The Rise of the Bullshittery: When Visibility Outpaces Competence

In the modern professional landscape, a quiet but profound shift has occurred. The unspoken contract of the workplace—that learning a skill, performing it well, and building a reputation for quality would lead to stability and success—has been fundamentally altered. In its place, we have entered the era of "the bullshittery," where the ability to appear competent is often more rewarded than actually being competent.

This phenomenon is not merely about a few bad actors or corporate grifters; it is a systemic inversion of incentives driven by the attention economy and accelerated by the industrialization of content through Large Language Models (LLMs).

The Anatomy of a Bullshitter

To understand this shift, we can look to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who in his 1986 essay On Bullshit, distinguished the "bullshitter" from the "liar." While a liar respects the truth enough to deliberately hide it, the bullshitter is entirely indifferent to whether their statements are true or false. Their objective is not deception in the traditional sense, but the optimization of perception: appearing confident, appearing knowledgeable, or appearing to be the "right kind of person" to be in the room.

In a world where truth-value is irrelevant, the bullshitter becomes a greater threat to honest discourse than the liar because they operate without any internal compass of accuracy.

Algorithmic Visibility vs. Professional Substance

Historically, professional reputation was a slow-build process. It required a track record of successful outcomes and the judgment of peers who could tell the difference between a polished presentation and a working product. Today, that mechanism has been largely replaced by algorithmic visibility.

Platforms like LinkedIn, X, and TikTok do not measure the quality of a software architecture or the depth of a strategic insight; they measure engagement. This creates a dangerous feedback loop:

• The Substance Penalty: The careful professional who spends a week researching a problem and refuses to claim expertise they don't possess is buried by the algorithm.
• The Carnival Barker Reward: The individual who ships five content-free, bombastic posts a day—optimized for hooks and emojis—is amplified.

As one commentator noted, this has turned professional networking into a form of "social credit," where finding a new job is often tied to participating in a culture of corporate propaganda.

The AI-Accelerated Grift

If the attention economy provided the incentive, LLMs have provided the infrastructure. The marginal cost of producing convincing, syntactically clean, and confident-sounding text has collapsed. This has turned the "manual process" of grifting into an industrial one.

We now see an "AI grift economy" where fake gurus recycle prompts to sell courses on how to make money using AI, and "thought leaders" generate seventeen-paragraph posts that contain no actual information. The danger is that this output passes the basic "sounds about right" test, which is increasingly the only test applied by both distribution channels and exhausted readers.

The Ecosystem of "Bullshit Jobs"

This trend extends beyond social media and into the very structure of corporate employment. The late anthropologist David Graeber coined the term "bullshit jobs" to describe roles that produce nothing of obvious social value—roles in middle management, consulting, and corporate communications where the primary output is artifacts for other people producing artifacts.

This creates a "steady-state ecosystem" of professional output: slide decks for slide decks, and strategy documents about strategy documents. When the connection to a real customer or a real problem goes slack, the only remaining metric for success is the performance of work.

One professional shared a soul-crushing experience where a colleague used an LLM to generate a nonsensical pitch deck full of fake data. Despite the lack of mathematical integrity, management bought the idea immediately. The lesson learned was stark: questioning the bullshit was seen as a lack of alignment with "management language," rather than a defense of the truth.

The Human Cost: The "Embarrassable" Professional

For those who refuse to participate in this charade—the engineers who insist on shipping things that work, the writers who insist on knowing their subject—the market has been tilted against them. The tradeoff between productivity and visibility is a zero-sum game: every minute spent advertising a project is a minute not spent improving it.

However, there is a strategic advantage to remaining honest: the capacity to be embarrassed.

Because the bullshitter has no relationship with the truth, they cannot truly be embarrassed by a mistake; they simply pivot to a new performance. The honest professional, who makes claims they actually mean, remains vulnerable. In a market that has stopped penalizing shamelessness, this vulnerability is actually a marker of good faith. It is the only remaining signal that a person is operating with integrity.

Navigating the Bullshittery

While the system currently rewards the loudest claim over the truest one, there are ways to push back:

For the Consumer

• Reward Substance: Explicitly signal when you encounter careful, well-sourced work. The system is starving honest creators of the signal it overpays bullshitters with.
• Direct Support: Whenever possible, pay creators, engineers, and artists directly, bypassing the platform extraction layers that prioritize engagement over quality.

For the Creator

• Refuse the Performance: Resist the pressure to ship the "vibe-coded" announcement or the hollow thought-leadership post.
• Embrace the "I Don't Know": Maintaining a principled stance and admitting ignorance when appropriate serves as a lighthouse for other honest actors.

Ultimately, the rise of the bullshittery is not a force of nature, but the result of a series of decisions made by platforms, employers, and consumers. While the path to a livelihood for the honest professional has become harder, the value of actual competence remains the only thing that can actually solve real-world problems. The performance may win the funding round, but only the substance can sustain the product.