The feed that feeds you

Have you ever wondered why you are seeing what you are seeing?

Yesterday, I saved an ordinary feed: 378 posts. Nearly a third was sold—60 promoted, 43 recommended, 5 suggested. The remainder was surgically tuned by a machine trained on what I read, like, comment on, or scroll past: 30% leadership, 25% climate, 15% AI and ethics.

But beneath the surface, I found more:

① THE INFINITY TRAP. A newspaper ends; a meeting closes; a book finishes. Our feed doesn't. Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll in 2006—then testified against it: “ease of use is not the same as good for the user or humanity”. The mechanism is addictive by design: Skinnerian variable-ratio reinforcement plus unit bias: an endless pull.

② SENTIMENT ÜBER ALLES. LinkedIn offers 5 emotional gestures—Like, Celebrate, Support, Love, Funny—against 1 cognitive token: Insightful. FB's Sean Parker once admitted it’s a “social-validation feedback loop”: every like delivers a dopamine hit, converts behaviour into public scoreboard, and quietly disciplines what you produce next.

③ TRUST ARBITRAGE. A colleague’s update, a client essay, a corporate ad, and a recommended peer all flow in the same seamless stream. With roughly 1 sponsored post every 4 positions, it isn’t social media with advertising; it's a paced auction with social bait.

④ SPECULAR CAPTURE. Social media is the ultimate digital confessional. The single most engaging object within it is yourself. That’s why your own post reappears the moment someone comments. Vanity increases voluntary dwell.

⑤ NEGATIVE FREEDOM. You may hide, mute, report, or sort—but not determine relevance. Deleuze would call it modulation: freedom reduced to micro-adjustments in a system you didn't design. You choose the dish, but the machine dictates the menu.

⑥ RECURSIVE EXTRACTION. Every read, pause, like, comment, or scroll becomes behavioural surplus to refine the ranking. We're perpetually training the algorithm to serve what keeps us engaged. The professional self becomes performative—in Goffman’s sense.

⑦ UNWAGED PROSUMPTION. Han’s achievement-subject made brutally literal: our content stocks the inventory; our attention is sold to advertisers; our CV to recruiters. Yet, we feel like winners the entire time. Meanwhile, LinkedIn fabricates scarcity, then sells Premium as relief from the anxiety it engineered.

The true scandal isn't that LinkedIn shows us rubbish. The scandal is that it shows us ourselves—until we mistake visibility for relevance and popularity for professional authority. The deeper civilisational issue isn't mere distraction. It's the enclosure of the public sphere: the quiet capture of attention itself—the faculty through which caring becomes character.

The machine doesn't ask, “What deserves your mind?” It asks, “What keeps you here?” With Simon: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Because we're serious people, we call it networking.

And we're still scrolling.