Notes On Four Parasites of LinkedInfication
The present phase of American decline cannot be adequately understood through narratives of partisan dysfunction, technological disruption, or moral degeneration, because such accounts remain confined to surface phenomena and episodic failure. What is at stake is a deeper transformation in the structure of power itself, one in which the production of durable institutions and the reproduction of competence across time have been displaced by a regime organized around vectors of algorithmic circulation. In this regime, value accrues not to those who build, maintain, and steward complex systems, but to those who control the channels through which attention, capital, legitimacy, and coordination move. The resulting order does not merely fail to sustain institutions; it actively selects against the dispositions required to do so. These are distinctly anti-civilizational forces.
The figures examined here are structurally exemplary and indeed their prominence reveals what the system now recognizes as intelligence, what it rewards as achievement, and by extension what it renders obsolete. Their careers converge around extraction without accumulation, media market signalling/ideological arbitrage without obligation, and optimization within horizons too short to sustain civilizational continuity. The relevance of these figures lies precisely in the fact that they are widely treated as successes. The figures I've chosen are Nikita Bier, JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy and Satya Nadella.
Nikita Bier’s ventures in consumer social software provide one of the clearest empirical demonstrations of vectoral logic. His applications, most notably tbh and Gas, were engineered to capture narrow bands of adolescent attention through carefully calibrated mechanisms of anonymity, affirmation, and social ranking while remaining deliberately detached from any obligation to governance, durability or social integration.
tbh, acquired by Facebook in 2017 after a brief period of explosive growth, was shut down within a year. This disappearance was not driven by technical infeasibility or regulatory intervention, but by the exhaustion of its extractive potential. Stabilizing the product would have required long-term responsibility for community norms, harm mitigation, and institutional integration, all of which would have undermined the logic that made it valuable in the first place. The product did not fail so much as complete its function and vanish, ultimately absorbed a large rogue Megacorp specialising in data feudalism.
Gas followed a nearly identical trajectory, achieving rapid adoption through the same exploitation of social affirmation and uncertainty before being acquired by Discord in 2023. Once again, the application did not evolve into a durable social space, nor did it generate transferable knowledge about community governance or institutional continuity. Its lifecycle reinforced a model in which competence is measured by the ability to generate an engagement spike that can be monetized before the temporal costs of stewardship arise. Such an approach to software sabotages the instincts, habits of heart and mind required to cultivate civilizational compentence.
Bier has been responsible for nothing but adolescent vaporwave and now in a short period of time has rendered Twitter unusable due to flooding it with AIslop and cogwar agitation.
These ventures support my central thesis precisely because their collapse is endogenous to their success. They demonstrate a mode of production in which durability is structurally incompatible with valuation and in which accumulation, whether of institutional memory or social responsibility is treated as an impediment rather than an achievement.
J.D. Vance’s career illustrates the political articulation of the same vectoral logic, expressed through narrative and affect rather than software. His Yale Law education did not culminate in the construction or reform of legal or administrative institutions, but functioned as a credential granting entry into elite financial networks including his work at Mithril Capital and the founding of Narya Capital. These ventures did not produce firms that expanded industrial capacity, rebuilt infrastructure, or altered the material conditions of the regions he later claimed to represent. They functioned primarily as financial vehicles for capital circulation within an already hyperfinancialized environment.
The absence of durable output here is not accidental, since Venture Capital of this type operates within a regime in which value is increasingly decoupled from production and tied instead to speculative positioning, narrative framing and access to elite networks. Vance’s role within this system was not to build institutions, but to circulate legitimacy, offer media market drama for culture war consumption and capital in ways that left the underlying hollowing of state capacity untouched. It was also to recycle tired old ideological narratives as somehow being transgressive and revolutionary to build loyalty around new media market brands.
His transition into electoral politics did not disrupt this pattern. As a senator and later as vice president, Vance has not been associated with sustained efforts to rebuild administrative competence, modernize procurement, or restore the state’s capacity to execute complex mega projects in meatspace. Instead, institutional decline is reframed in cultural and moral terms, allowing structural economic mechanisms to remain largely unchallenged. Governance is displaced by representation, and representation by performance often through vaporwave meme culture in cyberspace and providing cover for corrupt cryptoeconomics resulting in a political economy that depends on the persistence of dysfunction for its own reproduction.
