Category: welp

After patiently waiting for its release, I finally got my hands on a copy of Cory Doctorow‘s book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. I am still getting through the work, but it is, so far, an expertly led distillation of many of the litany of frustrations we have lived through on the modern internet. Much ado has been made about Doctorow’s book in the technosphere, with The New Yorker, Vox, The Economist, and Wired, among others, picking up on the work. Doctorow articulates all too well the things we knew were wrong in the first place, and backs them up with a predictable vim and vigor.

If you still do not believe, somehow, that Doctorow’s observed pattern of:

1. A platform, using a surplus of investor cash, is good to its non-business users
2. A platform pivots to prioritize the needs of commercial or business customers over regular schlubs
3. A platform turns into a giant pile of shit

Is real, I recommend you try to live the example by attempting to participate in today’s job market, which is almost entirely facilitated by online platforms like (especially) LinkedIn and Indeed.

While Doctorow elucidates on the pathology and patterns of enshittification, let me take you back to when I started my career and try to further explain on a technical level why I believe platforms always seem to attenuate value for individual users. In 2008, if you wanted a job, you had a few options, in order of effectiveness:

1. Know someone
2. Go on Craigslist
3. Apply directly to the job

There were a few job aggregators at the time, like Monster, but not many. It was unusual to be recruited for a job, or even talk to a recruiter at all in the process, though I recognize it’s not typical to be recruited for entry-level roles. But as I continued to move up in my career, the pattern remained the same. In fact, the first time I spoke with a recruiter for a role, a “recruiter screen,” was in 2022. In each case before that including my two longest-held roles, while emailing an HR person as part of the process was typical, they didn’t have a “recruiter” title and certainly weren’t conducting any interviews.

How did it come to be that we now hear horror stories from applicants about how they’ve applied for “thousands of roles in 6 months” (don’t do this), and from hiring managers that they have received “hundreds (or more) applications for a single role in less than 3 days”? How did it come to be that to land a successful role, in many cases, takes 5 or more rounds of interviews, and that that is increasingly typical, to say nothing about how these additional rounds are poorly-disguised layers of expensive bureaucracy?

AI and the terrible tech job market are one explanation, but they cannot entirely explain the magnitude of this gross imbalance. To answer these questions means answering this one: what is the thing a computer enables us to do?

The answer has three parts, all rooted in basic mathematics: the first is that the computer enables us to make a digital asset. Digital assets are typically significantly easier to manufacture than physical assets, so there’s value there. Nobody would argue that using a word processor is more difficult than handwriting.

The second is that we can transmit that digital asset electronically over a computer network at an extremely low cost.

The third part, however, is the key to unlocking the true value realized in the first two parts. The marginal unit cost of making a copy of a digital asset is almost zero. These three parts, the “value basis of computing,” are what have led us here, to the Information Age.

This model works exceptionally well for sellers and buyers of digital assets. The market for in-app cosmetics in video games, for example, is extraordinarily successful because a seller can charge a high price for something they really only made one time.

Consumers are clearly willing to pay that price, as developers pump out continuously more absurd cosmetics to consumers in what I can only reasonably believe at this point is elaborate trolling, although some would just call it “late-stage capitalism,” as if anyone knew what the difference was.

This model works well for digital assets, but not for real-life assets like jobs, scarce physical goods, or romantic partners, which is a topic for another day.

Here is where we see the rise of platforms like LinkedIn. LinkedIn has very much turned into a giant pile of shit, and it would be crazy to posit otherwise. LinkedIn’s value proposition originally set to connect like-minded professionals and has since evolved into a job search platform where paid B2B tools like “Sales Navigator” and “LinkedIn Recruiter” proliferate alongside a premium subscription that suggests you’d be a “top candidate” for an apprenticeship in weasel breeding.

Contributing to the rapid enshittification of LinkedIn and the unmitigated disaster of the current job market, especially in tech, is an uncomfortable truth rooted in the value basis of computing, which – remember – is only fully realizable with digital assets. In computing, we call this an M to N, or “many to many,” relationship. It doesn’t matter if 1 person wants the Beavis and Butt-Head costume or if 100,000 people do. The asset is created, priced, bought, sold, and distributed digitally. For scarce, real-world assets like jobs, the relationship is 1 to M. One role, many applicants.

So we have a scenario where we’re in violation of the third principle of the value basis of computing because a given job opening usually exists for a single candidate, but the other two principles still apply for the hiring organization, and all three principles apply for candidates. Whenever the value chain is out of balance, participants will respond in one of two ways:

1. They will weaponize technology against the other side of the platform (or other participants) in order to attempt to bring the value chain back into balance. See: AI-generated resumes, bots that attempt to purchase scarce goods, etc.
2. They will go to a competitor.

