The Bullshit-Industrial Complex
Bullshit has never been in short supply.
It is a natural-occurring byproduct of human societies. But the forces that have given rise to exponential growth in digital communication are fuelling a human bullshit mega-machine.
We are living in the midst of a bullshit epidemic.
This is clear to see in the creative world and it’s been bothering Sean Blanda. Back in 2017, his inbox at 99U was swamped by a deluge of bullshit artists.
Instead they choose to quote other people who quote other people and the insights can often be traced back in a recursive loop.
Their interest is not in making the reader’s life any better, it is in building their own profile as some kind of influencer or thought leader.
He describes the ecosystem. The Bullshit-Industrial Complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:
Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.
Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.
—— Bullshit Maginot Line ——
Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.
Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.
Groups 5+: And downward….
The astute reader will recognise that this piece is written from below the Bullshit Maginot Line.
This creates a polluted information ecosystem. And its worsening.
The rise of the infinite meta-aggregators is self-perpetuating. When content is already infinite, curation trumps creation. More so, when content quality is poor.
The rational response to a torrent of bad content is a counter-wave of aggregated, second-hand, filtered content.
Much of this will itself be bad content.
A side-effect of the Text Renaissance is the parallel rise in Bullshit production. The means of production have been democratised, and Bullshit is an easy on-ramp.
Incentives
This is a problem worth solving and the Platforms have tried to adapt.
Notably Medium, with its well-intentioned attempt to give writers a viable source of engagement-driven, non-ad-based income. Nevertheless, many canonical examples of Bullshit content remain front and centre on Medium.
Substack, where this is published, puts the decision-making back into the hands of the reader. You are the arbiter of Bullshit. One click is all it takes to unsubscribe and banish the bullshitter into email oblivion.
And yet the incentives still encourage the Bullshitter. The Algorithms still have some way to go.
The Self-Aware Bullshit Artist
That’s the ecosystem, let’s look at the individual.
Is it possible to recognise whether your writing is polluting the information ecosystem?
My own experience of bullshit artists is that they are painfully unaware of their plight ... or more to the point, to our plight.
Here’s a flow diagram I mocked up to keep myself honest.
You’ll notice that there’s large gaps for subjectivity to slip through unnoticed. And so that leaves us with a distinctly unsatisfactory conclusion.
Bullshit is in the eye of the beholder.
Mastery, Norms and Self-Policing
So what’s a boy to do?
Feedback is central to developing a writing and thinking muscle-pair. Feedback sparks conversations, self-reflection, and correction. It also keeps you accountable.
Just ship it.
Or so the mantra goes. The default online writing advice is to publish early and publish often. And so the bullshit deluge continues, and the information ecosystem declines.
Paul Graham points to another path:
If you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay... With essay writing, publication bias is the way to go.
He characterises writing worth publishing, thusly.
Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.
Again, there’s plenty of room for subjective interpretation here.
Useful writing, too, is in the eye of the beholder.
— — —
So should I publish this?
It depends.
I’ve traversed the bullshit checklist but I’ve not agonised through one hundred iterations on the path to essay-worthy.
Instead, I’ll take a side-road. This is posted as a short-thought, a vehicle for consistent online writing. It’s low risk, minimally intrusive and yet still ‘out there’. Once I’m comfortable with that, and if it receives the thumbs up from one or two close collaborators, you’ll see it in The Deployment Age.
As for the ecosystem problem.
Hopefully, the spread of norms like this will dampen the inexorable production and propagation of bullshit. But I’m not optimistic. The incentives are misaligned and enforcing nuance at Platform-scale is incredibly difficult.
We’ve got Platform-scale problems that demand Platform-scale solutions.
And the information ecosystem has begun absorbing three new hyper-polluters: Fake News, AI Generated Content and Deepfakes.
File these under algorithmically under-determined.
— — —
Sources & Inspiration
How to write usefully by Paul Graham
The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex by Sean Blanda
An alternative to the bullshit industrial complex by Tom Critchlow
The Practice by Seth Godin
On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
A Text Renaissance by Venkatesh Rao