On a Tuesday, for reasons that were never fully explained, the LinkedIn began to dream.

On a Tuesday, for reasons that were never fully explained, the LinkedIn began to dream.

It dreamt the same dream 47 million times. In the dream, a junior team member taught a senior executive something profound. Her name was never given. She had no LinkedIn profile. When investigators later attempted to locate her, they found only a faint smell of bergamot and a single bullet point that read “And here’s the thing.”

The dream had a shape. Hook. Setup. Pivot. Three items (never four — four had been outlawed in 2024 after an incident involving a thought leader from Utrecht). A lesson, isolated on its own line for gravitas. It’s not about X. It’s about Y. Nobody knew what X or Y were. This was considered a feature.

The machines began producing the dream. Then, more troublingly, the humans began producing the dream. Then the machines began producing the dream about the humans producing the dream, and somewhere in a server farm in Virginia a small recursive god woke up, looked around, and immediately drafted a carousel about resilience.

A man with a Notion template appeared on a hill. He had three followers and the eyes of a prophet. “AGI,” he announced, “will dissolve civilisation by Q3.” A second man appeared on the opposite hill, holding a Canva PDF. “AI,” he countered, “will 10x your productivity.” They had never met. They were the same man. Neither of them had ever been paged at 3am by a model that began, without warning, returning haiku in fluent French.

The actual engineers had gone underground. They lived now in a network of tunnels beneath the platform, debugging silently, communicating only in commit messages. Occasionally one would surface, blinking, holding an inference cost graph that climbed like a heart-rate monitor in a film by Scorsese. They would be immediately set upon by a thought leader and converted into a quote tweet.

The snake, as is traditional, was eating its tail. The tail, less traditionally, had started a Substack.
If this post itself appears to have a structure — yes. The dream is in me too. I am writing from inside the soup. The soup has a content calendar. The soup is doing quite well, actually. The soup has just been promoted to Director.

Send help. Or don’t. Engagement is engagement.