In the job market, the only outcome of this scenario is option 1 – a race to the bottom where applicants compete less with other applicants and more with the tools used by the organizations that are trying to hire them in the first place.

They do this by using their own tools. And the hiring org, overwhelmed, responds with more tools. Remember – it costs almost zero to make a copy of a perfectly tailored AI-generated resume. Each generation of the arms race attenuates the value on both sides until we have AI interviewers interviewing AI candidates, and the qualifications of the applicant matter less than the ability for the applicant to have access to paid agents hosted in the same cloud computing infrastructure operated by the companies who own the platforms.

Oh….

If you have two candidates: A and B, and A is objectively more qualified than B, but B is more willing to conform to “the algorithm” in the hiring process, what value did the platform actually generate when B gets hired?

We have hijacked the intended use of the computer and optimized it for density and volume of transactions, but not quality and outcomes. Platforms exacerbate and amplify this problem because they have strong financial incentives to do so. LinkedIn would like nothing more than to sell you LinkedIn Recruiter or Sales Navigator because you’re overwhelmed with leads and/or applicants. LinkedIn actually doesn’t have much of a financial reason to help candidates find jobs at all, because for many people it means they spend less time on LinkedIn (Doctorow doesn’t dive deep on LinkedIn, but he and I independently come to a version of this conclusion, and he goes into detail about network effects and ultimately how petrified platforms are of their collapse in his book).

I am not a recruiter, but I suspect based on the LinkedIn outreach I have received from recruiters that the quality of data offered to recruiters for sourcing on LinkedIn is only high enough to maintain LinkedIn’s status as a job broker. Anecdotal evidence, and there’s a lot of it, backs up this claim.

The solution to this problem is actually to introduce friction in the process and return to a paradigm where candidates compete on quality. People offer this as a solution to the problem all the time, they just don’t realize it. The solution they offer is telling someone “your network is your net worth,” and to try to find roles outside of digital platforms and in real life to bring the M to N problem closer in balance.

A second solution is to avoid the platform, but actively approach recruiting firms, preferably local ones, who you can establish a trust relationship with and send roles to you.

A third solution to this problem is to charge applicants a small fee to apply. The fee is refunded automatically when the application is finished.

The final solution is one many will not like, but I see it as the most likely to be implemented outside of in-person networking: implement a challenge-response process using a third-party verifier to authenticate the identity of an applicant at the time of application. Privacy advocates will poo-poo this scenario, and rightfully so, but considering the influx of bogus applicants from North Korea and other adversarial nation-states, I again see this as the most likely outcome, even though right now the practice of asking would be seen as scammy.

If all of these solutions sound like awfully bitter pills, that’s the point. You have been tricked into believing anything that can be done faster and more efficiently on a computer should be. This idea, academically called the “Technological Fix,” prescribes technology to solve problems that technology is not actually well suited to solve.

Platforms do not want to take the bitter pill. There is no dopamine to be had by paying to apply for a job. They want to be as efficient and frictionless as possible so they can sell you more services and serve more ads. They don’t care about the diseconomy of scale. They will certainly not be trusted to process a payment on behalf of a hiring organization.

I’m picking on LinkedIn a lot here because LinkedIn doesn’t really have any competitor. The best competition for LinkedIn is the thing that has been most effective the entire time: in-person networking.

I’m not trying to sound like a luddite. Are computers good? Yes! If LinkedIn (or any other platform) actually was excellent at matching people to jobs and facilitated the process for both job-seekers and hiring organizations, it would be great! Could they do this? Yes!

Can they do it?

No!

Why would they when it would invariably mean people would stop using the platform? They can’t afford to have one-time or limited-time users who churn after they get a job. That’s why LinkedIn continues to add crap features like short-form video of people (and it’s always a certain kind of person) about their “5-9 after their “9-5,” and browser games like Zip.

We cannot continue to slap technology on problems that scale poorly and attempt to force them to scale well. It just doesn’t work. We’re trying it with AI too. A byproduct of this technological shoehorning is, invariably, the enshittification that Cory Doctorow details in his book. I highly recommend you read it for a deeper dive on the pathology and cures for this worsening problem and the rapid decline of the utility of the internet.

Doctorow does go into detail about this, and it’s something I’ve written about before both on this blog and on platforms: the intent of the internet was to be a decentralized network comprised of participants who owned their data and were willing to share it. It takes real work to do this. Not much, but some. There are tools that can help you. I just saw a take on this the other day, on LinkedIn, in fact: platforms will kick you out. They won’t explain why. It’s happened to me! I have another blog post about it! Doctorow enumerates and elucidates on policy solutions to enshittification.

