The Golden Age of Bullshit

Where We Stand Two Decades After Frankfurt’s Warning

When Harry G. Frankfurt published On Bullshit in 2005, it landed like a philosophical curiosity, slim, sharp, almost mischievous. The internet was still young. The attention economy had not yet metastasized. Most people still believed, at least loosely, that facts had gravity.

Frankfurt saw through that illusion early.

His central insight remains devastatingly simple. The liar and the truth-teller are playing the same game. One tries to reveal reality, the other tries to conceal it. Both, however, acknowledge that truth exists.

The bullshitter does not.

That indifference, casual, almost lazy, has since become one of the dominant forces shaping modern life.

Looking out from 2026, Frankfurt’s work reads less like philosophy and more like a warning label we collectively ignored.

The Machine That Rewards Noise

In 2005, spreading nonsense required effort. Distribution was a gatekept privilege. Editors filtered. Producers decided. Friction existed.

Now, friction is dead.

Social media did not just democratize speech, it flattened it. Expertise and ignorance share the same stage, measured by the same metric, engagement. The algorithm does not ask if something is true. It asks if it spreads.

And bullshit spreads beautifully.

It is lighter than truth, unburdened by verification, engineered for emotional impact. Truth has to be checked, sourced, defended. Bullshit just has to feel right for half a second.

That half second is all the system needs.

The result is not just more noise, it is a complete inversion of incentives. The more detached a statement is from reality, the more flexible it becomes. And flexibility, in an attention market, is power.

Post-Truth Was Never a Phase

The term “post-truth” sounded dramatic when it first entered the mainstream. It now feels almost quaint.

What we are dealing with is not simply dishonesty. It is something more corrosive. A saturation strategy.

Flood the space with contradictions. Overwhelm the audience. Exhaust their ability to care.

When everything can be questioned, nothing feels worth defending.

This is where Frankfurt’s distinction becomes lethal. Bullshit is not trying to replace truth with a lie. It is trying to make the concept of truth irrelevant. If people stop believing that objective reality is accessible, accountability collapses.

Power fills that vacuum.

The Assembly Line of Language

Then came generative AI, and the game changed again.

We have built machines that can produce endless streams of coherent, confident language without any grounding in truth. Not maliciously, not intentionally, but structurally. These systems generate what sounds right, not what is right.

It is Frankfurt’s bullshitter, industrialized.

The scale is the shock. What once required a person now requires a prompt. What once took time now takes seconds. Entire ecosystems of content can be generated without a single moment of genuine understanding.

And because the output is fluent, polished, persuasive, it carries an authority it has not earned.

That is the danger. Not stupidity, but synthetic credibility.

When Reality Itself Becomes Optional

Frankfurt focused on speech. Words, arguments, statements.

We have moved beyond that.

Deepfakes and synthetic media have expanded bullshit into the physical world. Images lie. Videos fabricate. Audio deceives. The senses, once our fallback, are no longer reliable witnesses.

This creates a brutal asymmetry.

Truth is expensive. It requires verification, context, expertise. Bullshit is cheap. It can be generated endlessly, distributed instantly, and believed selectively.

The burden has flipped. Instead of proving something is true, we are increasingly forced to prove it is not false.

That is a much harder task.

Why We Let It Happen

Frankfurt hinted at this, almost quietly. Our tolerance for bullshit is not accidental.

It is cultural.

We have drifted toward a form of soft relativism where sincerity is mistaken for accuracy. If someone feels something strongly enough, it begins to pass as truth. “My truth” becomes a shield against correction.

It is comforting. It is also corrosive.

Because reality does not bend to sincerity. It just waits.

How to Stay Sane in a World That Isn’t

There is no clean fix. No policy switch that restores epistemic order. But there are habits, almost disciplines, that push back.

1. Say Less, Know More

Silence is underrated. Not every topic demands an opinion. Refusing to speak outside your depth is a quiet rebellion against the demand for constant output.

2. Slow Down the Feed

Speed is the enemy of truth. The faster information moves, the less time it has to be checked. Pause before sharing. Friction is not a bug, it is a defense mechanism.

3. Demand Reality, Not Performance

Charisma is not evidence. Confidence is not accuracy. Strip statements down to their verifiable core. If nothing remains, you are looking at performance, not truth.

The Real Fight

The challenge is not just identifying bullshit. That part is getting easier, if anything.

The real challenge is caring.

Caring enough to verify. Caring enough to resist the pull of easy narratives. Caring enough to accept that truth is often slower, less exciting, and occasionally uncomfortable.

Frankfurt gave us the language to describe the problem.

What he could not give us was the will to resist it.

That part, inconveniently, is still on us.