Abolish LinkedIn

The lobotomy needs to end.

Open the app. Give up part of your self.

Blue light. Holy light. False ascension.
Soft-lit aquarium for the ambitious dead.

The feed a corridor of smiling faces with hostage eyes. People “thrilled” and “honored” and “humbled” to be herded into slightly larger cages. People celebrating resilience while quietly bleeding out. Drip—drip—drip, blood in the snow. The walking dead. People posting layoffs like confessionals: “I’m grateful for the journey,” they whisper, the knife still in their back, twisting. Not the LinkedIn story, not the “I’m so grateful to be part of this amazing team” hostage video — the actual day is uglier, more human, more desperate.

But LinkedIn cannot metabolize ugliness.
LinkedIn cannot tolerate the smell of the animal.

LinkedIn is deodorant for the system’s corpse.

I abhor it. I want it gone. I want it abolished like a bad law, like an old superstition that’s been breaking our teeth for so long we forgot we’re allowed to stop chewing. In earlier essays I called it what it is: “a scourge upon humanity.”

But I want to go further.

Because LinkedIn isn’t just cringe.
It’s ritual technology.
It’s bullshit-capitalism’s church app.
It’s surrender.
It’s utter delusion.

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1) Blue cathedral

LinkedIn is a platform for “professional networking.” That phrase alone should be prosecuted. “Networking” sounds like something computers do. It reduces human relationships to cables. To ports. To compatibility. To throughput. Is there anything worse than spending time with people you hate?

LinkedIn is a mass liturgy for the religion of employability.

You enter. You kneel. You polish your halo. You speak in the approved dialect:
Excited to share.
Honored to announce.
Grateful for the opportunity.
So proud of this quarter’s results.

So fucking glad I can do useless work for useless companies; waste my life on an absurdity that isn’t even fun.

Every sentence is a small surrender. Every post is a micro-pledge: I accept the rules. I accept the hierarchy. I accept it all Goddammit! Please don’t let me fall off the world. Please, God. Please. Let me survive.

Because that’s what it threatens, always, silently: exile.

LinkedIn turns the old social question of “Who are you?” into a narrower, more violent one: “What are you worth?” And it demands the answer in public, with a smile, with your head held at the correct angle, with the correct headline, with the correct nouns. It turns identity into a product label.

You are not you. I am not Antonio.
You are, I am, Digital Marketing Specialist | B2B | Growth | #Open to work!
You are keywords begging an algorithm.

And the tragedy is that it works.

The religious love to kneel. We are all religious.

2) Sacrament

The primary action on LinkedIn is not communication. It’s validation.
Tiny dopamine communion wafers.
A thousand plastic “Congrats!” pressed onto your forehead like a corporate ash cross.

And the posts themselves are engineered for one thing: moral theater.

LinkedIn is the only place on Earth where someone will describe a tragedy — burnout, unemployment, illness, grief — and end it with a “lesson” and a “takeaway.” It is where pain gets converted into content. Where a human fracture gets turned into a carousel.

Here is my suffering.
Here is how it made me a better employee.

There is something genuinely demonic at work. Not because people are bad. Because the incentives are. Because everyone is running a small survival script: be visible. be useful. be safe. And the platform turns that fear into architecture.

Mark Fisher wrote about the slow cancellation of the future — the feeling that the horizon has been boarded up and only administrative life remains. In my words: you can smell the rotting paperwork everywhere. It has become our world.

LinkedIn is the perfume counter to the bureaucratic death sentence. It takes the scent of dead futures and sells it back.

And you buy it because what else are you supposed to buy?

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3) Aristocracy

Historically, society stratified itself with raw forces: land, violence, lineage, beauty, strength, intelligence, divine myths. Brutal, yes. But at least the brutality was honest. The king didn’t pretend he was humble. The knight didn’t post a three-paragraph reflection on the importance of stakeholder alignment during jousting.

Now the hierarchy runs on something far more degrading:

Performative office obedience.
Tolerance for bullshit.
Skill at smiling through spiritual nausea.

David Graeber’s bullshit jobs, ubiquitous. Work so empty the people doing it feel a quiet shame.

LinkedIn is the cathedral where that shame gets transubstantiated into pride.

