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.