I’ve closed my Linkedin account.

The decision was easy, based on three factors:

First, it was no longer a place where I could comfortably represent myself.

Having closed my business after a few decades’ of work, it had become a shrine to who I was and what I did. One could argue that my work experiences in the earlier part of this century (or even late during the last) were never particularly relevant or interesting, but they were certainly useless as descriptors of what I’m doing now.

I tried rewriting my headline with more current words, like “author” and “musician,” and dutifully added references to my creative projects, both finished and underway. But it just didn’t read right.

Second, the thousands of contacts who I’d collected (and been collected by) during the past few decades had absolutely no interest in my experiments in personal reinvention.

A solid handful were friends in the real world and were supportive, of course, but my engagement with them wasn’t a function of our outline relationships. Everyone else had links to some part of my past which was no longer part of my present, other than in the data retaining/crunching/exploiting algorithms of Linkedin.

And, speaking of those algorithms, the third reason I closed my account

The content sucked. Absolutely sucked.

The place had always been about self-promotion vs. revelations of true insights or meaning, but the amount of garbage posted and pushed my way had gone into overdrive over the past year or so.

Everyone seemed to have a “how to” list to share, likely written by AI, that said nothing and did so in language that was dull and predictable and yet would trail lists of comments that enthusiastically reiterated whatever nonsense had been shared. Linkedin, in its algorithmic brilliance, noticed that I’d blog about AI and would therefore relentlessly throw AI-titled garbage at me. It was overwhelming…and overwhelmingly stupid.

Oh, and then there were always the messages from people or businesses promising to “turbocharge my company’s sales” with some outbound marketing gimmick.

It just got to be too much or, better put, I got too little from it.

In its uselessness, though, Linkedin may have a use as an example of what happens to online interaction that is not only aggressively managed by AI but relies primarily on content generated by it.

An AI nightmare world.

Good riddance.