Performative fawning
The LinkedIn edition
For years, firms have been trying to decide what LinkedIn is for.
They tend to describe it as “a social media platform for professional networking”, which is one of those phrases that collapses if you look at it for more than three seconds. Social media is supposed to be social. Professional networking is largely a commercial ritual performed under fluorescent lighting by people pretending not to want anything.
The contradiction was there from the start.
In-person networking is already a form of theatre. People arrive with name badges, fixed smiles, and the dead-eyed optimism of hostages. They have been trained to ask questions which sound human but are really due diligence. What do you do? Where are you based? Who do you act for? Are you useful? Can you introduce me to someone useful? Would my firm approve of this conversation?
Nobody says it like that, obviously. That would be inelegant. Instead, everyone smiles, drinks warm white wine from a glass apparently designed for a dentist’s waiting room, and performs “interest in the person”.
The person is rarely the point.
The point is proximity. The point is opportunity. The point is a polite assessment of whether this interaction might one day be billable, reputationally useful, politically helpful, or at least capable of being mentioned in a business development update.
LinkedIn did not invent this. It simply removed the room.
Once the performance was moved online, something remarkable happened. The awkwardness disappeared, but so did the shame. The smile became permanent. The elevator pitch became a post. The humblebrag became a genre. The applause became measurable.
And so we now have the professional platform in its mature form: a place where adults with mortgages, practising certificates, and allegedly serious jobs gather to congratulate one another on having attended events, changed jobs, taken photographs near windows, overcome adversity, learned lessons, embraced journeys, failed upwards, reflected deeply, and been “humbled” by outcomes they have spent months trying to engineer.
There is the “I’m thrilled to announce” post.
There is the “I never thought someone like me would get here” post.
There is the “what a week” post.
There is the “leadership is about listening” post, usually written by someone who has spent the last decade converting other people’s evenings into margin.
There is the grief-to-growth post, where private pain is fed carefully through the engagement machine and emerges, somehow, as a lesson in resilience, authenticity, or personal brand.
There is the hot take, in which someone either announces the blindingly obvious as though delivering it from Mount Sinai, or says something faintly deranged in the hope that strangers will argue beneath it.
And then there are the experts.
LinkedIn is full of experts. Recruitment experts. Branding experts. Leadership experts. Thought leaders. Wellbeing experts. Culture experts. Experts in visibility. Experts in authenticity. Experts in LinkedIn itself, which is perhaps the final stage of professional collapse: becoming an authority on the platform on which you became an authority.
The legal profession, naturally, has adapted.
We now have the Legal LinkedInfluencer: a creature produced by the collision of insecurity, ambition, marketing budgets, and the algorithm. They are not assessed by the quality of their thinking, which would be old-fashioned and dangerously difficult to measure. They are assessed by frequency, volume, engagement, reach, impressions, reactions, and whatever other dashboard language has been imported from the wider attention economy.
The posts themselves are often almost impressively empty.
A photograph of a laptop beside a coffee.
A walk into the office.
A picture of a seminar room.
A reflection on “showing up”.
A reminder to “be kind”.
A throwback to a time before the writer’s personality had been absorbed into content strategy.
Occasionally there will be Lego. Nobody knows why.
Beneath all of this comes the ritual applause. Same-firm colleagues appear instantly, like meerkats of institutional loyalty. “So proud of you.” “Incredible.” “Well deserved.” “Couldn’t agree more.” “Important post.” “Powerful words.” Half the time you can feel the internal politics humming under the emojis.
This is not friendship. It is reputational maintenance with heart icons.
The client-facing version is even more exquisite. Someone posts a vague observation about the market, and a small crowd gathers to admire it. The comments are never quite comments. They are tiny offerings. Little professional sacrifices laid at the altar of future instruction.
“Great insight.”
“Really interesting perspective.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
“Important point for the sector.”
Translation: please remember I exist.
The legal profession is supposed to prize judgment, restraint, precision, independence, seriousness. Yet somehow it has persuaded itself that serious people must now maintain a public feed of choreographed enthusiasm. They must be visible. They must be positive. They must be “authentic”, but only in the approved format. They must show personality, but not too much. They must tell stories, but only stories which resolve into brand-safe lessons. They must be human, but not inconveniently so.
This is the real genius of LinkedIn. It does not force anyone to be false. It simply creates an environment in which falseness is rewarded so consistently that sincerity starts to look commercially negligent.
Nobody wants to be the person who says the whole thing is nonsense. That would be negative. That would be cynical. That would suggest an insufficient commitment to business development. So everyone carries on. The firms carry on. The marketers carry on. The associates carry on. The partners carry on. ‘Thought leaders’ continue to follow. The same posts circulate, the same people applaud, the same phrases recur, and the platform becomes what every professional institution secretly loves: a hierarchy pretending to be a community.
Perhaps this is why LinkedIn irritates me so much.
Not because it is uniquely stupid. It is not. Plenty of things are stupid.
It irritates me because it is so revealing. It shows the profession in miniature: status dressed as virtue, ambition dressed as generosity, sales dressed as insight, self-promotion dressed as vulnerability, conformity dressed as courage.
It is not an escape from the machine.
It is the machine, with a comments section.
And yet, I have to admit something slightly unpleasant.
For all my irritation, I am grateful for it.
Because if the legal profession has decided to build a vast public farm of performative hogwash, watered daily by humblebrags, professional fawning, client-flattery, and algorithmic self-regard, then it would be almost rude not to harvest it.
The same system that rewards the nonsense may yet help expose it.
Thank you, LinkedInfluencers.
Welcome to the machine.