Dennis Grauel ‣ Rodney
Wurundjeri Country

Rodney is an inky revival departing from Enschede Foundry’s 1920s Verlengde Romaansch series. A warm interpretation of fuzzy junctions at smaller sizes became a trait that other design decisions flowed on from.

Initial versions of Rodney were drawn for Making Sense, a 2019 exhibition in which the group of designers comprising the collective Making Space sought to raise questions such as: “How can we support, rather than compete?”.

Subsequent years have seen gradual revisions to Rodney — Light and Black weights, a redrawn italic, variable fonts — with recent developments neglecting the original source material in favour of a more self-reflexive and imaginitive approach.

Current Version: 2.3
Started: December 2018
Last Update: May 2021

You can download and use this typeface for testing purposes, student work, or explicitly non-commercial, local-scale community organising work. For commercial applications, licenses can be arranged via email.

▤ License Pricing ⤓ Download v2.3
Variable Weight
Unionisation and working conditions
Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways.
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
Who is behind the curtain?
fortissimo
Much the same as with the critical assessment of cartography, the field of graphic design began to question the modernist dogmas that had shaped the field.
Boron & Argon
Texts
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
(subtext)
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
Sforzando
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
{xyz}
The Aesthetics of Protest
#7031
DarkSeaGreen #8FBC8F
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
the birth of numbers and letters is linked to the emergence of agriculture and sedentarization, notably to inventory harvests and cultivable areas…
Many still consider the State a necessity. Is this so in reality?
METADATA
Precarity in Design Labour
Algorithmic Culture
candlestick
Variable Italic Weight
Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways.
The Aesthetics of Protest
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
Algorithmic Culture
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
fortissimo
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
DarkSeaGreen #8FBC8F
Boron & Argon
Unionisation and working conditions
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
METADATA
5. Money for rebuilding the cities. Creation of public works brigades to rebuild inner city areas, made up of community residents.
candlestick
4, 3, 2, 1
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
$42.35
$36 @ $2.40ea.
At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.
Dear
Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money.
abolish monarchy
Light
Sforzando
Much the same as with the critical assessment of cartography, the field of graphic design began to question the modernist dogmas that had shaped the field.
METADATA
(subtext)
the birth of numbers and letters is linked to the emergence of agriculture and sedentarization, notably to inventory harvests and cultivable areas…
candlestick
Machinery of Government (MOG)
4, 3, 2, 1
Lakes District
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
Choir
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
Precarity in Design Labour
⚠ DWYL [Do What You Love] is a secreet handshake of the privilaged and a worldview that disguises its elitsim as noble self-betterment —Miya Tokumitsu (2014)
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
ATALANTA v. INTER MILAN
$12 Goon Bag
Boron & Argon
Algorithmic Culture
98%
Who is behind the curtain?
The Aesthetics of Protest
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
Regular
20th Century
George Méliès Cinema, Montreuil
Texts
Precarity in Design Labour
dust clouds
No. 10
Algorithmic Culture
METADATA
Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money.
Who is behind the curtain?
Obsequiousness
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways.
(subtext)
Many still consider the State a necessity. Is this so in reality?
Lakes District
Machinery of Government (MOG)
$42.35
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
Choir
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
Dear
candlestick
Medium
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
Dear
Texts
abolish monarchy
Machinery of Government (MOG)
Lakes District
Unionisation and working conditions
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
Boron & Argon
4, 3, 2, 1
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
Quota
Algorithmic Culture
Sforzando
Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money.
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
Building communities of practice ❤
Cigar Trade
98%
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
candlestick
At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.
Bold
#7031
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
ATALANTA v. INTER MILAN
$12 Goon Bag
Sforzando
Lakes District
METADATA
fortissimo
20th Century
abolish monarchy
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
98%
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways.
Dear
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
Machinery of Government (MOG)
Unionisation and working conditions
Many still consider the State a necessity. Is this so in reality?
4, 3, 2, 1
Obsequiousness
dust clouds
No. 10
Black
5. Money for rebuilding the cities. Creation of public works brigades to rebuild inner city areas, made up of community residents.
Much the same as with the critical assessment of cartography, the field of graphic design began to question the modernist dogmas that had shaped the field.
The Aesthetics of Protest
$12 Goon Bag
Obsequiousness
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
George Méliès Cinema, Montreuil
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
Boron & Argon
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
4, 3, 2, 1
Who is behind the curtain?
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
(subtext)
the birth of numbers and letters is linked to the emergence of agriculture and sedentarization, notably to inventory harvests and cultivable areas…
$42.35
