LinkedIn has never been a great social network, but in the not-so-distant past, there was a time where people put effort into curating their personal image and brand. Sometimes there would even be some sort of meaningful exchange between individuals. That ship has long sailed. LinkedIn is still useful for finding a job, but the social aspect is an unusable cesspool of AI slop, and has been for quite a while.

One core problem is that folks on LinkedIn want to be seen as thought leaders. If you aren’t trying to be a thought leader, are you even trying at life? The cost of attempting to become a thought leader has never been cheaper. Copy a hacker news post and go ask a nearby slop machine to regurgitate it into some new form - but hold the em-dashes and the “not this, but that” pattern. Or just copy someone else’s double spaced, one sentence per line, monochromatic attempt at writing and have the machine whip up a response. No one is actually reading it, so why care about quality? It’s just clankers in these parts.

I get it. The job market is rough, and we want to show that we’re “AI Native” and play a part in leading the AI transformation of the world. The problem is that it’s lazy. At best it’s a repackaging of someone else’s original thought or a derivative, unreadable version of a source. At worst, it’s desperate slop, typically encouraging people to do something poorly with AI. Affirming the outsourcing of their own cognition to AI. Stop.

AI is a tool. A very, very powerful tool. We’re in the phase where the people who will get the most out of AI are the ones that can still think without it. Think of AI in terms of Newton’s Second Law: F=ma. AI is the acceleration. Your thinking is the mass. It doesn’t matter how high you crank up the volume on acceleration, if the mass is zero, the force is zero.

Disconnect from LinkedIn, put the motivational self help books away, grab a classic. Buy a good notebook from Japan or Germany. Then go outside, find a quiet, comfortable spot, and read. As you’re reading, write ideas into the notebook. Think deeply about simple things. Don’t ask claude to explain them - at least not until you’ve spent some time grappling with them yourself.

Don’t worry about being a thought leader - worry about thinking.