I have one more: take back your data. Start a website. Publish. Incentivize your network away from platforms. Maintain your phone book. Be thoughtful. Friction can be a valuable and useful tool. Engaging in difficult things and going through some struggle should be celebrated, it’s what makes us human. Be your own platform.

It’s up to you.

Update 4/28: LinkedIn has reinstated my account.

As an effect of being laid off, I decided to open a new LinkedIn account. I dislike LinkedIn (and all social media) generally, but beggars can’t be choosers when unemployed. The last time I had a LinkedIn account was a little over 18 months ago. I closed it because I just didn’t find it that useful, and most of the messaging I received was sales-related or recruiters who would send things like this:

“Are you interested in a role in Richmond?”
“I live in the DC area, it’s about 100 miles away from Richmond, so no.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. The location filter tool in LinkedIn kind of sucks.”

So anyway I need to find a job so I decided to open a new account using the same email address. Less than a week after I opened it, I was browsing positions while sitting at Dave’s Hot Chicken (which was just okay) and I was kicked out of the mobile app. I went to sign in again, and LinkedIn prompted me to “verify my identity,” which I had already done through CLEAR, so I was puzzled as to why I was being asked to do this a second time through a different verifier.

Cue a bizarre and kafkaesque process where I sent LinkedIn a picture of my driver’s license, and then had to do a live verification – essentially, a video selfie. After completing these steps, LinkedIn informed me that my account was suspended, and that they should have my “request” (what they mean is the request that got created as part of me sending them a picture of my ID, but if you want to make someone really paranoid this is certainly the exact verbiage to use) to have my account put “back on LinkedIn” in two days. Well, it has now been more than two days.

When I go to the site, it seems to be indicating that my account is suspended because they are not able to verify my identity. When I click “Verify your identity,” I am told that a request is already created to verify my identity. I am not able to contact any kind of support, because in order to contact support, you need to be logged into LinkedIn, which I cannot do because they apparently can’t verify my identity even though I provided it through two different verifying companies. So that’s cool. Maybe I’m in a database somewhere as deceased and I don’t know it. (Spoiler alert: I’m not dead.)

I’m just trying to get a job, man.

I really have no idea if or when they are going to restore my account, or what the problem is. I could simply create another one with a different email address, but I don’t want to give them a reason to ban me from the platform, so I won’t.

At any rate, it’s almost irrelevant, because if anyone wanted to know who I was, they can go to this website, which I have operated for several years. “Yes but how do we know who you are?” Well, I had to buy this domain name, hosting package, and TLS certificate with a credit card in my name. Obviously, anything can be faked, but in aggregate that should be more than what most social sites give you at a glance.

When I was an undergrad at the University of Mary Washington, which was a very long time ago, some very smart and forward-thinking people decided that the future of the web was in owning web presence. They called, and still call, this “Domain of One’s Own.” They were ahead of their time with Domain of One’s Own. At the time, social media services like Twitter (X) were nascent. LinkedIn and Instagram did not exist. Now, each social media service is offering more or less the same experience, there is no realistic avenue for support or help, and because they are so prolific it’s really no wonder that we have instances of “LinkedIn hell.” This is, of course, a separate and more nuanced conversation than the rampant and punishing toxicity plaguing all of these services by generally bringing out the absolute worst in humanity.

This episode with LinkedIn is not unique to the internet, or to LinkedIn. It truly baffles me that so many job applications request a link to a LinkedIn profile, and sometimes the link is a required field. There are any number of valid reasons (besides the low quality content) people don’t have a LinkedIn account, and requiring someone to have a social media presence when they value their privacy is 1) bad 2) creating complicit partners in the gradual enshittification of the internet.

I run this website through Namecheap and they more or less take care of all of the backend hosting for me. It isn’t turnkey like WPengine or SquareSpace, but it’s not a heavy lift to set up your own website, nor is it particularly expensive. I have seen enough of social media to know what happens to it in the long run: even LinkedIn succumbed to the short-form video trend.

So if you don’t have a domain of your own, you should try it, because you have a story that deserves to be told outside of the confines of any one social media platform that purports to offer a “free” product.

If you want to produce your own content free of arbitrary governing policies, have control over your own destiny, not have to send a picture of your ID to an organization that doesn’t make it clear what they are going to do with it, and don’t want to look at ads, you should take the time and very marginal amount of work to make that happen.

We do actually have the ability to say “no” to these social media companies and make the web more authentic and democratic. If you are looking to start, I recommend checking out the very fine folks over at Reclaim Hosting (as in, literally, “reclaim your digital identity”) or Namecheap if you have a bit more experience.