Every job seeker is familiar with the the relentless exhortation to network. Your family, your friends, blog comments from random strangers, and the total environment of media messages all telll you that if you don’t have a job yet, you must be a flawed person, deficient in the life skill of networking. Like truth and beauty, the ability to network is now held to emanate from the inside. Networking is a personal trait that can be cultivated and controlled by the virtuous. The perfect professional is the person who transforms their social network into a personal attribute. The ability to tap into a large social network not only matches job seekers with potential employers: the presence of a network has become proof that social aspects of the job seeker’s personality have prevailed over anti-social aspects (independent judgment, inclination to dissent, preference for isolated activities, etc.). Networking is now a moral sign rather than an indicator of location within the social configuration. A large network means you’re a good person: a small network means you’re a bad person (either unattractive or shunned for your behavior) who can only be redeemed if you follow everyone’s advice to start networking.

In defense of all who choose to be a hermit, I usually float the question of whether a person will gain more skills to increase their productivity and quallity of work from secluded study or from hanging out in a bar. Perhaps some people are meant to pursue creative or intellectual achievement, and forcing these people into trivial social interactions against their will might entail depriving society of a cultural achievement or material advance? In this age of trumpeting “people skils”, it’s almost a taboo to call human relationships “trivial” - it’s a heresy against the gospel of networking. A person who admits they would rather go invent a better mousetrap must be arrogant, nerdy, insensitive, irrational, unlikable - and all the other social labels that will cast that person as wrong, outside, and quite possibly mentally deranged.

As an entrenched hermit-heretic, I find some solace in the occasional book that dares to argue that networking is a social asset, not a character trait. For people with few resources for contact-bait, attempts to network may be futile. Pushing these people to network is the same as demanding that they waste their time or exhaust their remaining energies on a treadmill. Maybe the lesson of networking failure is that it’s rational for some people to focus on something other than how to court superficial relationships.

A culture that privileges the people with the best rolodex is a culture that allows for “positional middemen”. Positional middllemen are people who insert themselves into a transaction simply as a gatekeeper to some component of the transaction: they make no labor or material investment to enhance the transaction’s economic value. Positional middlemen are parasites who are being subsidized by the people who are obliged to work for a living. Do we really want to live in that kind of society? This is the message that’s sent every time someone tells an unemployed person to focus on networking instead of, say, mastering their craft. If we truly value a diverse society of independent thinkers, perhaps we should be trying to bring jobs to people with the right skills instead of leveraging control over jobs to dictate personality reforms. When we reward people for prioritizing the acquisition of social assets, we embrace cronyism, feudal dependency, and the compusive groupthink that has spawned so many disasters in our government and our economy. That’s only a short step from reducing other people to units of wealth and mere instruments of network access.