Buy LinkedIn, Delete the Slack-Brained Climb
Adrian Parpat and Julian Seitlinger are not attacking networking. They are attacking the grim little career religion that turns every coffee chat into a hostage note.
Moral Contradictions & Night-After Reporting
The cult of networking, with better lighting
Adrian Parpat and Julian Seitlinger did not say they hate ambition. They said something more useful: if they had a billion euros, they would buy LinkedIn and delete it. In Berlin, where half the city is a mood board and the other half is pretending not to need one, that lands like a slap with good posture.
The joke bites because it does not attack work. It attacks the machinery that turns work into a humiliating obedience test. LinkedIn is the velvet rope of the labor market: recruiters waving people in and then ghosting them, founders posting syrupy sermons about “building in public” while someone else quietly invoices the overflow, career coaches selling confidence by the ounce, and HR departments laundering layoffs through the language of “opportunity.” It is networking with a badge and a pulse monitor.
The platform’s favorite ritual is the fake confession. A manager posts that they were “vulnerable” after a “tough quarter,” which usually means they survived while other people got memory-holed. A startup founder thanks their “amazing team” from the safety of a funded runway. A talent manager announces they are “excited to connect” the way a nightclub bouncer might announce he is excited to inspect your ribs. Everyone is smiling so hard you can smell the gums.
Then there is the recruiter spam: the same hollow compliment, repeated by eight different accounts with a headshot and a surname optimized for trust. “I came across your profile,” they write, as if stalking your labor history were an act of romance. They want a quick chat, a coffee, a call, a culture fit, a tiny unpaid audition dressed up as curiosity. The whole thing has the tenderness of an emailed prostate exam.
Parpat and Seitlinger’s fantasy of deletion is not anti-ambition. It is anti-extortion. It is a refusal of the soft blackmail that says if you do not perform availability, gratitude, resilience, and cheerful desperation in public, you deserve to stay invisible and underpaid. LinkedIn thrives because it converts precarity into etiquette. It tells a generation of overeducated, underinsured adults to brand their panic as initiative and call that dignity.
That is why the site is so obscene. Not because it is tacky, though it is tacky in the way a cheap suit is tacky: trying too hard to look like authority while smelling faintly of internship. It is obscene because it makes the labor market feel personal. It teaches people to blame themselves for not smiling attractively enough while the platform sells their anxiety back to employers as “engagement.” The bosses get a data stream. The workers get a contour of shame.
One source close to the pair, who requested anonymity because he still had eleven unread connection requests from men who use “Founder” as if it were a diagnosis, said the line worked because it named the thing everyone already knows. “Nobody loves it,” he said. “They just need it to survive the month, which is exactly how these platforms keep their fingers around your throat without ever raising their voice.”
A LinkedIn spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by press time, which may be the most honest behavior the platform has ever produced. In the meantime, Parpat and Seitlinger have done the rare civic service of saying out loud what the entire professional class mutters into its latte foam: the networking cult is not community, it is coercion in a blazer.