On LinkedIn, the prestige of Excel becomes a virtue.
The ability to sit through meetings that prevent a decision becomes leadership.
The talent for writing a sentence that says nothing without sounding like nothing becomes communication.

Intelligence? Optional.
Strength? Irrelevant.
Craft? Too messy. Too slow. Too real.

The new elite skill is self-erasure with charisma.
A polite disappearance.

And the system rewards it. Titles, salaries, the soft narcotic of recognition.

LinkedIn is the public mirror where you watch your soul twisted, broken, disfigured, re-arranged into something employable. And then you clap and weep.

There was honor at least in getting mauled by a tiger.

4) Permanent audition

The hidden violence: LinkedIn makes the job application never end.

Even when employed, you are conditioned to be “open to opportunities.” Remain anxious, remain legible, remain pitchable.

You are always a candidate. Always a product on a shelf. Always one reorg away from the void.

You curate. You pre-smile. You sanitize your opinions. You drain your language. You become careful. You become bland. You become safe. You become everyone else.

And in doing so, you lose the crucial: the ability to speak like a human who is not asking permission to exist.

LinkedIn is not just a platform — it is a behavioral conditioning machine.
A training ground for ideological compliance.

Am I going too far yet?
Or do you feel it, perhaps?

Žižek said something like: the cynical subject knows the system is absurd, but performs it anyway. Your feed is full of that performance. Everyone knows it’s fake. Everyone plays anyway. Because rent. Because food. Because shame.

That’s what the platform monetizes: not your productivity, but your fear of social death.

5) Speak crime

Let’s talk about the dialect for a moment. The LinkedIn voice.

It is a dialect designed to do two things at once:

1. Signal obedience (I accept the rules)

2. Perform authenticity (I am a unique human)

And it fails at the latter and so it becomes a third thing: corporate ventriloquism.

It’s why LinkedIn feels so uncanny. It’s a haunted house of phrases. A place where language goes to be taxidermied. Every post reads like it was written by a nervous committee in a beige room with glass walls: We wanted to share… We’re excited to announce… I’m humbled…

Humbled by what, exactly?

LinkedIn is an engine that turns complex inner lives into “impact.” It reduces existences to “deliverables,” then invites celebration at the lobotomy. It encourages you to narrate your life as a brand story. It makes you write your own propaganda. Everyone hates propaganda they say.

That’s why my hatred toward this platform is not petty. It’s not aesthetic. It’s moral. Also it’s a bit unhinged.

It’s because the platform doesn’t just reflect the system. It cements it. It normalizes it. It makes it feel like weather: just how things are. Capitalist realism, again.

6) Total abolition

People will say: “Just don’t use it.”
As if ideology is a personal preference.
As if the platform isn’t wired into hiring, prestige, recruitment, professional legitimacy. As if opting out doesn’t come with a penalty. “Just don’t participate,” they say, while the whole economy is built like a dirty nightclub and the violent Bosnian bouncer with a criminal past (is it you, uncle?) asks for your profile.

Also, I don’t want a better LinkedIn.
I want no LinkedIn. I want it gone.

Not because I think deleting an app ends the farce. But because symbols matter. Rituals matter. Public mirrors matter. They are us.

Abolishing LinkedIn is not primarily about removing a website. It’s about refusing the value system that website performs.

Max Weber warned about the iron cage (the world of rationalized metrics, targets, dashboards) where the map replaces the territory. LinkedIn is the cage’s selfie camera.

We should smash the camera. Bury the pieces.

7) Final insult

The greatest insult of LinkedIn is not that it’s fake.

It’s that it makes you complicit in your own lobotomy. Your own reduction from something greater.

It teaches you to narrate your life as if you are grateful for captivity. It trains you to smile in public while dissociating. A society that needs this platform is a society that has forgotten what a person is. A job that needs two paragraphs to describe isn’t real anyway.

Kill LinkedIn.
As an act of symbolic hygiene.
As a refusal.
As a strike against the empire of fakeness and bureaucracy.

Stop the feed.
Put out the masks to dry and crack.
The cathedral goes dark.

Enjoy your day,

Antonio Melonio

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SERIOUSLY, IF ANYONE POSTS THEIR LINKEDIN IN THE COMMENTS I AM GOING TO DO UNSPEAKABLE THINGS.