Something stinks around here and it isn’t the leftover Christmas mostaccioli sitting forgotten in your garage fridge. “What’s a garage fridge?”, I can hear my non-Chicago friends asking. It’s the fridge in the garage where you keep your backup “mastachols” and 125 cans of RC cola. This week’s newsletter, however, isn’t about delicious pasta casserole, but about the stinky, stinky gaslighting of professional social media.

Lately, LinkedIn feels less like a professional network and more like a 24/7 QVC feed for personal brands. It’s not the side hustles, or the freelancers (like me), or the folks pushing a dozen projects because they’re chasing their dreams alongside survival that I am referring to. Please don’t think this is an “attack” on any of those things.

I’m very specifically talking about how every story, every post, every “genuine interaction” feels like a setup for a pitch. Every “vulnerability” post has a call-to-action waiting in the weeds that requires buying something you don’t actually need, instead of an invitation to connect and share. We’ve reached a point where people aren’t just surviving capitalism here; they’re performing it for applause like the afternoon seal show at SeaWorld. Yet when you try to pepper them gently with a little constructive criticism popcorn, they don’t delightfully spray you with water or flap their meaty seal arms; they get mean.

The mask really slips the most during the “Paid Partnerships” posts that are creeping up more and more lately. I watched this play out recently with a “big” creator, and that is what inspired this weeks newsletter. He posted a glowing ad for an online paid tool, but the comments were a mess. People were pointing out that the links were broken. When they could get the link to work, the info was misleading and not transparent around cost. Instead of helping, he got condescending and nasty; eventually reaching a point where he was calling his own followers “liars”.

When the proof became undeniable that these folks weren’t “just being haters”, he just shrugged it off, saying he didn’t have anything to do with the sponsor’s business and didn’t really care. That is the part that pisses me off. You don’t get to use your legal name and your “professional” reputation to lure people into a bad deal and then claim you’re just a neutral party.

There is something so predatory about cashing a check from a company to tell your followers (many of whom are unemployed, desperate, or just trying to figure out how to pay rent) that they need this tool to survive, and then immediately washing your hands of any responsibility the second someone points out a flaw.

We’re living in a world where people are struggling to eat, and yet we’re expected to clap for wealthy influencers who use our desperation as a revenue stream. We’re told that criticizing them is “unprofessional” or “toxic.” No. What’s toxic is getting a bag from a company you won’t even defend for five minutes in your comment section.

We used to call those people scam artists, plain and simple. Now we call them “thought leaders” and offer them hundreds of dollars to buy their “workshop” of bulleted content they generated using AI.

If these people targeted other high-income businesses, the posts would be less unbearable. But they almost always target the people who are struggling most; the ones who feel they need these tools to make money and survive.

These “LinkedInfluencers” sell big, false claims about how “you too can be rich,” but they never disclose the extra capital, support, and built-in following that makes their success with the tool or platform they’re shilling inevitable. They’re selling a dream to people who are just trying to live, and they’re doing it from a position of massive, undisclosed privilege.

Then they hide behind the disclosure tag as if it’s a shield. But disclosing that you got paid doesn’t make you immune to the consequences of what you’re selling. In my opinion, if you’re cashing the check, you inherit the conversation…even the ugly parts.

What’s being protected in those comment sections isn’t “community” or “positivity.” It’s the contract. Hustle culture has trained us to view dissent as a branding issue, vulnerability as a sales tool, and authentic honesty as a liability. And the platform rewards this. It elevates these posts because they get high engagement, even if that engagement is just a thousand people screaming that they’ve been misled. The algorithm doesn’t care if the “insight” is true; it only cares that it’s loud.

For me, the real cost of LinkedIn’s pushing of “sponsored positivity” is that it actively buries the people we should be listening to: the workers who were laid off, the radical innovators, the community  weavers, the folks the “opportunity” ignored, and the people who actually got burned. Their stories don’t “convert” well, so they’re treated as rude interruptions to a marketing campaign. I no longer see the incredible, out of the box, radical long form thought pieces by outsiders and unfunded real thought leaders that used to come across my feed anymore.

Just ads, sponsored posts, generated stories, and memes with zero effort brain rot posts attached that don’t even attempt to start a conversation or say…anything at all. Maybe my posts annoy you for being political, or radical, or blunt, but at least I still know how to screw up my lips and say “this isn’t OK”. And don’t expect a paycheck before I will do so.

Authenticity can’t survive in a system where every human interaction is treated like a lead. And real, vivid, raw human authenticity is what breaks through all the evils and socially constructed barriers that hold us back. It is the spitting of ugly truths that keep the monsters at bay.

If you feel alienated by this platform lately, it’s probably because you still think words should mean something. You aren’t “bad at networking” or “cynical.” You’re just refusing to turn your personality into a shopping channel for billion dollar corporations who in turn use your influence to do more harm.

The people who are still willing to say, “Hey, this smells off,” even when it messes up someone’s “tone”; those are the only people “keeping the lights on” the truth. To the people still calling bullshit in the comments: Don’t stop.

The “polite” version of this platform is a mall where everything is broken and nobody’s responsible. If being “professional” means staying silent while people get scammed, I’d rather be thee most unprofessional person here.

Keep being an interruption. It’s the most honest thing left to be.

xx JJ

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This post originally appeared on LinkedIn, through my free subscription newsletter. For totally free civics lessons for adults with low literacy, please visit my free substack, The Shatterpoint. For writing or editing services, please send me an email at theshatterpoint@proton.me. For those inspired to support this work through patronship, please feel free to visit here.