§ field notes · 2025
why you should delete your linkedin (or at least stop taking it so seriously™)
Professional performance theater, digital sharecropping, and the tools building our prisons.
republishing in progress — this essay ran as a LinkedIn long-form and is being moved here in full. the argument, in the meantime:
- Professional platforms reward performance over substance — a feed of announcements optimized for an algorithm, not for the person reading.
- Posting your career onto rented land is digital sharecropping: you do the work, the platform owns the yield.
- The AI paradox runs through all of it — we are building tools that build our prisons, then performing enthusiasm about the prison.
- The alternative is unglamorous: a simple resume or a personal site that you control. This site is that argument, practiced.