Unfortunately, it has essentially become a job requirement for B2B startup founders (I fall into this category) and C-suite business leaders to post thought leadership on LinkedIn to grow their businesses. Actually, hold up, it feels like more than a job requirement. At this point it may actually be the most important part of the job. This is most true in the startup space — where founders take an attention-by-any-means-necessary approach to getting their product in front of potential customers, while established corporate brands hold a tighter leash around what their leaders can say publicly.

Every leader should be an evangelist for their business. But we’ve entered an era where posting vapid thought leadership on LinkedIn is the most effective way to evangelize a product. This pressures every founder to become a LinkedIn influencer. To be not just a business owner or product creator, but a brand themselves. They must turn their own likeness into an online media brand. They become the marketing entity that pushes their business forward.

There has been a shift in how people share content on LinkedIn. Over the last decade, LinkedIn has transformed itself from a work-focused networking site focused on jobs to a business-themed social media platform. It’s the social media platform you can scroll through during work hours and feel like you’re still “doing work stuff”, a tiny semblance of being productive. It feels somewhat better than scrolling Instagram or TikTok. It’s also still great for salespeople to hunt down prospects.

Previously, people would only share content on LinkedIn if it was important. If they had a big career announcement, reached an important milestone, or had an idea they truly felt they wanted to share. In our attention economy and the new LinkedIn, this is no longer the case. The LinkedIn creator does not come up with an interesting thought or achieve something that they then feel is worthy to share on LinkedIn. Instead they start with: I need to post something. I need to post X times per week. Let me brainstorm some ideas that would make good content. This fills LinkedIn with content that is created simply for the sake of needing to show up in feeds.

Every LinkedIn post is a not-so-veiled advertisement for the poster's personal brand and their company. This is apparent in the content of posts. Many LinkedIn creators end their posts with some kind of low-stakes call to action — comment below and I’ll send you the playbook, sign up for my newsletter, follow me for more, etc. These posts are not a person in your network sharing information they feel is meaningful. These are advertisements disguised as such.

Every LinkedIn post is: Hey look at me. Look at my face. See my friendly smile? Look, I'm being transparent and vulnerable. Don’t you trust me? Aren’t my ideas interesting? Do you like this hot take? Look at my job title and company name. Don’t you want to click on my profile to see what exactly my company does? Then the comments of these posts are filled with other LinkedIn creators leaving uninspired comments lauding the poster just to get their name and face attached to the post to get attention for themselves. This even goes so far as co-founders shitcommenting (like shitposting) on each other’s posts for engagement, or worse forcing lightly suggesting their employees to engage — like these people aren’t in Slack talking to each other all day. Like they aren’t planning the posts and what they’re going to comment together. It’s obvious and it’s pathetic. This is what I like to call The LinkedIn Circlejerk™.

Doing this has become popular because this nonsense actually does work. LinkedIn has become the most cost-effective marketing channel for B2B. No, not paid LinkedIn ads — those suck, but organic posts from real people. The LinkedIn algorithm has throttled the reach of company pages into the ground. They’ve decided that feeds need to be full of people. People with real faces, real ideas, real companies, and real job titles (the last two aren’t actually required).

It works because the eyeballs on LinkedIn are more valuable to B2B companies than any other social platform. People on LinkedIn have business goals and problems, with budgets to solve them. Just by showing up in feeds, LinkedIn influencers can get in front of target audiences and build trust with potential customers. When a person engages with a LinkedIn post, the post is then shown to people that person is connected with. This helps influencers reach new, relevant business audiences who may have never heard about the person or company before in a way that builds trust — someone they know is “vouching” for this person by engaging. This incentivizes creators to make engagement bait — bold hot takes, “inspiring” stories, faux vulnerability, recycled business lessons, toxic positivity (to the point of me worrying that you’re actually down bad), and even selfies. Personally, I think the random selfies attached to LinkedIn thought leadership posts are one of the funniest things on the internet. Keep it up.

Some startups are now hiring LinkedIn influencers for full-time marketing positions simply to attach their company name to the creator’s posts so their brand can show up in more feeds in an organic way. Many companies are even making thought leadership on LinkedIn part of the job description for both senior and junior marketing and sales roles.

