It’s almost 15 years since the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his bestselling book, On Bullshit. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” he observed. Frankfurt defined bullshitting as distinct from lying: a lie is deliberate and focused; to lie one must first know what is true. The bullshitter, in contrast, may have no idea what is true but is unconcerned by this. “His eye is not on the facts at all… except in so far as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.”
We’ve been exposed to a lot of more bullshit since Frankfurt first charted the phenomenon. The rapid pace of online news and conversation seldom rewards intellectual humility or equivocation – if you want to be heard it’s better to offer a bullshit “hot take” than a more considered one. Social media has allowed for the mass production of bullshit: the extraordinarily broad expertise of the prolific Twitter commentator; the performative enthusiasm of LinkedIn profiles; and the faux-authenticity of Instagram and the subsequent rise of the personal brand, the “influencer” and the over-sharing politician. Several recent high-profile cases – including the blood-testing company Theranos, the disastrous Fyre Festival and Anna Delvey, the fake heiress – owed their initial success to a willingness to push to new extremes the kind of bullshit we fall for every day in boardrooms, on social media and at networking events.
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