By Buck “The Hammer” Thomas, Colonel (Retired), U.S. Army Cavalry
The Hammer’s daughter set him up on LinkedIn in 2019. Said it was for professional networking. He told her he had a Rolodex. She told him nobody uses a Rolodex anymore. He got on LinkedIn.
She was right about the Rolodex. She was wrong about everything else.
LinkedIn describes itself as a professional network. What it has become is a confessional booth for people who need an audience to feel like what they do matters. The platform did not become this on its own. The people on it made this choice, one post at a time, and the rest of the people on it rewarded them for it, and now this is what it is. The Hammer has watched this happen in real time and he wants the record to reflect that he said it out loud.
A man loses his job. Fine. Jobs end. In most situations this calls for a plan, not a press release. On LinkedIn it calls for a post. The post has a headline. The headline is the man’s name and the phrase “new chapter.” The post describes the journey. It uses words that do not belong in professional correspondence. The community responds. Thousands of people who cannot pick this man out of a lineup tell him he is brave. He thanks them. They tell him more.
The job search, as best The Hammer can determine, has not started.
The Army has a process for this kind of thing. After any operation — good or bad — you gather the team and you review what happened. What worked. What failed. What changes before the next one. You do this in a room, with the people who were actually there, and you do it honestly because the alternative is getting people killed. It takes twenty minutes. Nobody posts it. Nobody asks the general public whether they found it helpful.
LinkedIn has taken that process and turned it into a performance. Removed the honesty. Removed the room. Removed every person who was actually there. Kept the talking. Called it thought leadership.
And the format. God help us, the format. One sentence on its own line. Gap. One more sentence. Gap. White space doing the structural work that the content refuses to do. The lesson lands at the end. The lesson is always the same lesson. There are maybe six of them total and they have been cycling through this platform for years and the same people engage every single time. The Hammer has counted. The number is not impressive.
He has stood next to people who carried more in a single deployment than most professionals will be asked to carry in a career. They are not on LinkedIn. They are not explaining what the experience taught them. They already know what it taught them. They applied it and they moved on. That is what competent people do with hard experience. They use it. They do not exhibit it.
LinkedIn was built to connect professionals. It still does that. He has no argument with the infrastructure.
His argument is with what the people on it have decided it is for.
They have decided it is for being witnessed. For having strangers confirm, on a recurring basis, that they exist and that the existence has been difficult and that the difficulty has produced insight worth broadcasting to twelve thousand people who are also broadcasting.
The Hammer spent thirty years surrounded by people for whom that sentence would require explanation.
He misses them.
Buck “The Hammer” Thomas is a retired Colonel, U.S. Army Cavalry, with thirty years of service. He writes editorials for No Joe No Go. He does not have a LinkedIn profile.
