what we talk about when we talk about bullshit

Before we can understand the economics of bullshit, we must first grasp what distinguishes it from mere lies or errors. Harry Frankfurt’s seminal distinction remains crucial: bullshit is “something that is designed to impress but that was constructed absent direct concern for the truth.”1 The bullshitter, unlike the liar, doesn’t care whether what they’re saying is true or false. They care only about the effect their words produce.

G.A. Cohen deepened this analysis by identifying two distinct species. Frankfurt-bullshit concerns the speaker’s attitude: their indifference to truth. Cohen-bullshit concerns the statement itself: its “unclarifiable unclarity.” These are statements that seem meaningful but resist any attempt at clarification. When someone says “We need to leverage our synergies for transformative impact,” try asking what that means. The resulting explanation will likely be more bullshit.2

Daniel Dennett’s concept of “deepities” provides another lens. These are statements with two readings: one true but trivial (“Love is just a word”), another profound but false (“Love is merely linguistic”). The ambiguity allows speakers to retreat to the trivial reading when challenged while benefiting from the impressive aura of the profound reading.3

What unites these forms is their function in the attention economy. In a world where capturing and monetizing attention has become the primary business model, bullshit serves as a peculiarly effective currency.

the attention economy’s appetite for emptiness

I’ve been writing about bullshit, pseudo-profundity, and post-depth for some time now, documenting the transformation of wisdom into commodity, complexity into consumable portions.4 But to understand why bullshit has become valuable, we must examine its relationship to what Chris Hayes calls our “epoch-defining transition”: the commodification of attention itself.

In “The Sirens’ Call,” Hayes argues that attention has become to the 21st century what labor was to the 19th: a resource extracted from us, from which we are increasingly alienated.5 We’ve torn down the boundary between public and private in about a decade, creating what D. Graham Burnett calls “human fracking”: the systematic extraction and monetization of human attention by digital platforms.6

This “human fracking” operates through what Burnett identifies as decades of military-industrial research aimed at sustaining vigilance on screens. Research now weaponized to capture and hold our attention for profit. The attention economy doesn’t just want our focus; it wants to extract every possible moment of consciousness, turning our deepest neurological structures against us.7

In this extractive landscape, bullshit serves a crucial function. It provides content that captures attention without delivering substance. It’s the perfect fuel for an economy that profits from engagement rather than enlightenment. Consider Donald Trump’s signature style—what researchers have called “authentic bullshit.”8 His statements often lack not just truth but even a stable relationship with meaning itself. “Nobody knows more about technology than me.” “I’m the least racist person you’ll ever meet.” These aren’t lies in Frankfurt’s sense because they show no concern for truth whatsoever. They’re pure performance, optimized for attention capture rather than information transfer.

The attention economy rewards this kind of discourse because it generates engagement without resolution. A clear, truthful statement can be evaluated and dismissed. Bullshit, by contrast, creates an interpretive vacuum that draws continued attention. We engage not because we’re learning but because we’re trying to decode what, if anything, is being communicated. As Hayes notes, we’re like Odysseus hearing the sirens: compelled by something that promises meaning but delivers only captivation.9 Yet in the classical story, the protagonist ties himself, enduring suffering for the greater good. What’s our equivalent? Is there one? These answers escape me.

This isn’t accidental. The attention economy has systematically selected for bullshit over truth because bullshit is more extractable. Truth educates and liberates; bullshit captivates and captures. The $500 billion management consulting industry doesn’t exist despite its meaninglessness but because of it. Each incomprehensible framework requires another workshop, another engagement, another billing cycle.

bullshit as the essential fuel of attention extraction

The relationship between the bullshit economy and the attention economy isn’t merely correlative: it’s foundationally causal. The attention economy doesn’t just benefit from bullshit; it requires it as its primary operating fuel.

Truth has a terminal quality. Once you understand something true, you can move on. Bullshit, by contrast, creates what we might call “interpretive quicksand”—the more you struggle to extract meaning, the deeper you sink into engagement. This is precisely what the attention frackers need: content that generates endless scroll without resolution.

Consider the mechanics: A clear statement can be evaluated and dismissed or accepted in seconds. But pseudo-profound bullshit creates a cognitive loop. We engage not because we’re learning but because we’re trying to decode what, if anything, is being communicated. The very “unclarifiable unclarity” that Cohen identified becomes the mechanism of capture.

