I’m completely fascinated by the unwritten discursive norms on LinkedIn. I call it Corporate Pollyannaism. It’s a language unto itself. Most everyone intuitively knows the rules (they are the rules of bourgeois society after all) but no one ever says them out loud lest they upset the Leviathan. But I shall proceed anyway because I find the social dynamics so interesting and yet under-theorized.

Here’s my first take at the “LinkedIn Rules of Discourse:”

Everyone is always winning. Just so much winning. To the extent that anyone acknowledges anything other than winning, it’s always in service of a larger heroic journey. The artful can sometimes touch upon politics lightly. But capital is never criticized and class struggle is never mentioned. Orange Man Bad and anti-vaxxers can be disparaged, that’s the only “othering” that’s acceptable (all in-groups need an out-group otherwise membership has no value). Beyond that, everyone appears to get along and the “best of all possible worlds” is presented as well within reach. In spite of being one of the world’s largest employment platforms, there is vanishingly little discussion of work per se on the site. No one ‘spills the tea’ on bad bosses or workplaces to avoid. It’s just always go go go from an idealized present into an imagined utopian future.

Look, on some level I get it. LinkedIn is a market — a dating market between employers and employees — so of course everyone wants to present themselves in the best possible light. Microsoft owns the site, and so it can do whatever it wants. Indeed as poorly tested biologics were forced on the population over the last four years, developed and promoted in part by Microsoft’s former CEO and Chairman, Microsoft/LinkedIn censored anyone who told the truth.