Gong, a B2B sales tech company, invented the LinkedIn employee marketing playbook to help them grow a $7.5B valuation. The playbook is to essentially hold their junior employees hostage, forcing them to become thought leaders touting the company line. A real person. A real talking head. Showing up in your newsfeed. Talking about how great the company is. On LinkedIn, it looks good. The company appears to look like a rocket ship that all the employees are thrilled to be on. Engagement on posts from other employees or influencers all congratulate each other for sharing “insights”. But a quick scroll of through sales-related subreddits show that a lot of salespeople (their target customers) see through the bullshit and are nauseated whenever they see a post, especially those that have seen behind the curtain and have had underwhelming experiences using Gong’s products. These conversations can’t happen on LinkedIn. Unlike other social platforms, where creators who make disingenuous, corny, or outright bad content are called out — people on LinkedIn are disincentivized to call anyone out. Any negativity they bring to a post will be broadcasted to their entire network of connections. This is how LinkedIn creates the environment for The LinkedIn Circlejerk™. No one wants their boss, their coworkers, or customers to see them dunking on someone on LinkedIn even if the poster deserves it. There’s no shortage of tech companies that have adopted this employee marketing playbook, where employees must enthusiastically post about the company on LinkedIn to ensure their job security.

Advancements in AI-led software development tools are quickly making it so software companies no longer compete on product features. When everyone has the same product, or the ability to easily build a product, the way companies will differentiate and compete will be by brand — built through a race for the most attention. When the tasks that used to be done by a human worker are mostly done by AI, white-collar workers will find that an increasingly larger share of their job description involves creating content. The value the human will bring to the job is that they are a human and can be used as a marketing channel to establish trust by showing up in LinkedIn feeds. As AI decimates the white-collar job market, people will become more desperate for secure jobs and accept this reality.

A good friend of mine approached me about two years ago about starting a new company together. He wanted to make LinkedIn a core part of our go-to-market strategy — meaning he and I would post thought leadership consistently on LinkedIn. This made me deeply uncomfortable. I truly could not bring myself to do this. After a few beers on the roof of my apartment, I told him why this would be a dealbreaker for me: “Look man, I think this could be a good business opportunity and would of course love to take a shot starting a company together, but I have to tell you: Even if you told me right now that you could guarantee that if I created thought leadership posts on LinkedIn 5 days a week for the next year that I would get $1 million (in new business revenue or even profit) I would still say no.”

Now let me be clear. I am not a rich man. I do not have $1 million. But I don’t want $1 million that bad. Not bad enough to become a LinkedIn influencer. It’s not worth it to me. What these lunatics are posting on LinkedIn is so incredibly cringe and blatantly self-serving that I could not live with myself if I did the same. Even with $1 million I could not live with myself. (Theoretically, there is a number I sell my virtue, but it would be much higher.)

My friend and I didn’t end up going into business together, but he went down the path of posting on LinkedIn. Now he’s all badged up with a “Top Voice” designation on his profile. I’m genuinely happy for him and impressed he did it so quickly, but I have zero FOMO. I do not want to wear that badge.

I currently run a small B2B media company. We publish newsletters and run a website that is read by tens of thousands of business professionals every week. We have a loyal audience who enjoys our content. It’s a typical media brand with a name and logo. Neither myself nor my co-founder is the face of the brand. We’ve successfully run the company for four years without any personal brand.

As a niche business we have just a handful of real competitors. And I have to say, these competitors are absolutely smoking us in terms of influence, audience growth, and revenue. From what I’ve heard they’re probably doing about 2-3x our revenue. This is because they are creator-first media companies. The founders are LinkedIn influencers who are highly visible. I had a friendly chat with our biggest competitor about this. He admitted it was difficult being so visible, being the face of the brand, and showing up every day publicly on social (he’s also a LinkedIn Top Voice). He mentioned that he was a bit envious of my position, running a similar business without a public persona. I reminded him, “Yes, but you make way more money than I do.” He laughed, agreed, and posted some thought leadership on LinkedIn the next day.

My business partner and I have talked about this in depth. We both lean on the side of privacy. We don’t want to be business personalities. We don’t want to be LinkedIn influencers. We consciously made the decision, and continue to make it every day, to make less money as a business by opting not to become LinkedIn influencers. I just can’t make myself do it.

The use case and value of speeding up educational long-form content — content designed to deliver information without artistic value — is clear. This is content we need to “get through” and increasing playback speed helps us get it done. I myself use the 1.25x speed as default when listening to educational podcasts or YouTube videos that are more than a few minutes long. Why wouldn’t I? I want to get through the content as quickly as possible (while still comprehending it) so I can maximize my information intake.

