Et tu, LinkedIn
I recently have some time off as I am changing careers, and I have a bucket list. Is not a very interesting one. No skiing on the Alps, chasing waves in Hawaii. Nope. Is mostly boring, and quite a few of the items on it have to do with streamlining my internet presence.
Why? I see that platform enshittification is creeping in, that everything-as-a-subscription is moving further every day (making me feel like a long line of collectors are waiting to take money from me as soon as I cash my paycheck), plus a long list of pet peeves I hope to write about soon. But today, I was trying to clean up my password manager, my OTP token generator, and move most email logins from my old gmail account to my own domain hosted elsewhere.
I think I moved about 12 MFA accounts today, with no issues. I am ditching Authy for what I believe are crappy business practices. And among those, I had LinkedIn.
So, off I went. I did everything, copied my emergency codes offline, changed OTPs, etc. Logged off, then back on. All went well. And I went for lunch.
In retrospective, I realized that through history, a large number of human catastrophes started when an unaware supervisor just went to lunch. And as you come back to your station, ZAP!, Pompeii is gone, Atlantis sunk.
When I sat down I had a few quick messages to shoot to a contact, so I opened the App. The session was timed out and I had to log again. OK, no biggie.
I auto-logged from my password manager, and behold, a nice “For your safety, we need to check you are human.” And an array of pictures of pigs in different angles. Given how much of Western Civilization has never stepped out of a city, asking for accurate selection of a farm animal might not be the sharpest human-detecting criteria, but hey, you take what you are given.
I thought “It’s all OK, It’s just a captcha!”. But down in my subconscious, an Atlantean antecesor was humming “Oops! No city gates but a beach I never saw before? Mmmh, I must have made the wrong turn…”. Sweet denial and self-preservation.
Then, a more alarming message. “Your account has been suspended due to suspicious behaviour”. Still in mild denial, my long-gone Atlantean relative was saying “Yikes, those vases floating on the water look like the one my neighbor had! He surely brought them with him to this new beach and forgot them…”
After that, the kicker. “We need to check your ID. Please scan your ID card or passport”. What? I would not share that with the police in my country if they came to ask out of the blue with no explanation. And I am supposed to surrender this to an internet platform operating of a tax-free multiverse subject to no jurisdiction? Apparently yes.
At this point, my long-lost Atlantean relative realized he could usurp the title of Aquaman, King of Atlantis since nobody would contest him, and set up a tuna-canning company to make him rich, but that’s a story for another day.
If you are not paying, then you are the product.. How true, once more. I have no social media presence other than LinkedIn and a few Reddit throw-aways. I always felt, I must confess, looking a bit down on people beffudled that the cards have been turned around, and their FAANG overlords have kicked them out of their own content. It’s never going to happen to me. Well, it did.
So I caved. And now I here I am, pissed off at Microsoft, which at least makes me feel young again (hey, just like the old Ballmer times!). Impotent, and frustrated. So I moved up my schedule to minimize my footprint on the closed web, and turn my back on all that bot-generated content. Now, off to way that a faceless corporation decides to grace me back with control over my account, so I can go back as a good little pleb to give my eyeballs, connections and content for free on their platform.
Good thing I gave them a fake ID. 😳
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