to. This is the true hollowness of late-stage capitalism: not just that everything is for sale, but that we are the product – and that everything is potentially ‘content’.
Opting out doesn’t work in your favour. Recruiters want to know how ‘visible’ you are. Those hiring check your online activity. A dormant profile can raise eyebrows. Not posting is now a risk – not just for your engagement rate, but for your career prospects.
Long gone are the days of ‘don’t bring your work home with you’. Now, the opposite appears true: you must bring your home life to work. The lines have not just blurred, they have been obliterated.
LinkedIn has turned the personal into the professional by default – and once everything can be content, nothing feels sincere, much less private.
But it is working. People get jobs off the back of viral posts and land speaking gigs from comment threads.
It has become the final frontier of hustle culture – a curated collage of ambition, pain, and borrowed wisdom where your value is measured in views, and your integrity is just another thing to sacrifice for your brand.
You don’t have to be on it. But if you’re not, you need a really good reason why not. Because, in 2025, if it’s not on LinkedIn, it may not have even happened.
What are we doing?
This article first appeared in edition #78 of Byline Times
Kyle Taylor is the author of Byline Books’ The Little Black Book of Social Media
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