The Gist: On (and On) Bullshit
I have been thinking about Bullshit, in its official categorisation.
In his short and easy essay “On Bullshit”, the euphoniously-named American philosopher Harry J. Frankfurt posited that a person could say things while neither caring if what they said was true or lies.
(The Internet Archive has the whole 24 pages of the essay up and it is well worth a few minutes’ read.)
A liar seeks to deceive. They know what is true and are actively trying to hide that truth from their audience.
The truth teller is trying to convey the truth to their audience.
But the Bullshitter? The Bullshitter neither knows nor cares if what they say is true. They just want to say something or other and then get back to doing as they please.
We are, unquestionably, in the Age of the Bullshitter now.
Our economy is in an investment bubble for a technology which is literally only capable of bullshitting without understanding truth or lies.
It just delivers output, with no mind behind it and no way of imagining the mind in front of it.
The political world, from geopolitics to local, is not yet 100% Bullshitting, but the tide is so relentless- and so corrosive- that it certainly feels that way sometimes.
I hardly have to gesture at the US’ degeneration to make that point.
But look at the U.K. too.
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And here our Government has, in the last year, taken a harder and harder turn towards Bullshitting as it simply does as it pleases and says whatever, with the two increasingly uncoupled.
Yesterday they had a Minister again claiming the PSC becoming an ID card was voluntary. It doesn’t matter that they also have already announced a plan to require a PSC/MyGovID enrolment for the EU’s Digital Wallet plan.
The Minister didn’t care if you believed them. They just said whatever for the form of it and then ploughed on.
Also yesterday, noyb, the Max Schrems-led group in Austria revealed that the Irish Government had proposed - as part of the plans for the EU Presidency- that the rights of big AI companies to collect data on people should be recognised as a higher right than humans’ data protection rights.
The Irish Government didn’t lie to us about this plan. They didn’t bother. They didn’t even tell us this was government policy. They just told the rest of the EU.
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Speaking of putting AI companies' rights above those of living citizens, faced with energy prices soaring and data centres eating up over a fifth of all the juice in the country, the Govt paid KPMG €100k for a report which made such absurd claims about the employment dependant on them that it could have just been published as an appendix to Mr Frankfurt’s essay.
Amongst innumerable absurdities, up at the front of the report it claimed that “876,000 jobs (32% of national employment)” were “underpinned” by Ireland’s 72 data centres.
But at the same time, down the back of the report, in a Appendix, it acknowledged that their ongoing employment contribution to the nation was 9,500 jobs.
This week, doing God’s work, Fearon, Seán, Bresnihan, Patrick and Brodie, Patrick , (as they are cited) released “How we all pay for Big Tech: The social, economic, and environmental costs of data centres in Ireland.” Amongst its own work they address the KPMG report’s giant gap between 9.5k of people working in data centres that are eating over 20% of our power, and the claimed hundreds of thousands of JOBS! it described as “underpinned” by them.
TheJournal.ie gives us a flavour: “An example given in the study is that “the activities of surgeons and paediatricians” at a hospital “are assumed to be dependent” on a data centre if it is located within 50km of one.”
I guess anyone's job can be underpinned by a data centre if you define underpinned as including "drove past it one day".
The Minister claiming that all the doctors in Dublin couldn’t do their jobs without data centres within 50k of them didn’t really care if the listener believed that. They just needed some old Bullshit to say, to avoid addressing the truth of the consequences of their policies.
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Bullshitters, as Mr Frankfurt warns, are in a way more dangerous to public discourse than liars. Liars are laser-focused on reality and must know the truth if they are going to successfully deceive the listener. Bullshitters don’t care, and so don’t even have to acknowledge reality.
Take Jim O’Callaghan. As solicitors declined to work for the pay he was offering, the number of Legal Aid Certs issued fell from 10,277 to 702. But he asserted the courts were still working “effectively”. What did that mean? Nothing. It wasn’t meant to have meaning. It was just Bullshit, like the meaningless "underpinning" of data centres for 34% of all of Ireland's jobs.
Voters know when they are being served Bullshit. We all do, in our daily lives. And it is really annoying. But worse is when power is being wielded, degrading your own life personally and the person doing it just Bullshits instead of acknowledging reality. Think of the frustration that creates.
Which brings us to this poll:
"One of the questions asked whether our social and political institutions were worth preserving and improving or if people could not help thinking “just let them all burn”: 41 per cent leaned towards letting them burn."
