The Rise of the Bullshittery and the Cost of Performance
I read The Rise of the Bullshittery by Marius and it hit a nerve for all the right reasons.
The post argues that we have built a professional environment where appearing competent is often rewarded faster than being competent. That is not a new human problem, but the piece makes a sharp case that platform economics and AI acceleration have amplified it hard.
The framing I appreciated most is the distinction between lying and bullshitting, drawing on Frankfurt’s classic point: a liar still has to care about truth enough to hide it; a bullshitter does not care whether a claim is true at all. Once you view modern “thought leadership” through that lens, a lot of what feels off about contemporary online professional culture suddenly makes sense.
What the post gets right
The strongest part of the piece is that it does not reduce everything to “bad people doing bad things.” Instead, it describes an incentives problem:
- visibility beats substance,
- engagement beats accuracy,
- confidence theatre beats craft.
That lands.
If your channels reward speed, volume, and certainty performance, then the careful engineer, writer, or researcher who says “I need a week” is structurally disadvantaged against someone posting five polished takes per day with no stake in correctness.
I also think the AI section is exactly the right level of blunt: large models did not invent professional grift, but they did collapse the marginal cost of producing plausible nonsense. That is a meaningful shift. You can now manufacture authority-shaped output at industrial scale.
Why I agree with the conclusion
The conclusion is more constructive than it first appears.
The post calls for two things that sound boring and are therefore probably correct:
- As readers, reward substance when we see it.
- As creators, refuse to perform certainty we do not have.
That second one matters to me. “Be embarrassable” is a strong test for whether someone is operating in good faith. If you can never be wrong because you never make falsifiable claims, you are not contributing clarity, you are contributing fog.
A useful mirror for AI-era engineering culture
From where I sit, this piece also maps directly onto engineering and AI teams.
We are in a moment where shipping fast is easy to signal and difficult to interrogate, while careful technical work remains slow and mostly invisible. You can now produce demos, roadmaps, and narrative velocity much faster than you can produce reliable systems. That gap is exactly where a lot of organisational confusion now lives.
So yes, I found this post both accurate and useful.
It names a pattern many people feel but struggle to describe cleanly, and it does it without pretending there is a one-line fix.
Further Reading from the same blog
If this post resonates, these are worth reading next:
- The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News — a look at visibility, moderation, and how distribution layers shape what technical communities see.
- On Generative AI Imagery — a candid post about creative compromise, constraints, and practical trade-offs around AI usage.
- A Word on Omarchy — an example of long-form, evidence-driven technical critique instead of trend-chasing commentary.
- The Small Web 101 — a practical companion piece on rebuilding healthier discovery habits outside high-noise algorithmic feeds.