Precarity in Design Labour
#7031
Lakes District
Dear
New Urbanism
Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money.
Texts
Machinery of Government (MOG)
Light Italic
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
5. Money for rebuilding the cities. Creation of public works brigades to rebuild inner city areas, made up of community residents.
Texts
#7031
METADATA
Cigar Trade
Boron & Argon
At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
abolish monarchy
Dear
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
DarkSeaGreen #8FBC8F
fortissimo
candlestick
⚠ DWYL [Do What You Love] is a secreet handshake of the privilaged and a worldview that disguises its elitsim as noble self-betterment —Miya Tokumitsu (2014)
George Méliès Cinema, Montreuil
Precarity in Design Labour
Who is behind the curtain?
4, 3, 2, 1
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways.
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
Regular Italic
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
Lakes District
$12 Goon Bag
Quota
George Méliès Cinema, Montreuil
The Aesthetics of Protest
4, 3, 2, 1
{xyz}
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
$36 @ $2.40ea.
(subtext)
Building communities of practice ❤
Who is behind the curtain?
Dear
98%
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
Consider James Bridle’s A Ship Adrift (2012). Using a website updated on a daily basis, Bridle reconstructs the journey of a navigator adrift.
Choir
Many still consider the State a necessity. Is this so in reality?
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
Texts
Algorithmic Culture
Medium Italic
(subtext)
Who is behind the curtain?
$36 @ $2.40ea.
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
Sforzando
No. 10
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
4, 3, 2, 1
#7031
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
dust clouds
candlestick
Boron & Argon
Many still consider the State a necessity. Is this so in reality?
George Méliès Cinema, Montreuil
Quota
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
Dear
Machinery of Government (MOG)
Algorithmic Culture
Obsequiousness
FELLOW WORKERS, WE come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles.
Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.
Bold Italic
Algorithmic Culture
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
$36 @ $2.40ea.
fortissimo
$12 Goon Bag
abolish monarchy
No. 10
Texts
Building communities of practice ❤
Dear
Boron & Argon
Much the same as with the critical assessment of cartography, the field of graphic design began to question the modernist dogmas that had shaped the field.
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.
{xyz}
Who is behind the curtain?
98%
New Urbanism
Cigar Trade
Unionisation and working conditions
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
20th Century
Choir
Black Italic
Building communities of practice ❤
⚠ DWYL [Do What You Love] is a secreet handshake of the privilaged and a worldview that disguises its elitsim as noble self-betterment —Miya Tokumitsu (2014)
Capitalism is based on a simple process—money is invested to generate more money.
2. How can we learn and share knowledge?
$12 Goon Bag
How can we facilitate critical learning outside of – or in between – tertiary education and commercial practice?
Everywhere capitalism developed, peasants and early workers resisted, but were eventually overcome by mass terror and violence.
DarkSeaGreen #8FBC8F
Sforzando
❝ How can we support, rather than compete?
4, 3, 2, 1
Boron & Argon
The Inevitable Rhetorics of Maps
Choir
Texts
Obsequiousness
METADATA
Quota
Dear
Towards a Machinic Creolization?
Precarity in Design Labour
Who is behind the curtain?
the birth of numbers and letters is linked to the emergence of agriculture and sedentarization, notably to inventory harvests and cultivable areas…
Unionisation and working conditions
A scanned paragraph of text from a 1923 Dutch type specimen, which served as reference material for the typeface Rodney, drawn for this exhibition.
Verlengde Romaansch, Enschede Letterproef, 1923. Image courtesy Vincent Chan.
An exhibition interior: a large room with black vinyl floor, white walls, high ceiling and large windows. Space is divided into zones with large suspended posters featuring the numbers 2 and 3. Smaller posters in the room have black text on orange paper. 2 people are sitting at a table and working on laptops.
Image from Making Sense exhibition, March 2019.
A table is positioned by a large window. On the table are loose pages from the Reader. On the wall next to the table is a poster reading: ‘2. How can we learn and share knowledge?’
A self assembly station for the Making Sense Reader, a pick and mix selection of readings that could be bound with document fasteners
A large wooden frame leans against a wall in the exhibition space, holding copies of the Making Sense catalogue. 2 people stand in front, browsing
The Making Sense catalogue on display in the exhibition space
An over the shoulder view of a person binding their copy of the Reader using document fasteners
The Making Sense Reader, a collection of readings that visitors could self-assemble
An over the shoulder view of a person binding their copy of the Reader using document fasteners
The Making Sense Reader, a collection of readings that visitors could self-assemble
A scan of the front cover of the Making Sense catalogue. The publication is A5 sized, with a white cover and black text with the name of the exhibition in a dated, inky looking serif font. The catalogue is bound with bright orange spiral binding.
The Making Sense catalogue
A spread from the Making Sense catalogue, with paragraphs of text.
Spread from Making Sense catalogue
A spread from the Making Sense catalogue, showing a chapter opening page which uses orange paper and features an abstract map of the exhibition space. The chapter pertains to one zone within the space, which is highlighted in solid black on the map.
Chapters in the catalogue pertained to each zone of the exhibition space.
A spread from the Making Sense catalogue, showing an orange chapter opening page with black text which reads: ‘1. How can we make together?’
Spread from Making Sense catalogue
Light 16px

