The point here is not the cognitive dissonance between “counterterrorism” and “voice over”, but the feeling that all these skills are abstracted away from their real-world application to a point where they become equivalent, interchangeable. It’s quite interesting to see these different types of skills sitting so close to each other:
There’s a total dissociation between the application of a skill like interrogation (which we know in some circumstances amounts to torture) and the way that skill slots into a professional profile page on LinkedIn and helps build up a personal brand, the same way “photoshop” or “public speaking” might. Is it the interrogated? The surveilled? (It seems like the subject of an interrogation would be in the best position to make an authoritative endorsement about the interrogator’s skill level.)īut more remarkable than the act of endorsing someone for a skill like “asymmetrical warfare” or “weapons of mass destruction” is the feeling that on LinkedIn, all careers are basically on the same plane. I love to imagine who is endorsing who for something like “interrogation” or “surveillance”. First, LinkedIn’s skill system is a social feature: you receive skill endorsements from other LinkedIn members (as you probably know if you have an account on the site). There’s a lot going on here that I find pretty remarkable. Here’s what one of these skill sections looks like: Like every other LinkedIn profile, these pages catalogued education, background experience, and, of most interest to me, relevant skill sets. Here, for example, the search engine is offering to narrow my search to “People with Interrogation skills”.Īs I started to click around on different profile pages I realized that, as long as they were within two or three degrees of separation from me, I had access to the profiles of professionals working in fields like law enforcement, private security, and military contracting. I was surprised to discover that, in addition to showing matching organizations, LinkedIn was finding people. My initial thought was that I would find private organizations with ties to law enforcement and the military. Some time ago, I started searching LinkedIn for keywords like “interrogation” and “surveillance”.