> 1. they are selling you as a target.

This is why people sign up for LinkedIn.

They want to be targeted by companies for jobs. Or when they’re applying for a job, they want to be easily found by people at that company so they can see more information.

If you don’t want those things, you don’t need a LinkedIn page.

> Do the corporations that participate in this scheme provide mutual economic benefit? Do they contribute to the common wealth or are they parasitical?

You wrote a long hand wavey post but you stopped short of answering your own question.

The corporations who pay LinkedIn are doing so to recruit people for jobs. I’ve purchased LinkedIn premium for this purpose at different times.

After “targeting” those LinkedIn users, I eventually hired some of them for jobs. There’s your mutual economic benefit. This is why people use LinkedIn.

> It is a long causal change, so it is fair to ask whether there is any empirical evidence. If this is true we would expect to see ...? Well how about prices going up? Well how about in general people are less able to afford housing, food, cars, etc.

You think the root cause of inflation is… social media companies? This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. You’re just observing two different things and convinced they’re correlated, while ignoring the obvious rebuttal that inflation existed and affordability changes happened before social media.

> Somehow the fundamentals of places like linkedin, gmail, google, facebook, etc have eluded people.

I think most people understand the fundamentals of LinkedIn better than you do, to be honest. It’s not a mystery why people sign up and maintain profiles.