At first it sounds like a joke.
Scrolling through LinkedIn profiles.
One sells someone else’s goods.
One sells a promise.
One sells absence itself.
One sells the leftovers of that absence.
But the joke does not stay a joke. A model falls
out of it.
LinkedIn is not empty. That would be too easy.
There is real work there. Real people. Real skills. Real contacts. People do
find employees, clients, partners and sources there. In some fields it
functions almost like a public labour registry.
The worse part is elsewhere.
LinkedIn pours real work and the imitation of
work into the same container.
That is where the mud begins.
Image is a product. In some cases it is the only
product. Work becomes a product photo. Skill becomes a keyword. Experience
becomes packaging. A person no longer enters the market as a maker, but as his
own sales brochure.
Visible. Grateful. Humbly proud. Growth-minded.
Future-building. Value-adding.
Otherwise he almost does not exist.
Real value begins with a brick.
You can build with a brick. You can throw it
through a window. You can hit someone over the head with it. It has weight, use
and consequence.
A brick does not need a pitch deck.
It either carries weight or it does not.
In the image economy it is the other way around.
There is no brick, but there is strategic construction potential, a modular
growth framework and a future-proof spatial solution.
The buyer stands on the building site, invoice in
hand, surrounded by presentations.
There is no wall.
This is no longer air. Air is still something.
This is vacuum.
Or more precisely: manure wrapped in silver
foil.
Cheap shine. The suggestion of a gift. An
imitation of value. The smell still comes through.
Image is not always false. A good worker
sometimes needs visibility, otherwise he remains invisible. The craftsman had
his sign. The merchant had his reputation. The writer had his preface. The
politician had his speech.
Self-promotion did not begin with LinkedIn.
What is new is scale: industrial self-promotion,
measured attention and an algorithm that does not ask whether something holds.
It asks whether something moves.
The platform does not create all the sludge
itself. People produce it willingly. They want work, status, clients,
belonging, a seat at the table.
The platform formats it, amplifies it and taxes
it.
LinkedIn profits from this.
The more noise there is, the more expensive
access becomes. The more packaged manure there is, the more filters, premium
tools, recruiting tools, visibility and “better targeting” can be sold.
The platform’s interest is not that the right
person be found quickly.
The platform’s interest is that the search
continue.
Finding the right person begins to resemble
mining in a well. Everything appears to be there: names, titles, experience,
recommendations. But once you start digging, out comes mud, old lime, career
sediment.
Sometimes metal.
Rarely.
Even more rarely, a tool.
The paid version does not remove the sludge. It
gives you the right to see more of it.
You pay more.
You see more.
You know less.
Premium is not pure fraud. For some, it gives
better search, more contacts, useful tools. But the price is that the base
layer becomes more and more muddy.
First, reliable distinction is made difficult.
Then the tool for distinction is sold back to you.
This is not an accidental side effect.
It is a mechanism.
The platform grows.
Content swells.
Quality becomes uneven.
Searching becomes harder.
Then filters, advertising, visibility and paid access are sold.
And suddenly there is no strong incentive to clean the mud too well.
There is no shortage of information.
There is a shortage of measure.
Google produces search sediment.
Facebook produces reaction sediment.
Instagram produces image sediment.
X produces impulse sediment.
LinkedIn produces career sediment.
Marketplaces produce rating sediment.
The AI content industry produces language sediment.
The common denominator is the same: reliable
distinction becomes scarce.
The old colonial model extracted ore and left
behind a hole.
The new platform model is more cunning. It makes
the person feel that he is mining value himself, while in reality he is sifting
through a sediment basin built by someone else.
The person does the work.
The person gives the data.
The person gives the attention.
The person carries the nervous cost.
The platform collects rent.
The market is not one stupid head. It is a
mixture of fear, haste, greed, experience, chance and missing information. In
some places the market punishes packaging very quickly. A bad tradesman
disappears. A bad restaurant gets empty tables. A crooked wall does not stand
because of a LinkedIn post.
But in information noise the market becomes slow,
tired and expensive.
That is exactly where platform profit is built.
The market buys what it does not have time to
verify. Not always out of stupidity. Often out of lack of time. Often out of
fear. Often because everyone else is playing the same game.
If a person looks like an expert, speaks like an
expert, is shared like an expert — perhaps he is an expert?
