The Rise of the Bullshittery
Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece and it is the result of years of watching the same pattern play out in different industries, and sort of running out of patience. If you are one of the people doing honest, careful work in a field that no longer rewards it, this post is for you. However, if you are one of the people I am about to describe, then you probably already know who you are and you might want to keep on reading nevertheless. The tl;dr is at the bottom. A few weeks ago, I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn just to exclusively see one post after another that contained no actual information and not a single sentence that would have lacked any more substance if you replaced every noun in it with a different noun. There were thought leaders leading no thoughts, founders founding nothing of actual value, strategists describing strategies that amounted to “be visible” and “ship fast” , and an alarming number of self-described AI experts whose expertise appeared to consist entirely of having a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and the willingness to write about it in seventeen-paragraph posts. There is a word for this kind of communication, one the philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously employed back in 1986, when he wrote a short essay called On Bullshit . Frankfurt’s central observation, which has aged terrifyingly well, is that the bullshitter is not the same as the liar , because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false. The truth-value of the statement is simply not part of their concern. The bullshitter is optimising for a different objective, usually appearing competent , appearing confident , or appearing to be the right kind of person to be in the room . And precisely because the bullshitter is indifferent to truth, Frankfurt argued, they are a greater threat to honest discourse than any liar. Twenty years on, that essay reads like a pre-mortem on the modern internet and, in parts, modern society. The unspoken contract behind most professional life used to be as simple as learning how to do something, doing it well and gradually developing a reputation among people who could tell the difference. Over time, that reputation would then translate into work, money, and a degree of stability. It was a slow process, that sometimes was unfair, and that was never as meritocratic as its proponents claimed, but at least the basic shape of it made sense. Doing a good job was, on average, an advantage. That contract, however, has been broken in ways that are hard to comprehend, let alone ignore these days. The dominant mechanism for distributing professional opportunity is no longer slow reputation, it is algorithmic visibility . The algorithm, howeveer, does not particularly care whether you are good at your job, it only cares whether your message is engaging enough to spread fast and far. Researchers studying the so-called attention economy have been making this point for years, but one specific area that is particularly interesting is the one about politicians. A 2024 analysis of more than 6,500 U.S. state legislators found that distributing low-credibility information correlated positively with attention on the major platforms. In other words, being less reliable was, on average, a winning strategy for getting noticed. The same dynamic applies, in a less visible but more pervasive way, to anyone who has to build an audience to find work. The people who optimise for being correct are competing on an unfair playing field against people who optimise for being heard , and the result of this is a slow inversion of incentives. The careful professional, who takes a week to think through a problem, who refuses to claim expertise they do not have, and who writes one in-depth researched post about a specific topic, gets out-competed and buried by the carnival barker who will claim any expertise that fits the trending topic, and who fires off five posts a day, each of them a slightly different rephrasing of the same content-free observation. I am not arguing that honest, competent work has disappeared, but I am arguing that the incentive structure no longer points toward it, and that this fact has consequences that compound over time. If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn . The platform has become, by any reasonable metric, the professional-class equivalent of late-night infomercial television, except the products on offer are other people’s careers . There is now a well-documented genre of so-called mentorship influencers on the platform who leverage job seekers’ desperation to sell hollow advice, false hope, and bogus referrals, often under the facade of having worked at a recognisable (mostly tech) company. The trick is the same one snake-oil salesmen have been running for centuries: Look at me, I am living proof that what I am selling works! These days, however, this trick comes with a slightly more modern twist and the proof for the sales pitch tends to be a curated profile picture, a fabricated job title, and a few thousand bot-inflated followers. What makes this maddening is not the existence of grifters , who are an old problem, but the way LinkedIn (and many other platforms) actively rewards them. The algorithm does not know the difference between a thoughtful five-paragraph essay by somebody who has spent a decade in the field, and a five-paragraph essay generated in twenty seconds by an LLM, that’s probably sprinkled with emojis. From the algorithm’s perspective, both are content , and the one that triggers more engagement (usually the cheaper, more emotional, more bombastic one) wins. Multiply that across millions of users and you end up with a feed in which the loudest claims rise to the top, and the people doing the actual work become invisible. The same shape repeats on Medium , on Twitter X , on Instagram , on YouTube , on TikTok , on Substack , and on all the other content-driven platforms, where there is now an entire AI grift economy of fake money-making gurus recycling the same handful of prompts and selling courses about how to do it. While the platforms might be different, the physics are the same, the currency is engagement, and the byproduct is bullshit. The casualty of all of this is sadly anyone whose work cannot be compressed into a fifteen-second hook. While snake oil predates the internet by a few centuries, and plenty of people built lucrative careers out of nothing long before LinkedIn existed, what is new, and what I think changes the problem, is that the marginal cost of producing convincing bullshit has collapsed. Large Language Models have done for grift what the shipping container did for global trade. They did not invent it, but they turned a manual process into an industrial one. Now, anyone with a browser can generate a thousand words of confident, on-topic, syntactically clean text on any subject in under a minute. They can ship a book to Amazon , an article to a content farm, a thread to LinkedIn , and even a video to YouTube , all without ever having to know what they are talking about. The output passes the basic test of sounds about right , and that is, increasingly, the only test the distribution channels (and sadly the readers/viewers) apply. This behavior might however stem from a phenomenon that was observed over a decade ago already, which is the spread of paid employment that even the employee secretly believes is pointless and in a sense hollow . In his 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs , David Graeber argued that an enormous and growing fraction of professional work, in finance, consulting, middle management, communications, and adjacent fields, was producing nothing of obvious social value, and that the people doing it knew. However, it is important to mention that the empirical data for Graeber’s strongest claims is contested , and that a 2022 study found that less than 8% of European workers reported feeling their job was useless, well below the 20-60% that Graeber’s framing implied. Also, it appears that toxic culture and bad management were better explanations than pointlessness for the unhappiness he was describing. I nevertheless think that there is an argument of his observation that survives the critique, which is that an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts . Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents, posts about posting. Obviously this work seems not useless to the worker, who is being paid, or to the platform, which is selling ads against it, but it is still utterly useless to anyone outside the loop. This is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack. The part that bothers me the most is what it does to the people who refuse to participate in this whole charade. If you are a software engineer who insists on shipping things that work, a writer who insists on knowing the subject before publishing, a designer who insists on testing the thing on actual humans, a craftsperson of any kind who treats the work as the whole point of it, you are competing in a market that has been quietly tilted against you. The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you. They will get the speaking slots, they will get the promotions or, worse, the funding rounds. Heck, they might even end up on Forbes’ 30 under 30 . All that you will get is the satisfaction of doing the job properly, which, don’t get me wrong, is a beautiful thing, but sadly it does not pay rent. I think a lot of the cynicism, exhaustion, and quiet bitterness that has crept into professional life over the last years is downstream of this problem. I don’t believe that people no longer want to do good work, but I think that doing good work has stopped paying the way it used to, while doing bad work loudly has started paying significantly better, so people notice and they adjust. Of course, I might be completely off here and it is possible that the situation is not actually worse, only more visible. Bullshit has always been with us and neither LinkedIn nor any other platform invented the self-promoting middle manager. What has changed, though, is the observability of the bullshit, for which we now have a continuously updating feed. We see it all consolidated into a handful of prominent places, and maybe the volume looks higher because we are looking at all of it at once, and maybe not because the per-capita rate has actually climbed. This could be an explanation, but I frankly don’t think it accounts for all of what I am describing. It could also be, however, that what I’m describing are just people trying to keep up . The slop-posting middle manager who cannot tell you what their team actually built last quarter is not necessarily a malicious fraud, but they may be a person whose job no longer rewards them for knowing, in a system that has trained them to perform and act instead. While this, if true, does not make the output less hollow, it certainly does change who the actual villain is. Frankly, I don’t know, and I do not have any advice to give straight away on this. I believe, however, that in order to be able to dial things down again with regard to the bullshittery, we need actions on both sides, the reader/viewer, as well as the performer / creator . As viewers, we probably need to go back to reward substance when we see it. If somebody you follow does the careful and properly-sourced version of a piece of work, say so out loud. The system is starving them of the signal that it cheerfully overpays the bullshitters with and you are one of the people who can correct that. If you, as a viewer, can afford it, pay for the human-made version when you can. If a writer, an engineer, a designer, a musician is doing the work, and there is a way to give them money that does not pass through three instances of platform extraction, do it! The economics of doing real work in public are bad enough already without the further insult of zero direct support. As creators, we have to refuse to perform what we do not believe. This is harder than it sounds, because there is incentive and maybe even pressure to write that post , record that video , do that talk , publish that announcement , and saying no costs visibility you may not be able to afford to lose. But every honest professional who declines to bullshit is a small data point against this trend, and I think there need to be more of those data points. Frankfurt’s deepest argument is that the bullshitter is not embarrassable, because they have no relationship to the truth they could betray, while the honest person can be embarrassed, because they have made a claim they meant. As a creator, hold on to that, because being embarrassable is not a weakness. In a market that has stopped penalising shamelessness, it is one of the few remaining markers that the person you are talking to is operating in good faith. So be embarrassable! When I started writing this post, the angry version of it was about the people. The grifters and the gurus , the LinkedIn content pushers and the vibe-coding founders shipping vaporware to investors who frankly should know better. But after a few drafts I realised that I was aiming at the wrong target, because the people are mostly responding rationally to a system that pays for performance and ignores substance. If I blame them, I have to also blame myself for the times I stayed quiet and smiled at the demo, or signed off on the launch I did not believe in. I guess that most of us have done some version of that. It’s the system that is to blame, or as the old saying goes, “don’t hate the player, hate the game” . A market that prices visibility above credibility, that rewards the loudest claim over the truest one, and that lets a thin facade outsell a real product because the facade ships faster, is not a force of nature, but the cumulative effect of a lot of small decisions made by platforms, regulators, employers, and consumers, including me and you. None of those decisions are settled forever and each one of them is, in principle, reversible. I do not think honest work is going away, but I do think it is being pushed into a narrower, harder-to-find tier, the way handmade goods got pushed away when the factories arrived. There will still be a livelihood in it, and for some of us a very rewarding one, but the path to that livelihood will increasingly require you to do the work and to make the case, in public , for why your version of it is worth more than the cheaper, louder, hollower alternative. And that is a significantly harder game than the one we used to play. The simplest thing I can offer to anyone reading this, who is tired of being out-shouted by the bullshittery, is also the most boring: Keep doing the work, keep a principled and honest stance, keep saying I don’t know when you don’t, keep being embarrassable. Even though the market is bad at rewarding it right now, it will not continue to be forever. Hopefully.
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