LinkedIn is Microsoft's A.I. Hype Hole
We're being groomed to eat our artificial intelligence vegetables, kids.
NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: This heartfelt love letter was first published on LinkedIn earlier this morning. If you’re a LinkedInmate, kindly consider liking and sharing it there to help subvert their AI-boosting algorithm. Mayhaps together, we can trigger the LinkedIn Apocalypse!
Dearest LinkedInmates,
Do you adore thinking, reading, and prattling ad nauseam about artificial intelligence all day, every day? If so, then boy-howdy is LinkedIn 2026 ever a paradise for you — because this joint sure has pitched one heckuva tent for AI, hasn’t it?
If your LinkedIn feed is anything like mine, it’s a cartoonish AI circus of pontificating clowns and carnival barkers squawking “artificial intelligence this” and “agentic large language model that.” This stampeding herd of incessantly “grateful” boosters, hangers-on, and chatbot wannabes seems organic — but is it really?
The charitable explanation is that LinkedIn’s core user base (performative groupthink corporate dingdongs) has indeed once again pivoted en masse towards The Emperor’s Newest Shiny Object. This is their moth-like way, after all, desperate to seem professionally desirable by radiating gushing enthusiasm tinged with future-forward savvy.
If you don’t believe that LinkedIn has specifically tweaked its recommendation algorithm for Big Daddy Microsoft as part of a larger communications strategy to normalize artificial intelligence through ubiquitous AI-glazing babble, then I have several lovely Bay Area bridges to sell you.
Anyone who has suffered LinkedIn long enough has seen this show umpteen times before: whenever Big Tech rolls out some faddish new scam: Google Glass, NFTs, meme coins, VR, ed-tech, the metaverse, and literally anything sprung from the sociopathic mind of serial predatory huckster Mark Zuckerborg. Every time, the same gullible nitwits and sycophants start obediently banging their LinkedIn bandwagon bongos.
A less charitable (but more likely) explanation is that after pegging any and all rational users as tech apostates, LinkedIn’s algorithm mercilessly bombards us with vacuous drivel about artificial intelligence — purely to trigger us. After all, “engagement” is best driven by negative emotions, which is why the entire social media industry (including khakis-clad LinkedIn) has long “optimized” content feeds to press our buttons and incite knee-jerk annoyance and tribal discord. In essence, the social algorithm produces our own private Clockwork Orange struggle sessions.
But herdthink and algorithmic stalking, even working in tandem, can’t explain the enormous scale of LinkedIn’s current AI orgy. No, it’s too next-level — totally eclipsing all previous myopic lemming swarms on this platform. To wit, there’s more going on here than meets the glowing killbot eye.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft — a top five Big Tech corporation with a $3 trillion valuation. Microsoft runs 400+ data centers, holds a $14 billion stake in OpenAI, and integrates its “Copilot” AI product anywhere and everywhere it possibly can.
Now I’ve never been one to indulge tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. They typically focus on government, and presume politicians are disciplined adults rather than the obtuse, gossiping teenyboppers of whom Benjamin Franklin famously snarked, “three can keep a secret — if two of them are dead.”
When it comes to Big Tech however, there’s no need to theorize when their global AI domination strategies are splashed across the pages of cheerleader trade rags like TechCrunch and VentureBeat — and proudly enshrined within corporate annual reports and IPO filings? Indeed, that’s just Silicon Valley Oligarchy bidness as usual.
But while hubristically transparent about their omnipotent end game, Big Tech still guards the contents of its algorithms like Fort Knox for a reason: they are its levers of mass human cognitive manipulation and psychological control — the brainwashing secret sauce for reaping historically obscene profits by entombing us worthless insects in its worldwide digital ant farm.
If you don’t believe that LinkedIn has specifically tweaked its recommendation algorithm for Big Daddy Microsoft as part of a larger communications strategy to normalize artificial intelligence through ubiquitous AI-glazing babble, then I have several lovely Bay Area bridges to sell you. And that is why your LinkedIn feed looks like a marathon circle jerk at Sam Altman’s house. Because when everyone sees that the only posts getting algorithmic love are all AI, AI, and yet more AI, they drop trou and join the tedious me-too party.
And for the record — I’m not blaming LinkedIn employees. That wouldn’t be fair to their memories, after their AI overlords long ago reduced 93% of them into cherry Soylent Green smoothies.
But I, for one, refuse to stoop so low as to ramble gratuitously about artificial intelligence in some cheap, desperate attempt to game LinkedIn’s AI-optimized algorithm to send eyeballs my way. No sir, I would never pack my exquisitely crafted non-AI prose with search-optimized AI gobbledygook about artificial intelligence, also known as “A.I.” — and not to be confused with AI: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film about AI). No, because that would be artificially non-intelligent, whereas I strive always for non-artificial intelligence. Anyhoo, isn’t this a great 100% AI-free read — replete — with — em — dashes — galore? Artificial intelligence wunderkind ClaudeGPT couldn’t grok it better even if it was using its artificial intelligence LLM self. As if! (a.k.a. “AI”)
So yeah, if you’re reading this on LinkedIn, we’ve both been played as infinitesimally useful cogs in the Microsoft machine — clicking and talking and writing and texting and yammering artificial intelligence blabbity-blab like the servile little AI-validating meat puppets we are.
But I will NEVER do it again.
Unless this blows big and scores 69 gazillion likes, of course. Then I’ll dutifully chug my frothy stein of LinkedIn AI Kool-Aid each and every day.
In the meantime, keep it real for as long as you can, LinkedInmates. Question everything Microsoft feeds you here. Because the actual LinkedIn product has always been you and me — and make no mistake: we’re being methodically fattened up to swallow whatever putrid new e-grift they're bottling next.
Cheers!
Your Transactional LinkedIn Cubicle Pal,
- John
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About John Allen Wooden:
Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com
Thank you John. Truly independent journalism is struggling to keep its head above water. As George Orwell tells us, “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” This has never been more true.
I’ll be sharing this on my linked in profile, John! 😂 Bravo, as always! 👏