But playback speed is creeping into our leisure time — our entertainment. Many people, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, use this feature on streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu to speed up television shows and movies they watch. Netflix began testing the playback speed feature in 2019. As expected, filmmakers were outraged. Judd Apatow and Aaron Paul, among others, called out Netflix, likening the feature to a destruction of art, allowing viewers to take an artistic work and consume it like they would with other less meaningful content. Netflix released the feature anyway, citing improved accessibility for users. While slowing down a movie to 0.75x speed could potentially be useful for your aging grandmother, the feature has been widely adopted to “speed watch” content.

Advocates who use this feature say it helps improve pacing, especially at 1.25x speed, and that it doesn’t feel like the content they’re watching is comically sped up or that any context is lost. But for entertainment like television and movies, there is really no valid reason to do this.

The argument for speeding up content is that it saves time. But I ask, what does it say about society when we must rush through an activity that is meant to be leisure time? Are we really that strapped for time that we cannot afford to spend the 61 hours it takes to watch the entirety of Breaking Bad? At 1.25x playback speed, the entire show can be watched in just under 49 hours. The viewer gains 12 additional hours back in their life, but to what end? Are we looking to save time in our consumption of entertainment content so that we have more time to spend on more meaningful activities in our lives? Perhaps, but in this case I think the answer is likely “no” among those of us who speed up our entertainment. We’re not so busy that we need to streamline our content consumption to fit into our day. We use this feature to consume more content in a shorter span of time. We increase the playback speed so that we can maximize our content consumption.

We are in an era where maximizing content consumption is the goal for many of us, even if we don’t realize it. There’s such an abundance of content that it’s starting to feel like work to try and consume it all. It’s difficult to dedicate a significant amount of time to a single piece of content when there’s so much content out there that might be better, or tickle our brains differently. Speeding through long-form content that is created to entertain us during our leisure time fundamentally violates the creator's artistic vision, stripping away the deliberate pacing, nuance, and emotional resonance that gives the work its soul. As a result, long-form entertainment content suffers as a medium. The availability of entertainment in quick bites is ruining our ability to consume long-form content without speeding it up — a natural progression of behavior that comes from our new short-form video consumption habits.

Social media platforms have gone all-in on short-form content, and destroyed our attention spans in the process. With the promise of fresh new content just a lazy swipe of the thumb away, we find it hard to stick around to consume content that loses our interest after just a few seconds. Because of this, there’s less appetite for long-form from audiences and less incentive for artists to create a magnum opus: a book, a film, an album. Punchy tweets, Instagram Reels, or song snippets are the new mediums that allow artists to get attention and build careers. This is putting intentional, artistic, long-form content on life support from a creation standpoint.

Even Substack, which began as a platform focused on long-form writing, has bent the proverbial knee to short-form content. This is evident in their Notes feature that pushes writers to publish Twitter-style content or snackable versions of their writing in order to grow, and most recently the short-form vertical video Reels feature. But we can’t blame Substack — they’re just giving us what we want: sound bites, headlines, straight-to-the-dome dopamine. If they don't, we’ll get it on another platform.

Short-form content, more specifically, short-form video content has emerged as the primary way to consume content, especially for Gen Z.

Now even Instagram and TikTok, the leading providers of short-form content, allow users to speed it up. Increasingly, short-form content longer than 30 seconds is starting to feel too long. These quick bites are no longer quick enough.

I started using the playback speed option when watching Instagram Reels as soon as it became available. Now when a video comes across my feed that hooks me in, I find myself glancing down at the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. If it shows me that there’s still a lot of video left to watch, I hold my thumb on the screen to speed it up to 2x. Why wouldn’t I? I want to get to the next video as quickly as possible to maximize my dopamine per session.

Speeding up content is profitable. Radio stations and television news networks have been digitally altering playback speeds for nearly three decades so that they could fit in more content and ads. The modern version of this, speeding up social content, is likely even more profitable for social platforms as users can consume content endlessly, and therefore be served more ads.

What began as a tool to help us consume long-form educational content is now used to speed up our entertainment content; both long-form and short-form. This means we’re beginning to make increased playback speed the default for all content consumption. This will only continue to degrade our attention spans and change the type of content that we collectively create. In this world, artistic expression takes a hit. Artists may opt-out of creating deep and meaningful work, choosing to make disposable content that allows them to build a career. The meaningful work they do create is sped through or all together ignored, as people prefer to spend their attention on dopamine-first short-form content. In our rush to consume everything, we risk feeling nothing.

