What I saw when I saw LinkedIn
Here I am. I am a young corporate slave. I am doing my daily lap of LinkedIn. Stay with me, please.
There is a post about a coffee brand. It is called Flat White or Fuck Off, except they don’t say “Fuck”. The “u” has been supplanted with an asterisk. It takes the shape of a transgression without the consequences.
The font is a custom, scratchy, neo-Comic Sans. The palette is black and off-white. I can envision the brand guidelines: a rule-by-rule playbook defining the aesthetics of not caring. “I don’t give a F*ck, I honestly don’t!”, yells the strategist. The text on the cup affirms it.
I imagine it being pitched in a meeting to nods and giggles. It has been funded, and it is on LinkedIn. There is an investors page.
There’s a world being sold here. The office is business casual, but some people wear hoodies. There’s a snack bar, and the snacks are healthy, and there might be a ping pong table. You walk in with a takeaway coffee cup that dares to say the word “F*ck”. Your boss grins at you; they are delighted. You’re that rascal.
This is crap, right? Am I going “fucking” insane?
I go to the comments, at speed, in search of people agreeing with me. To my horror, random dads everywhere were loving it. Patrick Bateman is sweating profusely. His forehead is wet.
You can’t be a cool company, grandpa
At risk of being the old man yelling at clouds: I don’t think fake-swearing is cool. More on that: I don’t think we can carry on pretending that being a company is cool. Being a cool brand is impossible. And the idea of censoring a swear word to toe the line between edgy and search engine optimisation is so profoundly, astonishingly dispiriting.
The disconnect is generational, probably. I had a recent “back in the old days” conversation with my parents. Back in the old days, I learned, people thought Apple was cool. Apple was listed on the Stock Exchange in the eighties. It has a board of directors and quarterly earnings calls. Apple cares very deeply about what its shareholders think.
The trick is wearing thin. Take the coffee brand that markets itself on the singular premise that it only sells flat whites, and doesn’t care what you think. All I can see is the carefully tended spreadsheet that tracks exactly what I think. Compensating for Americano sales, a new row is added for a ÂŁ25 logo beanie . Cha-ching.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Unf*ck Yourself. Shut the F*ck up.
Continuing my rabid search for someone out there who agrees with me, I headed to Reddit. The 2010s were the decade of the self-help book. Books with self-censored swear words bolted themselves onto the bestseller shelves. The r/IfBooksCouldKill subreddit is all over this. The titles compelled you into thinking that other books were lying to you. Those authors wouldn’t dare to say bad words.
Thank you, u/lookslikerheyn. That’ll do for my argumentum:
The SEO-aware generation has no fun
This is a tangential thread; bear with me. A recent article in The Guardian observed that AI-generated language has retroactively poisoned some literary tics. First, it was the em dash. Then it was “it’s not X, it’s Y”:
Although “it’s not X, it’s Y” predates ChatGPT, I cannot hear it without assuming that AI made it. A few weeks ago, I was rewatching the Mad Men episode where Don Draper pitches a watch. “It’s not a timepiece,” he says. “It’s a conversation piece.” A decade ago, I was amazed by Draper’s elegant turn of phrase. But now I can’t see it without thinking that a chatbot vomited it out between daytime scotches.
Once you’ve seen a machine output something, the magic goes away. Nobody in the near future will write like Don Draper and come off as well-written. In a similar vein, “I’m not a regular company - I’m a f*cking cool company” reads like a homework assignment. Maybe the SEO-aware generation can’t have any fun.