LinkedIn Is So Weird

It’s probably a net good thing that there are social media sites for people of various proclivities and needs. There’s Snapchat for mean younger millennials, BlueSky for elder millennial furries, TikTik for overwhelmed Gen Zers, and Facebook for Boomers who wish their elder millennial furry kids would still talk to them. And then there’s LinkedIn.

How best to describe LinkedIn? I think part of the genius of the site is that it’s not just a place to list jobs. It’s a professional social media platform. A deeply strange one. I once knew a therapist who’d just moved from NYC to LA, and I asked what the difference was between the two places, based solely on her patients.

“In New York, everyone tries to convince you their life is worse than it is,” she explained.” In Los Angeles, it’s exactly the opposite.”

LinkedIn culture is sort of like LA culture, but an even more erstatz and AI-inflected version. It’s one of those places where they film when it’s too expensive to film in LA, but it needs to look like LA. I guess this means that LinkedIn is the Vancouver of social media?

I say all this because I had a strange interaction this week with the platform based on a post I wrote on The Autopian. It was about how Nissan’s new CEO, a guy named Ivan Espinosa, is in an unofficial Nissan house band called Tempura Crime Scene. I was delighted by this post and challenged the band to play the New York Auto Show.

While I don’t usually share posts on LinkedIn, I did share this one, mostly because I wanted to see if I could convince someone at Nissan to make it happen. As hoped, Nissan USA’s Director of Corporate Comms responded positively.

So you’re saying there’s a chance…

If that was the only interaction I’d had, it would be fine. But then I logged in and noticed someone shared the post, and even did so in a flattering-sounding way. Here’s what I first saw when I was tagged:

From Drumbeats to Driving Innovation @ Nissan Motor Corporation

Sharing a fantastic article by Matt Hardigree at The Autopian about Nissan’s new CEO, Ivan Espinosa — who also happens to be the drummer for the band Tempura Crime Scene.

Oh, cool, I thought. I wandered over to the post to see the full thing.

At first glance, it might seem like just a fun side note. But being a drummer is more than keeping time — it’s about:

Leadership through rhythm – the drummer sets the pace and keeps the group in sync, just as a CEO drives alignment across a global organization.

Listening & collaboration – great drummers know when to push forward and when to support, much like guiding a team through market challenges and opportunities.

Energy & creativity – the heartbeat of the music mirrors the passion and innovation required to inspire a company’s culture and customers.

Oh, no…

You can click the link above to read the full thing.

LinkedIn is full of this sort of exec-speak, Brene Brownnoser kinda content. I cannot say with 100% certainty that this post was written by AI, but it follows an extremely popular format that AI loves. You’ve probably seen it if you’ve been on Linkedin before. It provides four bullet points and ends with two emojis.

This post feels like it was either written by AI, or it was written to ape a style that AI learned by reading too many LinkedIn posts in some sort of degenerative rhetorical spiral. The “author” of this post appears to be a part-time social media consultant named Stephen C. Holtzman, whose day job is doing social media work for a few Toyota and Mitsubishi dealers, as well as some other local businesses in Canada, according to his profile.

He’s somehow amassed over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn with this schtick, so fair play. His post got more engagement than my post, and I wrote the original article. It seems like a lot of big deal PR and Comms people follow him.

Did I follow him? I do now. LinkedIn may be a Potemkin version of the real professional world, but there are advantages to being prominent there. I suppose the easiest way to thrive in an uncanny valley is to be equally uncanny.

Also, he linked to the full article, which I always appreciate.

Top graphic images: LinkedIn