The concept of celebrity is simple. It is the state of being well known by people that you do not know personally. The celebrity has their every move watched, studied, and critiqued by people whom they do not know. But the promise of celebrity is attractive. The celebrity has social status, wealth, freedom, and admiration. Celebrity status elevates a person to a different stratosphere than other humans inhabiting the same earth. Being a celebrity can make one’s life feel more important than others. The celebrity is important in culture. The celebrity has influence.

Modern celebrity culture was created by and is perpetuated by the media. Around 100 years ago in the early Hollywood era, the concept of the modern celebrity was new and novel. Celebrity was (and still is) aspirational. The life of a celebrity has always been painted as glamorous and idealistic, but mostly unrealistic to achieve. Today it is more realistic than ever. Historically the title of celebrity was reserved for film & television stars, musicians, politicians, artists, and writers. Those whose public work was so important and visible in culture that people took interest in the person behind the work. The number of celebrities there could be was limited by the distribution of pre-internet media outlets. There was only so much space in a newspaper column and airtime on television or radio to elevate people to the status of a known public figure. With the internet, the guardrails came down and with social media the barrier to entry was reduced drastically. The delivery method improved allowing more media to reach a larger share of the population. In turn, media consumption became more accessible, and addictive algorithms forced it to become a larger part of our daily lives.

The social media creator is a close relative to the traditional Hollywood celebrity, a descendant really. Traditional Hollywood celebrities are legacy celebrities. The new celebrities are social media creators. Creators are famous in the eyes of their audience — they are watched, admired, and critiqued — just on a smaller scale than legacy celebrities. A creator that earns a large enough following can even climb the social (media) ladder to reach the status of legacy celebrities — walking the same red carpets and sitting down with the same late-night talk show hosts.

Celebrity has evolved rapidly in the last decade as social media has allowed people to circumvent the legacy institutions that controlled the means to mint new celebrities. Because of this, anyone can now turn themselves into a celebrity by creating and sharing content online. With enough perseverance, anyone can build an audience of fans to achieve a certain level of fame, fortune, and admiration. This has diluted what it means to be a celebrity. It has changed what it means to be famous. Before the internet, fame was more binary. It was grandiose. If you were famous, you knew it and people around you knew it. Today there are over 10 million Instagram accounts that have between 100,000 to 500,000 followers. Most of these people will never be like legacy celebrities that grace the covers of magazines or are followed around by paparazzi, but they are certainly famous. The number of people who know them would exceed the seating capacity of the world’s largest sports arenas. I would argue that any creator who shares content online using their name, image, or likeness (NIL) turns themselves into a public figure and sets themselves on the path to celebrity.

There is a perception that celebrities are desired by the public, but celebrities are not desired by the public. They are consumed by the public. We consume them simply because they are there. They are thrust upon us. They offer us entertainment and a bit of escapism. But when we are done with them we toss them away into obscurity and fixate on their replacement that feels more new and fun. This is a hard truth that is learned only by those that have been (un)lucky enough to experience celebrity themselves. Once they reach celebrity status, they are no longer a person in the eyes of the public, they become a concept — an easily replaceable concept.

The way that we are making people famous today and the trajectory we’re on for how it will progress in the future, I believe, is an evolution of the human race. As we approach a world where everyone is a social media content creator, a celebrity in some capacity, and many begin their journey while they are young, we’ll see a notable change in human behavior. The way we think about ourselves, our lives, and careers will change. In a chronically online world, we won’t need physical defensive mechanisms to survive like Neanderthals, instead we’ll need to evolve mental defensive mechanisms to survive the negative consequences associated with being in the public eye.

The First Shift: Everyone is a creator

Indulge me for a moment. I want to imagine a future scenario, one that I believe is very likely as technology advances and Gen Z and Gen Alpha make up a larger share of the population.

We will live in a world where the majority of people are content creators. There are a few reasons why I believe this will become a reality:

1. Young people want to become content creators. 65% of Gen Z already describe themselves as “video content creators”. Our chronically online youth aspire for the lifestyle that comes with being a content creator. What’s not to love? More money, no boss, complete autonomy over your daily schedule, unlimited dopamine hits from your beloved admirers, and internet clout. Make no mistake, internet clout is a valid currency that can get you places even money cannot. Most will go the route where they use their name, image, and likeness to create an online personal brand (and career) for themselves. We live in an attention economy. Because we want to be entertained and we micro-dose content throughout every dull moment of our day, this has already become a viable career path.