This explains why, as I documented in “Post-Depth,” we see the simultaneous rise of sensationalist content and the decline in our ability to discern genuine profundity. The attention economy hasn’t just commodified our focus; it has actively cultivated our appetite for meaninglessness by making it more engaging than meaning itself.

algorithms, hallucinations, and the automation of emptiness

Artificial intelligence’s propensity for “hallucination”—generating plausible-sounding but entirely fabricated information—represents a new evolution in bullshit, one perfectly suited to the attention economy’s needs. When large language model chatbots confidently cite non-existent studies or invent historical events, we’re witnessing the automation of what was once a distinctly human vice.10

But there’s something deeper happening here. These systems have been trained on the entire corpus of human textual output—including all our bullshit. They’ve learned not just language but the patterns of empty discourse that dominate our information ecosystem. When an AI produces a “thought leadership” article indistinguishable from human-generated corporate communications, it reveals how mechanical our supposed insights have become.

What I’ve called the “plasticization of profundity” reaches its apotheosis here. Just as microplastics now contaminate every ecosystem on Earth, algorithmic bullshit contaminates every information stream. The sensationalist, the pseudo-profound, the artificially urgent—these aren’t bugs in the attention economy’s system. They’re features, optimized through billions of iterations to maximize extraction while minimizing nutrition.

What Burnett calls the “intimacy economy” emerges here: AI systems designed to capture attention through pseudo-personal engagement. These “totally algorithmic pseudo-persons” are, as he notes, “sensitive, competent, and infinitely patient,” offering the simulacrum of meaningful interaction while serving the human fracking apparatus.11 In a podcast where I was interviewed about conversation and AI,12 I proposed that the great breakthrough of Large Language Models was making us think and feel that they’re similar to us.

Deep fakes push this further still, creating not just textual but visual bullshit. The proliferation of these technologies reveals that we’ve built an entire technological infrastructure optimized for producing convincing unreality. In the attention economy, compelling falsehood often outperforms mundane truth.

the industrial scale of meaninglessness

The scale of the bullshit economy defies comprehension. The global management consulting market alone reaches somewhere between $300–500 billion annually.13 Add the personal development industry at roughly $40–50 billion14 and corporate training at $160–360 billion15, and we’re looking at a trillion-dollar economy built substantially on discourse “constructed absent direct concern for truth.”

These aren’t discrete markets but an interconnected ecosystem optimized for attention capture rather than truth delivery. Management consultants package common sense in proprietary frameworks not because complexity clarifies but because it justifies fees and extends engagement. A while ago I was invited to be part of a panel of supposed specialists who would give their opinion about an important strategic business decision. The slide deck shown to us had been prepared by one of the big consultancies. We panelists had largely not met or known each other. The interesting thing was that almost all of us coincided in our analysis: the roadmap being proposed was not coherent with the ethos, the will, of what the board wanted. In some cases it was not only incoherent but contradictory. I don’t know what the fee was for that deck but I bet the figure would have made me drool, like Homer Simpson over a fresh beer or a steamy burger.

Personal development gurus repackage ancient wisdom as revolutionary breakthroughs because novelty captures attention better than tradition. You have to listen to Helen Lewis’s masterfully written and edited BBC podcast series “The New Gurus” to truly grasp the scope of this phenomenon.

LinkedIn has evolved into perhaps the most visible marketplace for this attention-optimized emptiness. Every mundane observation must be transformed into a “powerful lesson” because the platform’s algorithms reward engagement over substance. This very publication is proof of this. I have people liking and commenting on the essays and I know they couldn’t have read them, because most require a subscription, even if free. The commute becomes a meditation on journey versus destination. Coffee-making transforms into a metaphor for percolating success. This isn’t mere annoyance: it’s a sophisticated economy where social capital accrues to those most fluent in attention-grabbing meaninglessness.

The platform’s algorithm doesn’t distinguish between profound and pseudo-profound. It only measures dwell time, clicks, reactions. And here’s the crucial insight: bullshit consistently outperforms truth in these metrics. A post declaring “Failure is just success in progress!” generates more engagement than careful analysis precisely because its meaninglessness invites projection, interpretation, and response. The algorithm learns, adapts, and soon the entire ecosystem optimizes for maximum meaninglessness.

why we pay for what we know is empty

The research reveals something disturbing: we’re largely aware we’re trafficking in bullshit. Studies by Littrell and Fugelsang (2024) identify a “bullshit blind spot”—we recognize meaninglessness in others while producing and purchasing it ourselves.16 This isn’t simple hypocrisy but reveals how bullshit serves essential functions in our attention-scarce, extraction-based environment.

