LinkedIn and Soul-Sucking Corporate Pollyannaism

The Insidious Nature of Corporate Pollyannaism

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.

The discursive norms on LinkedIn are a convention, a social practice, a type of theater for the purposes of financial gain. The dialect is an artifice, a language of introductory commerce but not descriptive of reality (even though it pretends to describe reality). Corporate Pollyannaism is not a method for finding or communicating the truth; indeed it is unconcerned and often contemptuous of the truth. Actual commerce, for example an audited financial statement, involves a completely different dialect (indeed using the peppy, cheery, performative LinkedIn dialect in an SEC statement would get one fired or possibly jailed).

But are the people well-versed in LinkedIn-speak fully aware of its insidious nature? I can picture people new to the site adopting the discourse to try to put their best foot forward. At first they are still bilingual — they present one way on LinkedIn even though they speak a different vernacular in their day-to-day life. They remain cognizant of the fact that most workplaces are authoritarian, abusive, filled with petty infighting, and damaging to the soul even if they are not allowed to speak about that on LinkedIn. But maybe they get a promotion and are now seeking job candidates — they are on the management side of the transactional relationship representing the interests of capital or the state.

I wonder if over time they come to permanently see the world through the lens of this bougie discourse? Is LinkedIn a slippery slope that trains people into a mindset they probably would not have willingly chosen on their own? If so, is LinkedIn a machine that gradually strips us of our humanity?

My profound worry is two-fold (and I guess it’s why I felt compelled to write this):

Repeating something over and over, as part of the LinkedIn discursive system, really does change one’s thoughts over time. So it’s not entirely innocent.
What happens if corporations and the state merge (what we’ve historically called fascism but the faint of heart call corporatism) and put their profit interests ahead of the well-being of individuals, families, and society? At that point, we are participating in our own demise if we play by the rules (unwritten or otherwise) of the system.

Indeed that’s what happened over the last five years. Corporations and the state merged. They ran a sophisticated global operation to increase their power, wealth, and control. And the vast majority of the over one billion Bougie Winners on LinkedIn didn’t say a word because they were so thoroughly indoctrinated into a system of Corporate Pollyannaism that, to this day, they don’t even realize what happened or acknowledge how they may have participated in the assault on humanity by the fascist Pharma state.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.

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