Banned From LinkedIn

 Well, I'm not banned quite yet, but I expect to be any minute.

My offense? First, let me explain that I was planning on ditching that platform anyway. Everyone knows it's lame. It's a way for corporate recruiters to gather their contacts without doing any work. It lets speaking of corporate jargon and purveyors of business punditry demonstrate their chops to others of their kind. So it does serve a purpose. For me it was a way to build some personal contacts.

But in the flush of recent events, having deleted multiple social media accounts on major platforms, I turned my eyes to LinkedIn, and for a moment I thought of doing away with the account, but I decided for the moment to keep my contacts but to remove as much information from my profile as possible---all identifying photos, my background, my resume (ugh---I had this up in public!?), my educational background, etc. 

Once I started deleting, it was easy to delete almost everything except the essentials that would let my few old contacts know that it was me and not someone else with my first and last name (of which there are many, it seems).

I even changed my occupation to "Retired Physics Professor," which is technically true.

Then last night I decided that I'd change tactics. I changed the background image in my profile to the old timey front script of 1776 (originally from the Declaration of Independence, I think) but that is on the navy blue cover of President Trump's 1776 Commission Report issued last week. Biden canceled the commission on his first day. 

I also took a grinning updated photo of myself for my avatar. With everything else still deleted, I changed my profile headline to "MAGA-friendly Software Development for the Web."

The minute I did so, I felt free. What's the thing they want of us? To be afraid of them. They want us afraid that unless we do and say what they way, they will crush us, deplatform us, cancel us, etc, so that we cannot even make a living, or conduct normal financial transactions.

Meh. Others have faced much worse in history and come out OK. I know a few people who probably would have little problem hanging all 75 million of us who voted for the real winner of the Presidential election, but I don't think we've gotten to that level of derangement yet in the wider public.

One reason I felt free is that I realized that there is actually a market for what I just declared myself to be---a possibly very large market. If I really wanted to continue in this line of business, being a remote software consultant, I would probably be able to convert this into an enormous income in the Trump Parallel Economy that is going to be built, and which will be impervious to them, as the original DARPA Internet was meant to be impervious to nuclear attack.

Still I figured LinkedIn, like all tech companies, is staffed by Wokistas who can't bear the thought that heir precious platform could be used for purposes which violate their sacred Groupthink. I could be wrong about them. I'm just playing the averages of what I know about tech companies, which are among the Wokest of the Woke segments of the economy.

But I couldn't be satisfied with just that. I figured I wanted to make a statement on the wake out the door. The opportunity came this morning in the form of a post from my undergraduate Alma Mater in Oregon, a small liberal arts college in the Willamette Valley. 

I have seen their posts over their years in my LinkedIn. You would never know  from thethat back in the old days (the Eighties), it was considered a conservative school. All I see now is a failing university (because they are all failing now) trying desperately to justify its existence and exorbitant tuition by becoming the Fountain of Wokeness in every online statement. It's as if they handed their feed over to the teenage girls on Tumblr to design the perfect world where unicorns shit rainbows.

Evidently students are assigned their educational tasks by their skin color. White students who are gender fluid are encouraged to learn about their gender fluidity. White students who are not are supposed to be into the environment, the last refuge of Whiteness.

All of this has been a horror to me because it's exactly what I wanted to happen, in some future utopian America, when I was student there in the Eighties. I felt like the sole Cassandra Lefty on a campus of conservative small-town Oregon folk who just didn't know enough about the world to know that they needed to become Leftists like me.

This morning the post from the Wokistas who curate my Alma Mater's feed was one of Bernie Sanders in spotted around campus. It was fake photos of him wearing a mask at Biden's inauguration. It's been a meme for the last couple days. Lefty memes are lame, as we know, because they cannot really laugh at themselves. Their egos are too fragile. They make a point of saying how fragile their egos are and they cannot bear humor.

That was it. I have no more use for them in my feed. So I commented, using my brand new persona and profile description, "Where can I send back my degree?"

I hope someone I know sees it and gets a kick out of it. I hope I brightened someone's day. Most of the time no one comments, because LinkedIn is lame for that, but perhaps someone will get righteous on me and take me to task. How I'd delight in being lectured to by little students at my Alma Mater again after these years. In any case, I suspect I've violated some Terms of Service on LinkedIn by this remark, of hurting people's feelings, so it happens to come to the attention of one of their moderators, perhaps I'll be tossed.