More troubling still is how prolonged exposure to bullshit degrades our capacity for discrimination itself. Just as a diet of ultra-processed foods recalibrates our palates until whole foods taste bland, a diet of pseudo-profundity makes genuine depth feel boring, inaccessible, or irrelevant. We develop what might be called “semantic diabetes”: an inability to properly metabolize meaning, leaving us dependent on the artificial sweeteners of deepities and empty rhetoric.

Adela Cortina touches on this phenomenon in Borja Hermoso’s La Conversación Infinita (The Infinite Conversation),17 and the Portuguese philosopher André Barata explores similar territory in E se Parássemos de Sobreviver? (What If We Stopped Surviving?),18 among many others. If we’re increasingly consuming content in bite-sized portions—TikToks, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, tweets and other posts, memes—and we think like we read, watch and talk, then it keeps getting harder to think in “long form,” forming well-grounded opinions and ideas, learning to be positively suspicious without feeding arrogance and starving curiosity.

In an economy designed to fracture our attention into monetizable fragments, bullshit offers cognitive efficiency. When faced with what Hayes calls “the steady dings of notifications… the 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer… the hundreds of unread emails,” we often choose the pseudo-profound over the genuinely complex because it provides the feeling of engagement without the work of understanding.19 A weekend workshop on “radical transformation” feels more achievable than the slow, difficult work of genuine development.

Organizations deploy bullshit as a kind of complexity management system. In contexts where genuine communication might surface uncomfortable truths or require difficult decisions, empty language provides safe passage. “We need to leverage our synergies” sounds better than “someone’s getting fired.” The expensive consultant’s report demonstrates action without requiring change.

The attention economy has also transformed bullshit into a signaling mechanism. Those who can seamlessly deploy trending jargon demonstrate their engagement with contemporary discourse. The ability to produce compelling bullshit becomes a form of cultural capital, opening doors and creating opportunities.

the real cost of counterfeit meaning

The price extends far beyond consultancy fees. When our information diet consists primarily of bullshit, we develop what might be called “semantic malnutrition”: a degraded capacity for meaningful communication. Young professionals can only discuss struggles through “imposter syndrome.” Managers respond to human complexity with “agile methodologies.” Grief becomes a “healing journey.”

We’re creating what I’ve elsewhere called “emotional bureaucrats”: people who process even their deepest experiences through the language of optimization and performance.20 In an attention economy that rewards performance over truth, we lose not just the ability but the incentive to speak authentically.

As Burnett warns, “our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.”21 The human fracking apparatus doesn’t just extract our attention; it reshapes our capacity for genuine thought and expression.

Most troubling, our collective tolerance for bullshit may be undermining democratic discourse itself. When citizens can’t distinguish between pseudo-profound political rhetoric and genuine policy discussion, when “alternative facts” compete with verified reality for attention and belief, the very possibility of informed decision-making erodes.

reclaiming meaning in the attention economy

The question isn’t whether we can eliminate bullshit. Frankfurt was right that some amount is probably inevitable. The question is whether we can develop what Burnett calls “attention activism” in an economy that profits from meaninglessness.22

This means cultivating practices that resist the pull of pseudo-profundity and the extractive logic of human fracking. It means learning to value silence over empty words, precision over comfortable vagueness, genuine uncertainty over false certainty. It means creating what Burnett calls “attention sanctuaries”—spaces in our organizations, relationships, and media diets where bullshit carries cost rather than reward.23

Some promising developments suggest change is possible. The emergence of attention activism as a movement, the creation of sanctuary guidelines for classrooms and homes, the growing awareness that our minds are being “fracked” for profit—these represent what Burnett calls “new forms of resistance” to the commodification of consciousness.

the market correction we need

The bullshit economy persists because we’ve made meaninglessness profitable in the attention marketplace. Every click on vacuous content, every share of a pseudo-profound quote, every dollar spent on empty consulting frameworks reinforces a system designed to extract value from human consciousness while returning nothing of substance.

But markets respond to demand. If we collectively decided to stop paying—with our money, our attention, our social capital—for elaborate meaninglessness, the supply would diminish. The professional who speaks plainly, the consultant who admits limitations, the thought leader who values truth over virality: these feel radical precisely because they violate the extractive economy’s rules.

I’ve noticed something in my own professional spaces. Small groups meeting informally, trying to make sense of real challenges without borrowed language. Long-form writing that resists the pull of attention-optimizing emptiness. Conversations that tolerate uncertainty rather than rushing to pseudo-profound conclusions. What Burnett might call informal attention sanctuaries, where human fracking finds no purchase.