That is how packaging becomes evidence.
The dilution of value may begin as a side effect.
No one has to say: let us dilute value.
It is enough that visibility becomes more
important than work. That packaging becomes evidence. That “expert”,
“strategist”, “innovator” and “creator” become stickers.
But once confusion starts producing profit, it
becomes a maintained condition.
Noise was first a side effect. Then someone
discovered that in noise one can sell earplugs, noise reduction, curated
selection, paid access and expert help.
From that moment on, noise is no longer an
accident.
It is a business model.
Who pays for it?
The one who still actually does something.
The user pays with time.
The employer pays with wrong people.
The worker pays with self-marketing.
The small maker pays with invisibility.
Society pays with declining trust.
The end customer pays with money.
The platform pays the least.
It sells the well, the shovel, the sieve and the
premium bucket. If the find is sludge, it says: you searched incorrectly,
filter better, pay more.
The old world was not more honest. Before
LinkedIn there were recommendation letters, acquaintances, party cards, closed
clubs, inherited positions, the right boys in the right rooms.
Fraud is not new.
What is new is its industrial distribution.
This is old filth in a new form.
Bread and circuses. Except now the public no
longer sits in the stands. Everyone has to climb into the arena. Everyone
performs his own small number in order to get near the bread.
Grateful to share.
Proud to announce.
Five lessons I learned.
Thanks to the team.
The next chapter.
The circus remained.
The bread became conditional.
The clown now has to write his own CV.
From here the larger picture begins.
Scattered worlds of thought. Scattered life
attitudes. Scattered values. Great confusion.
In Biblical language: before the flood, the world
is out of order. Not merely “sinful”, but without measure. Boundaries,
responsibility, relation, work, shame — everything is mixed.
The modern flood does not come from water.
It comes from noise.
Everyone speaks. Everyone sells. Everyone brands.
Everyone has his own truth. In the end the question is no longer who is right.
The question is whose boat is still not leaking.
And immediately someone appears selling a ticket
to Noah’s ark.
Subscribe for access.
Join the closed network.
Buy premium.
Get curated knowledge.
Enter the community.
Be among those who know.
The platform does two things at once: it floods
the space with noise and then sells access to a higher deck.
It is Noah’s ark without Noah.
Only the ticket office.
In the Bible, Noah is saved not because he has a
better narrative. He builds a ship. Timber, pitch, measure, work.
Again, the logic of the brick.
The real Noah builds the hull. The false Noah
sells the certificate.
A drought of firm structures means systems do not
collapse immediately.
First they become liquid.
First language breaks down.
Then trust breaks down.
Then responsibility breaks down.
Then the institution breaks down.
Finally the person breaks down, because he has to carry all of it alone.
Structure is not always good. Structure can be a
prison. Nomenklatura. Professional monopoly. Bureaucratic gatekeeping. The
network of “our people”. Old structures often protected precisely those who
kept the system locked.
But the absence of structure does not make a
person free.
It makes him defenceless.
The question is not the destruction of structure.
The question is who guards it and against whom it works.
Structure can also be protection: a wall against
the wind, a rule for the weaker side, professional skill against the fraudster,
a contract against a promise, reputation against a mask.
When structures disappear, free people do not
win.
Slippery people do.
Voltaire said: one must cultivate one’s garden.
The Bible says the same through another door: by their fruit you shall know
them.
A person was not given an endless comment
section.
He was given a garden.
Soil. Boundary. Work. Repetition. Responsibility.
Death by comfort begins when the garden is left
uncultivated, but a vision document is written about it.
Process instead of work.
Communication instead of responsibility.
Image instead of skill.
Platform instead of ground.
Profile instead of garden.
Visibility instead of fruit.
Comfort does not kill with a blow.
It takes away the muscle.
A person no longer knows how to do, only how to
order. He no longer knows how to repair, only how to complain. He no longer
knows how to distinguish, only how to scroll. He no longer knows how to
cultivate, only how to judge other people’s gardens.
A garden is not romance.
A garden is boundary, work and repetition. It
cannot be ordered. It cannot be replaced by a subscription service.
When a person gives his garden to a platform, he
receives a profile in return.
A profile bears no fruit.
The garden is structure. Comfort is weed. When a
person no longer cultivates, the system begins to cultivate him.
