I'm almost embarrassed to say how important LinkedIn is to my business. My network is large though not vaynerchukian. It's taken a good amount of work, but it seems worth it. It often seems to me that much of the industry knows who I am and doesn't despise me.
Further, about twice a month I get a message from a CMO-like object asking for a phone call. About half of those calls turn into revenue.
But there's a pernicious side to LinkedIn. And not just LinkedIn, but amerika. Lately, I've noticed a trend and become annoyed by it.
I get a shitload of intrusions like these.
When I respond by trying to get rid of them, I get messages like these:
By what algorithmic alchemical bullshit are you feeding me this shit? If you, LinkedIn, are randomly suggesting that I pay attention to people I'm sure to find idiotic, how does that help you, LinkedIn, or me, a LinkedIn customer.
How could you possibly think I'd give a shit about this? You're force-feeding me garbage. Regardless of any binary so-called understanding of my taste and reading habits.
What's more, or worse, there's this semantic miscarriage.
I have blocked every one of your suggestions, LinkedIn, for the almost twenty-years I've been on your platform. Yet, you keep making them. You keep insulting me, lying to me asking me for more information in order to "improve my feed." My job is not to improve my feed which you are crudding up.
Listen, I never asked for my feed to be improved. I want my feed left alone. I want you to leave me alone. You have no right, LinkedIn, to assume I need your help in improving my feed or my anything else.
What your suggestions and solicitudes are are lies. Much like the lies we all get when we go to a site and buy something and then get two emails a day for the rest of our lives. Or when we leave something in a "cart" because we've thought better of it and we get two emails a day for the rest of our lives telling us we've made an error and left something in our carts.
I don't need any of this shit from brands.
I don't need to be addressed by my first name as if we're friends. Or lied to under the guise that you're doing something special for me. Or treated like I'm an idiot and without you I wouldn't know a major pagan celebration is coming.
I don't need to be addressed by my first name as if we're friends. Or lied to under the guise that you're doing something special for me. Or treated like I'm an idiot and without you I wouldn't know a major pagan celebration is coming.
I don't need to be revved up by your fake buy-now hysteria. I've got my own hysterium to deal with and I don't need yours on top of mine.
Modern marketing must have been contrived by the same sort of people who designed the old-fashioned shooting galleries they had at amusement parks when I was a boy. To modern marketers I'm a slow-moving duck and they have endless ammunition to shoot at me with.
Modern marketing treats my in-box like a horny priest putting his hand up someone's skirt or down someone's pants. Modern marketing thinks they own my in-box, my time and they have some sort of carte blanc permission to treat me as a "friend" (which in modern marketing, is really a victim) when all I want from brands is to be left alone.
In fact, brands today treat people like they're always on. When all I want from a brand is to be there when I need you, do what you promise and leave me alone.
About two-decades ago, my younger daughter, the marine biologist, used to spend parts of her summer at "whale camp" on a nearly-deserted Manhattan-sized island in the Bay of Fundy, called Grand Manan.
The cod and sardines died out in the 1960s, and Grand Manan died with them. Where there used to be jobs and fishers and processing plants today there is desolation, poverty, despair and heroin.
On the entire island, outside of a bed and breakfast or two, a store where you can buy sterno (to drink) and white claw, which is cheap wood alcohol mixed with seltzer and cut with bile, the ferry terminal and a bar or two, there is no commerce. There's nothing to do at night except watch TV and get stoned.
The island, in short, is post-commerce. You can scarcely find a souvenir t-shirt of the place.
The island, in short, is post-commerce. You can scarcely find a souvenir t-shirt of the place.
I'm old now and have all I need to live for my remaining life-expectancy without the need to buy anything save food, propane to heat my house, and about three gallons of gas-a-week. I have no material wants. I don't lust after any inanimate object.
I'm old.
I've earned the right to be left alone, not besieged by marketers who treat me like I'm an imbecile and work ceaselessly to create a mercantile mania in order to make me think I'm missing out on something.
When you try to opt out of something, say (because they ask) that you have no interest, they send you one-thousand more. This is not marketing. This is harrasment.
It seems the entirety of amerika is built on lies that there's always more to buy, and the mechanized and automated and the AI'd marketing industry is endlessly turning out crap to support and propagate those lies.
This isn't work in service of a brand. This is mania. And it's destroying trust, companies and crushing our souls.
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