At current market rates, genuine understanding remains undervalued. But perhaps that’s beginning to change. In an era of AI hallucinations and deep fakes, of populist simplicities and corporate obfuscations, the ability to distinguish meaning from meaninglessness becomes not just intellectually but economically valuable.

The question before us isn’t whether bullshit will continue to exist. It will. The question is whether we’ll continue to pay such a high price for it, not just economically but cognitively and culturally. In an attention economy that profits from distraction, perhaps the most radical act is simply meaning what we say and demanding the same from others. But this is treacherous because it may enter the same kind of argument used by self-help gurus or populist politicians: “it’s just my truth.” The solution might be a new shared morality, which is a challenge in this globalized, fracked, and polarized world. The same characters that use bullshit are undermining the procedural, moral and relational consensus that took so much loss, suffering and effort to stabilize.

As Hayes reminds us, we need to tie ourselves to the mast like Odysseus, creating structures and practices that protect us from the sirens’ call of empty engagement. The bullshit economy thrives on human fracking. Perhaps it’s time to close the faucet.

The attention economy requires interpretation without end because that’s how it sustains extraction without limit. Every deepity, every piece of corporate jargon, every AI hallucination is designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, engaging—never satisfied, never finished, never free. Understanding this is the first step toward resistance. Choosing clarity over cleverness, substance over sensation, truth over trending. These become revolutionary acts in an economy built on their opposite.

  1. Frankfurt, H. (2005). “On Bullshit.” Princeton University Press. ↩︎
  2. Cohen, G.A. (2002). “Deeper into Bullshit” in “The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt.” MIT Press. ↩︎
  3. Dennett, D. (2009). “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.” W. W. Norton & Company. ↩︎
  4. See “Post-Depth: The Plasticization of Profundity” and related essays in this collection. ↩︎
  5. Hayes, C. (2025). “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” Penguin Press. ↩︎
  6. Burnett, D.G. As discussed on “The Ezra Klein Show” episode “Your Mind Is Being Fracked” (May 31, 2024) and in various writings on attention activism. ↩︎
  7. Burnett notes that “about a quarter of the U.S. military’s research projects went into figuring out how long people could stay focused on screens” for decades, creating the foundation for today’s attention economy. We only needed to make screens omnipresent, and we have. ↩︎
  8. Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). “Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking.” Journal of Personality, 88(2), 185–200. ↩︎
  9. Hayes uses Homer’s image of Odysseus tied to the mast to illustrate our relationship to digital media: we know it’s harmful but feel powerless to resist. ↩︎
  10. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. ↩︎
  11. Burnett, D.G. (2025). “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” The New Yorker, discussing AI as the attention economy’s “killer app.” ↩︎
  12. “Conversa com Rui Pedro Paiva” (in Portuguese), Bosch Portugal podcast. Available at: https://youtu.be/FXYvzQsfqpI ↩︎
  13. Management consulting market estimates vary widely, from $303.10 billion in 2024 (Maximize Market Research) to $307.62 billion in 2022 (Globe Newswire), with the U.S. market alone at $395.9 billion in 2025 (IBISWorld). ↩︎
  14. The global personal development market was valued between $40.1–50.42 billion in 2022–2024, with projections reaching $67–86 billion by the early 2030s. ↩︎
  15. Corporate training market valuations range from $163.5 billion to $361.5 billion in 2023, depending on methodology and scope. ↩︎
  16. Littrell, S., & Fugelsang, J. (2024). “The Bullshit Blind Spot: The Roles of Overconfidence and Perceived Information Literacy in Bullshit Detection.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. ↩︎
  17. Hermoso, B. (2023). La Conversación Infinita: Encuentros con la escritura y el pensamiento. Siruela. ↩︎
  18. Barata, A. (2018). E se Parássemos de Sobreviver? Pequeno livro para pensar e agir contra a ditadura do tempo. Documenta. ↩︎
  19. Hayes describes the overwhelming nature of our digital environment as creating conditions fundamentally at odds with human flourishing. ↩︎
  20. See “Emotional Bureaucrats” for a fuller exploration of how we’ve internalized administrative logic into our most intimate psychological processes. ↩︎
  21. Burnett, quoted in Hayes, “The Sirens’ Call,” on how the attention economy undermines human flourishing at the neurological level. ↩︎
  22. Burnett and his colleagues at the Strother School of Radical Attention advocate for creating “attention sanctuaries” where different modes of attending can be cultivated and protected. ↩︎
  23. Burnett, D.G., & Mitchell, E. (2025). “Attention sanctuaries: Social practice guidelines and emergent strategies in attention activism.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. ↩︎
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