Where did you get that link from? Link Tin
One can be overwhelmed with a sense of bleakness when browsing LinkedIn. There is an inescapable feeling that the world is full of arseholes, and the arseholes are winning. The few remaining good ones then decide that if you can’t beat them, you must join them in setting up a LinkedIn profile.
The process of creating an account is the online equivalent to recording the soundbites for your intro on The Apprentice; repeatedly striding up and down the millennium bridge, loudly exaggerating your personal achievements like a narcissistic out-of-work student actor. Except nobody is filming.
The Mandela effect is the phenomenon of the public collectively mis-remembering something from popular culture in the past. For instance, didn’t “Maltesers” used to be spelled “Malteasers”? (It definitely did, they must have changed it in the early 2000s).
There is something similar that happens online.
Let’s say somebody sends you a link to a bizarre website or video, the weirder the better. The successful links of this nature are completely unexpected but lack depth, meaning you will find it funny for between one minute and one hour, then forget it.
A year or so later you try to remember the contents of one of these links because it suddenly is relevant to something you are working on: “I swear I saw a guy singing, but just noises, and he was holding sparklers?” The weirder and older the link is, the less likely they have good SEO, meaning you won’t be able to Google it and the email that contained the link initially simply contained the text “Yo” making it also impossible to locate.
Instead, you try to find some random, unexpected links of your own.
However, the thing about wanting to find something unexpected is that you can’t find the link yourself or else it would be expected, so you need help from others. In the same way you can’t hide your own CD-ROM of Championship Manager 2001/2 when you need to be revising, and instead must ask a friend or passer-by to do it on your behalf.
Desperate for some inspiration for your project, you find yourself reading a listicle on LinkedIn: “10 creative ways to inspire your ideas”. You scroll as far as number 5 when they inform you that you’ll have to register as a user to continue to reading.
Worry no longer.
Introducing: Link Tin.