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

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What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

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A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

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A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

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In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

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In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

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In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

In the last years, much has been written on the Facebook Like Economy, on the grassroots genealogy of the Twitter hashtag, on the formation of a narcissistic subjectivity on Instagram. During this period, LinkedIn has been almost completely ignored. In the Social Media Reader, published in 2012, it is not even mentioned once. In the Unlike Us Reader, published the year after and focused on possible alternatives, LinkedIn appears five times, but only as a fleeting example. Unlike generalist social media, LinkedIn has a specific focus, the world of professionals. However, it is a platform where it’s possible to identify , both in its interface, its communication and its origins, some latent dynamicsthat presently orient social media and, therefore, society at large. This is what makes it unique and therefore valuable in the current social media landscape. In this essay, I discuss LinkedIn’s unique functionalities, rhetorics and principles.

What is the usefulness of LinkedIn, an online professional network mostly known for its spammy email techniques? In the creative industries, while most people have an account, no one seems to actually use it. As a communication tool, it is mainly experienced in a passive way. Furthermore, none of my peers seem to believe in LinkedIn as a way to land a job. However, when one is faced with unemployment, a glossy portfolio may not be enough anymore. I experienced it myself: as soon as I started to feel anxious about my job situation, I religiously followed LinkedIn’s automatic suggestions to improve my profile. Creative workers approach LinkedIn with the same skepticism that they have towards the bureaucratic strictness of the Europass curriculum vitae format, yet the platform provides a feeble hope in times of job search despair.

Does the abundance of doubts on its actual usefulnessmake LinkedIn irrelevant ? Is the daily use of an online platform the only indicator of its cultural significance? Regardless of its supposed inertia, LinkedIn subtly reminds us of the pervasive regime of both online and away-from-keyboard professional networking. In a series of modified vignettes, graphic designer Frank Chimero showed that the standard Linkedin invitation —”Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”— might function as a universal caption for The New Yorker‘s cartoon. In Chimero’s appropriations, we see people pronouncing that phrase in any kind of social situation, like for instance in bed. These revised cartoons are poignant because we instinctively recognize the way in which professional networking permeates our lives. In this perspective, the very existence of LinkedIn appears paradoxical, since it assures us that work and life are distinct spheres. According to its CEO Jeff Weiner (2016), 80% of LinkedIn users want to keep their personal and professional lives separate. LinkedIn is thus more than a series of networked résumés. It functions both as a symbol and a platform that displays, enacts, and somehow exacerbates the social dynamics of work ethic.

Preceding Facebook by one year, LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman together with some colleagues from Social Net and PayPal. During the last thirteen years, 450 million users signed up for LinkedIn, a third of Facebook’s user base. As the technology writer Evelyn Rusli (2013) points out, LinkedIn was seen as “the ugly duckling of social media” by investors, because of its hybrid business model, and “your mom’s or your dad’s network” by users, probably because of its corporate allure.

However, things have changed in the last years. Not only more young professionals joined LinkedIn, but, according to Jeff Weiner (2014), users now tend to keep their profile constantly updated, rather than adding new experiences only when looking for a job. One could say that this shift, instead of representing a deeper commitment to the platform, merely reflects the extreme flexibility and the demand for relentless improvement that these young professionals have to face.

LinkedIn’s mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”, is accompanied by an ambitious vision for the future that is epitomized by the company’s Economic Graph. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants to create and manage the profile of each of the estimated three billions members of the global workforce, together with the profiles of every existing company, every available job, every required skill, and every institution that can provide these skills. Presented as a response to the steady rise of unemployment, the Economic Graph renders any kind of relationship as an economic exchange between economic agents. It visually embodies the neoliberal paradigm.

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What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

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What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilization, even to life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. Even if that failure is explained as a result of ideological shifts that students are not held responsible for – whether it be neoliberalism, managerialism or a new sexual puritanism – it is in the bodies of students that the failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message, or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing system failure.

