LinkedIn and Algorithmic Professionalism

Social: A Toxic Ecosystem

LinkedIn isn’t just another social platform. It’s a hyper-controlled arena where professionalism is a nonstop performance. You don’t communicate—you showcase. You don’t work—you display how well you work. Every action is a strategy, every post a pitch. Your identity? Just optimized packaging.

Professionalism as Performance

From motivational posts to instructive failures, every piece of content is a calculated move. Authenticity is just a format. Vulnerability is a lever for social capital. On LinkedIn you perform, sell, and monetize. The professional becomes a persona.

On LinkedIn, narcissism wears a suit. Badges and metrics are the new mirror.

Social and the Architecture of Control

Nothing is neutral: reactions, layouts, notifications, algorithm. As Castells teaches us, cyberspace doesn’t reflect reality—it organizes it. Every platform is a micro-machine that codes identity. LinkedIn teaches you to be useful, visible, optimizable.

The Toxic Hierarchy

• TikTok: Entertainment = dopamine.
• Instagram: Aesthetics = constant comparison.
• LinkedIn: Performance = alienation.

According to Nick Couldry, media don’t describe reality—they impose it.

Affordances and Conditioning

Each platform imposes a desire. Instagram demands beauty. TikTok demands virality. LinkedIn demands usefulness to the system. Every click is a choice you never truly made.

Standardization isn’t aesthetic. It’s ontological.

Biopolitics of the Personal Brand

Daily on stage, daily pitching. Foucault would say LinkedIn shapes docile subjects. Self-surveillance and self-promotion become a lifestyle. The work identity merges with the real one.

The Algorithm as Manager, Social as Temple

It doesn’t manage content—it manages people. It suggests who you must become to stand out. Those who don’t adapt disappear. The algorithm is your boss—unseen, yet omnipresent.

Professionalism is no longer a quality. It’s a quantifiable performance.

Social Commodification and Alienation

Every connection becomes capital. Every interaction an asset. Dignity turns into currency. Real identity gives way to the strategic, digitized, optimized one.

Worse than TikTok Shop: there you pay in euros, here you pay with yourself.

The Authenticity Paradox

The platform demands authenticity—but only rewards what works. Sincerity becomes marketing. Everyone performs, pretending they don’t know it’s a collective act.

Resisting Socials

To resist is to unmask the algorithm, to post without a strategy, to reject the script, to defend the right to imperfection. As writes Cybermediateinment : seeing the mechanism is already rebellion.

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Decode. Resist. Reclaim.
Staying human is the only truly radical act.