Talking to an old friend about LinkedIn the other day, said friend described it as “business LARP”. The topic came up because, as a person who is easing themselves back into the searching-for-gainful-employment game, I am now obliged to engage with LinkedIn: in Sweden, it’s basically the default platform through which almost all recruitment takes place. (This may be the case elsewhere as well, I don’t know.)

A few days of rolled-up sleeves, and I can see my friend’s point, though I might phrase it a bit differently. I joined LinkedIn way back in the boom era of social networking, when I was starting to freelance, and so I clearly recall its earlier incarnation as the answer to a question which should never have been asked, even in jest: “what if F*ceb*ok had been designed by Microsoft?” On the basis of this week’s encounters, it feels less like “business LARP”—which, for me at least, is an idea sufficiently capacious to leave space for interesting results at the edges of the normal distribution curve, at least in potentia—and more like “business Instagram”, all performativity and personal-brand backslapping, a river of abstract aspiration laced with brow-furrowed bits about mental health and the risks of over-obsessing about what one does, all written in a style whose careful optimisation to the platform’s affordances suggests people doing the exact opposite of what they’re saying, quite possibly without even realising it.

And before anyone gets cranky about my cynicism, yeah, I get it: that’s the game we’re all playing, and finding a way to be the version of us we most want to be which can actually exist within the confines of the game’s rules and incentives, well, it’s that or get out of the game entirely, take your pick.

Well, I say that I get it: what I mean is that I get that this is the prevailing rationality. I do not, however, get the rationality itself, which is the rationality of social media more broadly, and which nearly broke my mind a couple times before, and makes me die a little inside every time I have to look at it. There is no necessity that the world work this way—though there is of course sociotechnical path-dependency, context and capital, which in combination amount to something so sufficiently close to necessity that, should you find yourself trying to define the distinction, you’ve already lost the game. (Or at least you’ve lost the attention of the audience, which is the game’s scoring system, so my point stands.)

It will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this blog that corporate culture and I have never been a great match, but honestly this incarnation of capitalism makes me nostalgic for the days when jobs were listed in the Wednesday edition of the local paper: at least then, neither you or your employer had to pretend that you wanted to become one another’s BFFs as part of a noble quest to make a difference to some undefined something or other. They had a thing that needed doing, and you had—or could at least make a good argument for your having—a set of pertinent skills for doing that thing, and all you had to do was convince them that a) you actually had those skills, and b) would reliably turn up to work at the allotted place and time.

And yes, yes, it’s still that, of course—but now it’s all this other stuff as well, the performance, a LARP where everyone is playing the same damned character, companies as much as employees and jobseekers, every firm seeking to convince you of its distinctive and caring working environment by using almost exactly the same set of stock phrases as all the others, and all of them looking for the unique and distinctive hire that will fit the role, which is described by using… ugh, you get it.

But again, it’s the only game in town—so I’d best screw on my grown-up trousers and learn to deal with it. My friend says that they have taken to a more adversarial and playful poke-the-bear approach to LinkedIn of late, which sounds both more fun and more within my capabilities… but it doesn’t look like a strategy that can be successfully be deployed from a position of weakness, which is where I’m at right now.

So maybe I just need to seek out the edges of the distribution curve: after all, the edges are where I’ve always ended up, and there’s little point in trying to fight that fact, just as there’s little point in pretending I can fake the sincerity that appears to define the center.

Thing is, the center’s where all the damned jobs are. Plus ça change.