2. Artificial intelligence will greatly reduce or eliminate the need for human labor in society.

   While there are many different potential scenarios for how AI will affect work as we know it, this one is highly probable — maybe not in five years but almost certainly in fifty. Eventually, we’ll enter a post-work society and receive some type of universal basic income (UBI) that allows people to afford daily life without the need to work.

3. Becoming a content creator will become the most viable option for humans who want to work or earn additional income outside of a UBI in a post-work society. Content creator will be the last “job” that humans can have. While people won’t need to work, many will still want to work — especially on something they are passionate about. There will also be many who desire more than the “standard issue” lifestyle that comes with a UBI. These people will turn to content creation, developing their own personal brand, to increase their income. AI can certainly create content. AI influencers are already here. But as AI-created content floods media platforms, we’ll grow tired of it and crave authentic human-centric content. It’s a natural human desire to see other humans. Our humanity and individuality will be the only valuable contribution we can bring to a post-work society.

4. In this post-work society, people will spend their newfound free time consuming and creating content. The idea of a post-work society ushered in by AI has always come with the promise that humans could spend more time on offline leisure activities that enrich our lives — creating art and spending quality time with other people. It’s a nice thought, but I believe it’s too late. We’ve already become too connected to our devices and content feeds, especially our youth. We will spend the majority of our waking hours consuming content. The time we do spend pursuing our interests, hobbies, and expressing our creativity will be turned into content. The art we create will be shared and monetized through content creation.

The Second Shift: Being unknown is in vogue

Now that we’ve set the stage for the conditions that bring us into a world where the majority of the population are content creators. Let’s talk about what happens once we live in a creator-dominated society.

At this point someone who is relatively unknown, who hasn’t created a personal brand on the internet for everyone to see, will become increasingly rare. As humans, we desire what we can’t have. Historically, celebrity has been unattainable for most. The rarified air that celebrities inhabit makes them unique and interesting. But when everyone is a celebrity in some capacity, the desire to be well-known will diminish. Public perception will flip. The “nobodies” will become more interesting. People will aspire to be unknown rather than well-known. This is when privacy becomes the new celebrity.

As technology advances, there will be the ability for every piece of content a person has posted online to be cataloged and easily searched. Much like how the Internet Archive allows for anyone to go back in time to see what a specific web address looked like on a certain day or time. Today there are two major barriers stopping this from happening: content storage limitations and platform access limitations. While I don’t propose to know exactly how these two limitations will be solved, I do believe it’s likely they will be and that this type of resource will exist.

Throughout all of history humans have worked to preserve important information. From ancient libraries to the Internet Archive, it’s in our nature to preserve the past work of our ancestors so that we can reference and study how the people who came before us lived and what they learned throughout their lives.

Naturally, the next evolution of the Internet Archive will be social media content. Social platforms are eating the more “traditional web”. Google, the core infrastructure for discovery of webpages and information on the internet, is losing traction with Gen Z. Instead of searching for information on the web, young people search within social media platforms for entertainment and information. This content is important. Like how our ancestors stored information with libraries of books and how the Internet Archive has preserved websites, social content will be next.

When a public archive like this exists for social content, those who have created public digital footprints can be reduced in a few short sentences or a compilation of images and videos into a concept of who they are based on everything they’ve posted publicly. Anyone who accesses such a tool could surface everything an individual person has said and done on social media using a keyword or phrase search like Google or perhaps asking questions in a ChatGPT-style interface: Show me the five most embarrassing videos John Doe has ever posted. Show me content from John Doe where he talks about politics. Summarize who John Doe is and what he stands for. etc.

A person’s life could be easily summarized by the content they have shared. The good, the bad, and especially the ugly. This is how humans are turned into concepts. This is the trap that many creators will fall into by oversharing information about themselves publicly that allows them to be turned into data that can be easily categorized, dissected, and replicated.

This is when the people who have not overshared on the internet become more important and more interesting. Being unknown will be in vogue. In a room of ten people the one person without a personal brand and public digital footprint will be the most interesting. We’ll live in a world where having no audience and no public trail of your life on the internet is the most valuable social capital.