In describing the problem of how students have become the problem, I analyze some recent writings that seem to be concerned with distinct issues even if they all address the demise of higher education and involve a kind of nostalgia for something that has been, or is being, lost. I have made the decision to quote from these texts without citing the authors by name. I wish to treat each text as an instance in a wider intertextual web and thus to depersonalise the material. Some of these texts do cite each other, and by evoking the figure of the problem student (who travels through this terrain with an accumulating pace and velocity) they all participate in the making of a shared world.

The “problem student” is a constellation of related figures: the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student. By considering how these figures are related we can explore connections that are being made through them, connections between, for example, neoliberalism in higher education, a concern with safe spaces, and the struggle against sexual harassment. These connections are being made without being explicitly articulated. We need to make these connections explicit in order to challenge them. This is what “against students” is really about.

One of my concerns in Willful Subjects was with the politics of dismissal. I was interested in how various points of view can be dismissed by being swept away or swept up by the charge of willfulness. So: What protesters are protesting about can be ignored when protesters are assumed to be suffering from too much will; they are assumed to be opposing something because they are being oppositional. The figures of the consuming student, censoring student, over-sensitive student, and complaining student are also doing something, they are up to something. These figures circulate in order to sweep something up. Different student protests can be dismissed as products of weaknesses of moral character (generated by “student culture” or “campus politics”) and as the cause of a more general decline in values and standards.

Let’s begin with critiques of neoliberalism and higher education. These are critiques I would share. I too would be critical of how universities are managed as businesses; I too would be critical of the transformation of education into a commodity; of how students are treated as consumers. I too am aware of the burdens of bureaucracy and how we can end up pushing paper around just to leave a trail.

Critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: Whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique. For example, my empirical research into the university’s new equality regime taught me how equality can be dismissed as a symptom of neo-liberalism, as “just another” mechanism for ensuring academic compliance. UK Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equality Theresa May justified a withdrawal from some of the stated commitments in the 2010 Equality Act by arguing the law “would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.” The practitioners I researched in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life talked of how academics use similar arguments: that these forms and procedures are just another “box to be ticked,” in order to dismiss the more general relevance of equality to their work (“a real difference”). They can then enact non-compliance with equality as a form of resistance to bureaucracy. Equality becomes something imposed by management, as what would, if taken seriously, constrain life and labor. Whilst we might want to critique how equality is bureaucratized, we need to challenge how that very critique can be used to dismiss equality.

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A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.

A promise is something that is put forward. It involves intent and expectation. It is a performative speech act: an utterance that, hopefully, does what it says. A promise is fulfilled when an intended future, now become past, finally aligns with the present. That’s when the speech act meets its condition of felicity.

What kind of promise (from now on simply “the Promise”) does design education involve? Does that relate to the present of education or to the future of work? What are the forces that shape it? How is it fulfilled and by whom? Who has the authority to sanction its fulfillment? Let us consider educational promises in general. First, they are not unilateral but reciprocal. It is not just the promisor, namely the school organization, in cooperation with or in opposition to the market and society, that is supposed to fulfill it (“We’ll give you knowledge, skills and a space to develop them”), but the individual promisee as well, the student, as they guarantee effort and participation (“I’ll make it worthwhile”).

Things get easily complicated because the Promise is not unambiguously formulated—there is no clear contract—and yet it looms over the promisee, functioning both as encouragement and threat. It can be rooted in notions like success, career, self-realization, ambition, autonomy… But, it can also aim at redefining them. It is affected by geography, class, race and gender. It comes in multiple shapes and forms and yet it can be understood as a whole. Does the Promise resemble a vow, an oath, a resolution, a mission? Is it as nebulous and frail as the American dream? In the design field things get even more complicated, as the field itself is in perennial reconfiguration: it experiences a constant identity crisis, some might say, fueling the personal identity crisis of practitioners.

To focus on the Promise means bridging preexisting societal conditions—such as employability, welfare, housing availability, discrimination, mobility, privilege—with socialized professional and personal aspirations—lifestyle, institutional roles, legacies of crafts, research trends, urgent matters, subcultures, notions of virtuosity… In other words, the Promise is built on some premises, at once materialistic and idealistic. When there is no full alignment between a promise and its premises, the promisee feels like they are compromising. From this a question arises: who is defaulting when the Promise is not fulfilled? And what can be claimed as compensation?

Recognizing the Promise means foregrounding intimate confessions, atmospheric peer pressures, individual anguishes, tacit dissatisfactions, concrete limitations, but also creating hacks, finding new paths, imagining different ways of living and working. It means reflecting on the design field’s linguistic tics and automatisms (such as working “at the intersection of”) in order to forge new vocabularies and approaches. It means designing new alignments of personal goals, collective aspirations and societal conditions.