Daniel O’Shea, as yet unshitcanned from the Twitter: “LinkedIn has reached peak cringe. Help us build something better.” Then he goes on to list terribly banal prerequisites that guarantee nobody with an original idea will be allowed on his “team.”
LinkedIn baffles everyone. I assume it too is some kind of money-laundering operation, but that is as sideshow to its true function, kompromat. LinkedIn exists to provide oppo research on zero-profile civilians who run afoul of progressives (or, rarely, non‑ or anti-progressives). If one dares to render a forbidden word online, or espouse some ostensibly controversial topic (“LGBT+ are doing the work of the Man of Lawlessness, in knowing defiance of God”), one’s enemies will scrape the LinkedIn page one had set up for reasons unclear even at the time. It’s certainly a great source for headshots, which one should never have uploaded anyway, as their true usage is in the service of reverse-racist employment discrimination.
As I wrote O’Shea (saving a relevant portion for a later day):
Surely you’ve had all sorts of nerds writing in with ideas that amount to shuffling deck chairs on the Linkedtanic. The imperative for this project, I submit, should be to become the natural home of refusé(e)s, the blacklisted, the cancelled.
And I have something to offer there, given how many times… I was told directly to my face I would never work at the company in question, or that open blacklists were in place keeping me out of entire industries, including one I cofounded. (I’ve been online for 31 years, wrote the book on Web accessibility, have a breezy 45 years in typography, did my own usability research, and have other qualifications, but if you’re shopping for qualifications this is itself an error for which a recruiting site must correct.)
And if you work with me at all, even though I will ask for very little at the outset, you’ll basically be tarred for life… assuming news of same gets out.
If I’m not perfect for this project, I don’t know who might be.
Elon Musk wrote (separately and later): “We need to make this interface far more beautiful.” “Note that part of my proposition here is doing just that,” I appended to O’Shea.
This LinkedIn manqué can serve as a recruiting hub for anyone at odds with the régime – even if, as must someday happen, the polarity of that régime flips. Red Balloon has attempted to do something similar, but the network effect dooms them.
Through intelligent markup (inevitably some form of XML – still, in the 21st century) and well-more-than-intelligent typography and design, any such LinkedIn manqué can render the résumé obsolete. (I would always ask the blind people I met if they wanted my card. No – I’ve got everything electronically, they’d say. I appreciate Latin, but, while XML in the 21st century can be tolerated with gritted teeth, curricula vitæ in that century really cannot.)
Recapitulating the experience I explicitly stated to him, Daniel O’Shea couldn’t be bothered to get back to me. Now he can assemble a well-compensated team to half-assedly implement the ideas I could have achieved with brilliance and panache.