Vance’s career exemplifies collapse through substitution, where institutions that once demanded technical expertise and long-term responsibility are replaced by narratives that mobilize affect while producing no durable capacit
Vivek Ramaswamy’s ventures in biotechnology and finance provide a particularly stark illustration of hyperfinancial logic overriding institutional responsibility. Through Roivant Sciences and its subsidiaries, Ramaswamy advanced a model in which therapeutic candidates discarded by larger pharmaceutical companies were repackaged within a structure optimized for financial flexibility and investor appeal. The most prominent test of this model, Axovant’s Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine, culminated in a high-profile Phase 3 clinical failure.
This collapse was not merely a scientific disappointment, but an exposure of how value had already been extracted through fundraising, valuation increases, and speculative enthusiasm long before therapeutic efficacy was established. Patients, clinicians, and public health systems bore the consequences of failure, while the financial architecture that enabled the venture remained largely insulated. The enterprise did not produce a durable contribution to medical knowledge or treatment capacity, yet it succeeded in demonstrating how biomedical futurity could be monetized independently of delivery.
Ramaswamy’s subsequent ventures in asset management and politics replicate this structure in different domains. Through Strive Asset Management and his presidential campaign, ideological positioning becomes a differentiator within crowded markets, and critique of existing institutions functions as a mechanism for attracting capital and attention rather than as a prelude to building viable alternatives. The repeated absence of enduring institutional output is not a flaw in this model, but its enabling condition, since optionality and reversibility remain profitable only so long as obligation is avoided.
Satya Nadella’s tenure at Microsoft represents the most comprehensive and least visibly disruptive form of vectoral dominance. Under his leadership, Microsoft has positioned itself as the infrastructural substrate upon which a wide range of institutions now depend for communication, identity management, data storage, collaboration, and increasingly, cognitive mediation. This strategy has generated immense financial success while gradually eroding institutional autonomy and internal competence. In becoming the quintessential Arasaka-esque Cyberpunk Megacorp, Nadella's reign has also seen the most vivid example of enshittification across the Microsoft ecosystem.
Microsoft’s expansion into cloud infrastructure and enterprise software has repeatedly outpaced the ability of public and private institutions to develop internal expertise, leading to implementation failures, cost overruns, and reliance on external consultants in sectors such as education and healthcare. These episodes are not isolated missteps, but manifestations of a broader dynamic in which institutions adopt proprietary systems faster than they can understand or govern them.
This enclosure converges with the LinkedInification of work, a process in which professional life becomes increasingly mediated through platforms that reward visibility, signaling, and narrative alignment, ideological arbitrate for fickle media markets over demonstrated mastery and long-horizon responsibility. Hiring, promotion, and capital allocation decisions become sensitive to algorithmic legibility, encouraging individuals and organizations to optimize for symbolic presence rather than for the slow cultivation of expertise. Competence that cannot be easily circulated loses standing, while performative alignment with prevailing managerial or technological narratives is rewarded.
The rapid deployment of generative artificial intelligence across Microsoft’s ecosystem intensifies this trend. Enterprises and public institutions adopt AI-assisted tools without corresponding investments in training, governance, or epistemic accountability, resulting in confusion, compliance risk, and degraded decision-making. Often, the AI bogeyman is used as an excuse for mass layoffs to preserve hyperfinancialist logic. These failures are structural rather than accidental, arising from a model that treats cognition as a service layer rather than as an institutional practice that must be cultivated internally. Institutions continue to function, but their capacity to reproduce competence erodes as reliance on proprietary systems deepens.
Nadella’s achievement lies in normalizing this dependency, presenting enclosure as efficiency and cognitive outsourcing as empowerment, thereby stabilizing a form of decline that proceeds without dramatic rupture but at the same time feels utterly enshittified and ossified in bullshit.
Taken together, these figures reveal a ruling stratum selected not for its ability to build durable institutions, but for its capacity to extract value from attention, software dependence and hyperfinancialist markets while avoiding entanglement with the temporal demands of stewardship. Bier’s products collapse into acquisition and disappearance adding to the total zombification of the Corporate Web, Vance’s ventures dissolve into narrative and finance without institutional heft in pursuit of petty careerist ambition that provides cover for a tech oligarchies, Ramaswamy’s enterprises extracted value from futures that never arrived whilst also trying to go down the Vance political route and Nadella’s platforms succeed financially while hollowing out the capacities of the institutions that depend on them and holding its users hostage in never ending eternal rounds of enshittification.
And truly God knows best