Nobody Asked You
On mass outreach and the cost of calling it normal.
Photo by Brian J. Tromp on Unsplash
Author’s Note
Last week, my husband Jason and I recorded the first episode of our podcast, Candorland, in which I called LinkedIn a cesspool. I don’t regret it. But this isn’t only about LinkedIn. It’s about every unsolicited blast, survey, and automated sequence that arrives uninvited and leaves you with time and effort you never agreed to spend. I’ve been thinking about it since.
At some point, management said this is just how it’s done now, and the room accepted it. Maybe there was mild discomfort, seat-shifting, or even a heated discussion. But in the end, the decision was made, the tools were purchased, and the lists were built. Somewhere in the machinery of that process, the question of whether any individual recipient would experience it as human contact never survived the logistics.
I know the feeling of sitting in that room. The simultaneous pull of two things that shouldn’t coexist: the recognition that they’re probably right about the landscape and the complete disgust at what it has become. Not doing this is no longer an option, in a narrow sense. The infrastructure of professional visibility has been rebuilt around volume, algorithmic signals, and outreach cadences. Opting out has real costs.
But inevitable and right are not the same word, and they don’t mean the same thing. Yet we’ve been letting them stand in for each other.
What nobody said in that room—what nobody seems to be saying in any of these rooms—is that the model only works if you’ve already decided that a 2% response rate is all that matters. That means you’ve decided, before you’ve sent a single message, that 98% of the people on your list are acceptable losses. Not people whose time you’re spending without consent. Losses.
No matter what you’ve been conditioned to believe, that is not a marketing strategy. That’s a philosophy. And it’s worth knowing which one you’re agreeing to.
The infrastructure didn’t build itself. Marketing agencies sold mass outreach as standard practice, packaging, pricing, and delivering it with enough expertise to make internal objections hard to voice. When the experts you’ve hired hand you a strategy, the “should we?” question doesn’t disappear. It just gets outranked.
And outranked by what? Not by evidence that it builds relationships. Not by longitudinal data showing that recipients who received a blast in Q2 felt more warmly toward the brand in Q4. Outranked by the fact that enough other organizations were already doing it, so refusal began to look like falling behind. But what it truly amounts to is peer pressure within the organization, disguised as a justified strategy.
The efficiency argument is real but narrow. Sending one message to ten thousand people does save the sender time per contact initiated. There’s no denying that. What the model doesn’t count is the other side of the ledger: ten thousand people spending five seconds (or more) to skim and close something they didn’t ask for is nearly fourteen hours of collective human attention, gone. The cost didn’t disappear. It was externalized onto recipients who never agreed to carry it, at a scale the sender never has to witness or measure.
That’s not efficiency. That’s accounting that only works if the recipient’s time is worth nothing, an assumption the model makes without stating it.
The organizations running these campaigns aren’t necessarily lying. They’re looking at an incomplete picture and calling it the whole picture. They measure the 2% who responded and call that the client experience. The 98% who found it intrusive, quietly unsubscribed, mentally downgraded the brand, and moved on aren’t in the data. There’s no field in the campaign debrief for the recipient found this presumptuous and now trusts you less. Silence reads as neutral. It isn’t.
This is what makes the normalization so durable. It’s not cynicism. It’s a measurement gap dressed as customer care. Because the feedback loop that would correct it is structurally absent, there’s no natural mechanism for accountability. The system can’t see its own damage. So it keeps running, and the damage keeps not counting. Somewhere in a quarterly review, someone says the numbers look good.
You are the data they’re not collecting. So am I. So is everyone who has ever closed a LinkedIn message or email in under three seconds and, however briefly, felt like a target. Conservatively, I spend 15 to 20 minutes a week on deletion alone, not reading, not evaluating, just unabashed clearing. That’s 13 hours of labor I didn’t agree to perform each year, in service of someone else’s pipeline.
The more interesting question is how a system so indifferent to its own damage keeps running.
None of this required a conspiracy. It required something more ordinary: a set of incentives that made the practice easy to adopt, hard to question, and impossible to measure honestly. The agencies had revenue models built on volume. The platforms' engagement metrics rose when messages were sent, regardless of quality. The software companies charged per seat. Everyone in the value chain had a reason to keep the machine running, and nobody in that chain was the recipient.
That’s how a hollow practice becomes institutional strategy. Not through deception, but through a system in which those with the power to stop it never had to feel it.
And yet the people sending these messages are also receiving them. They’re closing LinkedIn requests in under three seconds. They’ve also felt, however briefly, like a target. The cognitive dissonance this requires doesn’t stand up and raise a red flag. It resolves automatically, through a move so common it’s nearly invisible: we’re different. Our outreach is targeted, relevant, and more human than the others. Everyone inside the system believes their instance of it is justified.
What this requires, beneath the justification, is a kind of pattern-matching that has stopped questioning its own inputs. This is how it becomes the answer to a question that was never asked, because the question stopped being askable when the practice became normal. You can’t interrogate a default. You can only inherit it, deploy it, and measure the results on the only side of the ledger visible to you. The discomfort you feel as a recipient gets filed under that’s just how it is, the same framing that authorized the practice in the first place, now doing double duty as the thing that keeps you from noticing you’ve become what bothered you.
They won’t stop even when recipients are annoyed. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve organized themselves so the annoyance never reaches them.
You can’t fault anyone for trying. But at scale, without specificity, trying stops being trying and becomes noise. The people generating it are often as trapped in the system as those receiving it.
So what does it mean to refuse?
It doesn’t require a manifesto. It doesn’t require shaming anyone still inside the system, still sitting in rooms where management sets the terms. It requires something smaller and more precise: a decision about which operating agreement you live by.
Not sending blasts is a statement about how you value other people’s attention. Not responding to them is a statement about your own. Neither requires explanation. The people worth connecting with will notice the difference immediately because they’re operating the same way. Recognition between people who’ve made the same quiet decision is instantaneous.
The infrastructure will keep running. The quarterly reviews will continue. The numbers will keep looking good to the people whose job it is to make them look good.
You don’t have to be in those numbers on either side.