GoKawiilA few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece and it is the result of years of watching the same pattern play out in different industries, and sort of running out of patience. If you are one of the people doing honest, careful work in a field that no longer rewards it, this post is for you. However, if you are one of the people I am about to describe, then you probably already know who you are and you might want to keep on reading nevertheless. The tl;dr is at the bottom.
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.
A market that punishes substance
The unspoken contract behind most professional life used to be as simple as learning how to do something, doing it well and gradually developing a reputation among people who could tell the difference. Over time, that reputation would then translate into work, money, and a degree of stability. It was a slow process, that sometimes was unfair, and that was never as meritocratic as its proponents claimed, but at least the basic shape of it made sense. Doing a good job was, on average, an advantage.
That contract, however, has been broken in ways that are hard to comprehend, let alone ignore these days. The dominant mechanism for distributing professional opportunity is no longer slow reputation, it is algorithmic visibility. The algorithm, howeveer, does not particularly care whether you are good at your job, it only cares whether your message is engaging enough to spread fast and far.
Researchers studying the so-called attention economy have been making this point for years, but one specific area that is particularly interesting is the one about politicians. A 2024 analysis of more than 6,500 U.S. state legislators found that distributing low-credibility information correlated positively with attention on the major platforms. In other words, being less reliable was, on average, a winning strategy for getting noticed. The same dynamic applies, in a less visible but more pervasive way, to anyone who has to build an audience to find work. The people who optimise for being correct are competing on an unfair playing field against people who optimise for being heard, and the result of this is a slow inversion of incentives.
The careful professional, who takes a week to think through a problem, who refuses to claim expertise they do not have, and who writes one in-depth researched post about a specific topic, gets out-competed and buried by the carnival barker who will claim any expertise that fits the trending topic, and who fires off five posts a day, each of them a slightly different rephrasing of the same content-free observation. I am not arguing that honest, competent work has disappeared, but I am arguing that the incentive structure no longer points toward it, and that this fact has consequences that compound over time.
Professional-class grift
... continue reading