Bullshit has always existed, but modern life has refined it into a near professional discipline. In offices, institutions and public discourse, people increasingly speak in ways that sound meaningful while being anchored to nothing. The performance of insight has overtake the practice of it. Bullshit succeeds because it imitates the structure of truth while carefully avoiding its weight.
Its language is recognisable. Sentences stretch beyond necessity. Certainty appears without evidence. Abstractions step in where specificity would expose the absence of substance. People elevate minor experiences into sweeping lessons and rely on tone to compensate for what content cannot carry.
Bullshit thrives in environments where image outruns competence and where saying something impressive matters more than saying something useful.
The conditions that enable this are systemic. Institutions reward confidence over depth. Audiences skim rather than read. Emotional resonance is valued above intellectual accuracy. In a crowded information environment, ambiguity becomes a feature rather than a flaw.
Bullshit spreads not because it persuades but because it demands very little from either the speaker or the listener.
This diffusion has consequences. Real expertise becomes harder to distinguish from imitation. Younger professionals internalise the idea that eloquence can substitute for competence. Organisations mistake polished rhetoric for strategy and gradually lose their capacity for honest internal discussion. In cultures shaped by bullshit, the signal collapses into the noise until even intelligent people begin to echo phrases that feel right rather than ideas that are right.
But if bullshit has become an art, so has the ability to recognise it. The tell-tale signs are surprisingly consistent.
How to recognise bullshit
Bullshit is not revealed by tone but by structure. Five markers expose it immediately.
First, there is the confidence evidence mismatch: bold claims supported by almost nothing. The style is assertive, the foundation fragile. When tone outruns proof, the substance is suspect.
Second, bullshit hides inside a vocabulary fog. It prefers inflated language because precise words would reveal the thinness of the underlying idea. If a sentence becomes clearer when shortened, the longer version existed to conceal, not explain.
Third, watch for lesson disproportion. A trivial event is inflated into a philosophy. A coincidence becomes a revelation. The conclusion is always larger than the experience that supposedly inspired it.
Fourth, bullshit relies on the emotional shortcut. It seeks to make you feel something quickly so you will not examine it slowly. When sentiment arrives before reasoning, scepticism is prudent.
Fifth, bullshit avoids accountability. It remains unfalsifiable. No trade-offs are acknowledged, no responsibility assigned, no scenario presented in which the claim might be wrong. It survives by never being specific enough to be challenged.
Once these patterns become visible, the spell weakens. The language stops feeling profound and starts reading like choreography. Ambiguity looks like evasion. Confidence sounds like theatre. What once felt insightful reveals itself as air.
The persistence of bullshit is often blamed on dishonesty, but insecurity is the deeper driver. Many people fear being ordinary.
Bullshit offers a shortcut to significance: a way to borrow the tone of wisdom without enduring the discipline required to become wise. In that sense, bullshit is less a cultural failure than a psychological crutch.
This comes with a quieter cost. Over time, bullshit erodes trust not only in institutions but in language itself. When words are used to impress rather than illuminate, they stop functioning as tools for understanding. They become packaging. They become costume and eventually, people stop listening.
There is a final irony: even analysing bullshit carries the danger of performing it. A piece attempting to expose the pattern can easily slip into the pattern….polished, persuasive, but not necessarily transformative. The boundary between clarity and cleverness is thinner than most writers admit.
This reflection might be an attempt at honesty, or it may simply be another carefully crafted piece of bullshit. You will judge the difference.
Innovation always arrives with the confidence of inevitability. Advertising embraced every wave, convinced that more data, better targeting and new tools would sharpen persuasion and elevate the craft. Instead, something stranger happened. The technology advanced. The imagination retreated. With every breakthrough, the work felt a little smaller.
For two decades, the industry treated innovation as progress. Programmatic promised efficiency. Personalisation promised relevance. Social platforms promised connection. AI now promises creativity at scale. Yet each leap brought an unintended consequence: the slow erosion of the qualities that once made persuasion work at all. Automation delivered reach but drained attention. Personalisation increased precision but produced uniformity. Infinite content created abundance but flattened originality.
The turning point came when advertising stopped paying for attention and started paying for access. Once platforms controlled distribution, the purpose of advertising shifted. Its job was no longer to persuade a human being. Its job was to feed a machine.
In that moment, creativity ceased to be a competitive advantage and became a variable in an optimisation loop. Innovation didn’t accelerate originality. It standardised it. In a system calibrated for predictable performance, surprise becomes a liability and replication becomes the path of least resistance.
Economic incentives deepened the problem. Platforms captured distribution, data and value. Agencies adapted by serving the metrics that platforms dictated. Clients, pressured by volatility, demanded certainty and measurable outcomes. Creativity became something to justify rather than something to pursue. The work bent itself around what could be tracked, not what could be felt. The industry once prized ideas that lived in culture. It now mass-produces content that survives in a feed.
Behaviourally, the consequences are severe. Humans respond to tension, novelty and the unexpected. Algorithms reward what has performed before. When a system selects for the familiar, it punishes the original. Advertising shifted from making meaning to manufacturing micro-interactions that register as activity but rarely accumulate as persuasion. The ambition of the work shrank to match the duration of a swipe.
Culturally, infinite content did not expand possibility. It converged it. Templates spread faster than ideas. Trends collapsed into hours. Brands that once shaped culture now orbit the same reference points, moving in sync with the same logic of the platforms they depend on. In a landscape where anything can be produced instantly, almost nothing feels crafted.
AI arrives as the next accelerant. It offers astonishing ease but amplifies the worst instincts of the existing system: speed over substance, scale over intention and optimisation over imagination. If deployed within the same incentive architecture, it will not revive the craft. It will accelerate its dissolution. The industry will not drown in bad ideas. It will drown in endless competent ones.
The uncomfortable truth is that advertising did not decline because innovation failed. It declined because innovation succeeded in a system that rewarded efficiency, predictability and standardisation. It became frictionless. It became measurable. It became scalable. But persuasion has never been any of those things. Persuasion is human, slow, emotional and fundamentally resistant to automation. When everything becomes efficient, nothing feels meaningful.
Advertising used to be a cultural force. It did not have to lose its soul. It simply entered an economy designed to value access over attention, repetition over originality and metrics over meaning.
Once the platforms became the intermediaries, the outcome was not just predictable but unavoidable. Justifying it was easy: the audience had moved, and the click-through rates looked reassuring. But numbers can rise even as the work diminishes.
It is a bleak irony that one of the world’s most inventive creative industries lost so much of its creative inventiveness in the name of progress
