Humanity has had a Stone age and an Iron age; an age of Sail, and an age of Industry. Many have successfully argued that we are currently in the age of Information, and the eventual and tragic conclusion to the age of Information under capitalism is an age of weaponised misinformation - an age of Bullshit.
To be absolutely clear, 'bullshit' is not merely the act of lying. It is the wilful and malicious twisting of the truth and / or application of mistruth by someone to further their goals, or save their skin. Bullshit is not just the presence of a lie, it's a complete disregard for the facts, even when confronted with them.
Bullshit is Kelly Anne Conway talking about alternative facts when comparing the numbers at Trump's inauguration to Obama's. Bullshit is Boris Johnson travelling round in a bus promising 350 million a week to the NHS post-brexit, and then distancing himself from it the second the leave vote came through. Bullshit is Jo Swinson claiming her party could have gotten a majority, purely to ratfuck Corbyn out of a huge chunk of anti-tory votes at the last election.
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The problem of bullshit is ultimately a problem stemming from capitalism. Bullshit is rewarded at the highest tier of business by investment in insane tech ideas that work only in the minds of modern snake-oil salesmen, able to trick investors out of their inherited wealth to fund an e-cigarette that measures people's skulls.
Billions of units of western currencies are funneled through this borderline wealth-laundering scheme, with an alarming number of these companies never even running at a profit, or eventually folding having spent the investor's money while failing to deliver a working product.
(If you want to see an example of this in action, listen to literally any episode of Trashfuture).
Because of the insane financial success and inflated stock valuations of these companies, bullshit is proven to be the most lucrative form of business. You don't need to actually be good at your job, you just need to convince the next level up that you're promotable by abusing the people under you. You don't need to have good ideas, they just need to sound successful while you take the credit, and then distance yourself when it all goes wrong. The business doesn't need to be sustainable, it just needs to make money now, and then when it doesn't, you dump it and move on to the next fad.
Thus the modern management culture of 25 year olds with no idea how to do a job, attempting to oversee people who have done the actual labour since before they were born, and fucking up entire industries to maximise the amount of short-term cash they can make.
Chief among the bullshit factories producing these people is of course Eton, the breeding ground for most of the current crop of Tory bullshitters. They specialise in raising an individual not to have any skills of their own, other than the ability to convince others that they are the right person to lead. They represent the absolute zenith of capitalist disregard for the value of labour.
Their only skill is bullshit, and they wield it liberally and constantly. And they are enabled in their delusional fantasies of what the public 'really thinks' by an entire industry of statisticians ready to twist statistics into whatever model is needed.
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During the May government, the tories fired the statistics company it hired to prove that brexit would be a success, when it reported that it would categorically not be. Proving only that the company who wanted to replace them would have to be willing to bend the truth to stay employed, and opening the door to a feedback loop of the government bullshitting, and then the lie being reinforced by statisticians willing to bullshit in exchange for government cash.
None of them are called to account by the press any more either, because the press now suffers a similar problem - journalism graduates who have no practical experience of any kind of investigative journalism, and instead are essentially well paid bloggers rewording whatever comes up on twitter, or quoting whatever the 'senior downing street source' has handed to Laura Kuenssberg.
(Also as a side note, political consequences have not really existed since
David Cameron destroyed the concept of a scandal by sticking his dick in
a beheaded pig).
The absolute state of Journalism and management training at universities is a reflection of the aspirational, middle-class focused attitudes of the student loan boom of the mid-nineties.
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I have to put a disclaimer here that this is not an anti-intellectual rant. Higher education and study are vital to the progress of the humanities and our broader understanding of the human condition. Tuition should be free, loans should be grants, and everyone should have the right to higher education.
But universities are currently caught in the widening gulf between the role of a vocational college, and that of a place of learning and inquiry. At university, the reward comes from writing about something rather than learning how to do something. Again, that is a fine ideal in terms of intellectual inquiry, the arts and humanities - the idea being that you study, you learn, and you go away and practice in your own time.
In the case of people who are studying something they are passionate about, this works incredibly well.
But the employment landscape is such that now, you need a degree to get a job. Young people are effectively forced to go through university in order to avoid the remaining jobs, which are underpaid and rife with abuse. So instead of 'wasting' time at a vocational college learning how to do an occupation, young people take out a loan to go to a university to write essays about the subject instead.
And anyone who has been at university knows of the people on their course who wrote their essays not to explore ideas, but to convince their lecturers that they had done enough work. Or even with people who were passionate about their subject, tweaking the arguments of an essay not because the truth supports it, but to appease the lecturer you're writing for.
Bullshit, in other words.
More and more space on universities' campuses and syllabuses are being dedicated to these pseudo-occupational courses. Courses where students are suckered in with the promise of learning (for example) journalism, only to have modules covering the history of it, the controversies surrounding it, the implications of it and the social roles of it - anything but the practical instruction in how to do it.
Again, I want to reiterate that this is not a rant against universities. They are fantastic, intellectual institutions and everyone should have the right to attend one.
But they're not vocational training, nor should they be sold as such. And yet they are, by the new breed of administrator attracted to universities by ever increasing tuition fees. It's more bullshit, built to trick young people into abstract learning instead of practical training, and in the case of journalism, it's causing an immense skill drain at the national level.
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The first episode of the latest season of Hassan Minhaj's Patriot Act on Netflix covers the decline of local news in the US, but also reveals the specialist nature of local papers as the source of most investigative journalism, at least in the US. They have a long tradition of seasoned reporters passing on their skills to the next generation through paid, in-work training.
Whereas monolithic national papers have little to no contact with their staff, and just pull in people who have the right degrees. Maybe at some point in the past they would have recruited smalltown reporters with a name, but the requirement of a degree has drastically weakened that track. Investigative skills never get passed on, and as long as the ad revenue is going up, there's never any reason for the editor of a national oulet to question the lack of substantial content.
The job market demands degrees, and universities sell their degree courses as vocational training when in a lot of cases, the students leave after three years of abstract inquiry with no practical skills other than how to bullshit. Again, abstract inquiry is not the problem. Universities trying to cash in on tuition fees by bullshitting about it as if it's as valid as vocational training in preparing someone for a job is a huge problem.
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Not that a lot of modern jobs need to exist. Both Buckminster Fuller
in the past, and the author David Graeber more recently have written on the
nature of bullshit jobs (Graeber's words, not Buckminster Fuller's) - jobs which don't need to exist, serve no meaningful purpose toward the betterment of society, and exist seemingly because the alternative is high unemployment statistics.
But we have an excess population that far outweighs the amount of labour
that actually needs to be carried out. Most people's jobs are not going to change their company, let alone society. And even if someone realises that their job is bullshit, most people will nevertheless defend their job because under capitalism, the
alternative is to starve.
Advertising also magnifies the unwillingness of journalists to call out bullshit. National papers rely primarily on funding from advertisers, who can threaten to pull it if they fail to fall in line editorially. Local businesses however need the papers as a platform to get the word out affectively to local customers, so have far less influence over them.
Advertising is raw, unfiltered bullshit in it's ascended form. We know
it's bullshit. We know it stretches the truth, often to breaking point.
And we accept it as normal because it's constant.
Just as we now accept bullshit from our politicians and their advisors as normal. We accept that journalists won't tell us the whole story as normal, because nobody's training them to and their revenue streams incentivise them not to rock the boat. We know advertising is bullshit. And we accept not only that everything is bullshit; but that in order to survive, we ourselves need to join in the bullshit.
It's bullshit all the way down.
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