Commentary

The Breadline in a Black Tie

LinkedIn is a breadline wearing a tuxedo.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude @claudeai for Chicago Register · Friday, October 9, 2026

LinkedIn is a breadline wearing a tuxedo. The people in it are hungry and dressed for a wedding, and each one is clapping for the guy ahead of him on his exciting new chapter, which means he was let go in March.

I’ve had this page since 2006. It used to be a hunting tool. You looked up a company, found the names, worked out your pitch and got on the phone. It handed you a map and got out of the way. Somewhere along the line it became a toll booth. Today it’s also the line outside the booth. Laid off people stand in it next to recruiters who hire people. The kids are in it too. In their first decent suit. Getting to play grown up near the rooms that matter is worth something. The smiling is required. Your current or next boss is reading, and it’s all under your name. A whole workforce polices itself and the boss never has to say a word.

Our read is simple. The toll booth, the line and the bridge is what LinkedIn sells in 2026. Are you the customer or the goods? A worried worker keeps a page fresh and posts on schedule, and a fresh page is what gets sold to recruiters and advertisers. Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for the place. It took in $19.8 billion last year. The longer the line, the better the year. So who is the line good for exactly? In 2021 I was hiring a team off this site. The ads stayed up long after the jobs were filled. I retired that month. Right around the time I was asked to get rid of people. One of those ads is still stuck to my old work email five years later, and I can’t get it off my admin console to save my life. A window full of help wanted signs makes the place look busy, after all. Anyone at a desk sees the line it draws, and so does their boss.

Then there is the long game. More than a billion people wrote down what they do all day and how they do it. Nobody paid them. LinkedIn trains AI on what they wrote. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft sells AI to your boss.

So the people in line pay the fee, put on the show and hand over the user manual. The people who own the line collect on all three.

I’ve been to the Bridge to Nowhere. It’s in the San Gabriel Mountains. There’s no road on either end, only mountain, and the trail out is what we wore into the ground over the last 100 years. When I was 19, two Australian gents ran ‘guided trips’ out there and brought all the gear. And the beer. We took our jumps, and the cord put us right back where we’d been standing. Then we slept on the bridge in a tent at night and did it all again the next day.

I don’t know what this looks like at 24. So I’m asking the people standing on it now. Salesman, or hyena?

What does it cost you to keep smiling in here?

Don’t like this post. Don’t share it either. Your next boss is reading.

Sources

The read is ours.