In Macbeth, Macduff finds himself talking with a porter about liquor. The porter tells him that there are three things that drinking provokes, but that…

Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes. It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

I think that the Internet has been an equivocator with communication. It gives you a platform with which to talk to the world, but it drowns your thoughts in a cacophony of published noise. It persuades and disheartens. It excites and disappoints. It tells us that we can be understood, but really it has given us the lie, for no one is really trying to understand. If communication is to be useful it must contain fact or intelligent thought. But the Internet has replaced communication with exhortation, and we are asked not to understand but rather just to agree. This is particularly true for political and social speech, and as a result I think we need a new word for it — it’s not communication. Fortunately, there is such a word.

In 1986, Harry G. Frankfurt wrote the marvelous essay On Bullshit. In it he describes a phenomenon that, while it has always been present, has exploded with the advent of the Internet — bullshitting.

So what does he mean by bullshitting, and how is that different from lying? Frankfurt makes the distinction beautifully :

This is the crux of the distinction between him [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it […] he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

The bullshitter then is saying what he says because he wants to convey a favorable impression of himself and to convince his audience of his wisdom and insight, but especially to advance the narrative he’s talking about. He’s trying to sound honest as he says something that he thinks you should hear. But what he doesn’t care about at all — what is irrelevant to him — is whether what he is saying is, in fact, true. The liar knows what the truth is and wants you to believe something he knows to be false. The bullshitter doesn’t care what the truth is - he just wants you to reflexively agree with, and believe him.

Okay, but there have always been bullshitters, they aren’t anything new. But Frankfurt was prescient :

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.

And this is exactly what the Internet has done, with its incessant demands for new content, for more “communication”, which has propelled many more people into the public life with their writing to feed it. Whatever else happens, websites can’t be stagnant. There have to be new articles, new blog entries, new headlines, new tweets, new updates all the time. Advertisers pay good money to get their ads seen, and the more times a website is loaded, the more ads can be put on it. Matt Drudge understood this very early on — he constantly is changing his links and teasers. The online magazine Slate is a great example of this. The articles and links change often, and while there are often good pieces there, others really seem to be devoid of thought or point or veracity and to have been produced because someone had to produce 5000 words that day. Quantity has won out over quality. Having an opinion about everything is both easy and necessary, and whether it has a basis in fact is irrelevant.

[There] has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself.

Writing then becomes not about communicating facts or having discussions but rather about the author trying to come across as sincere. He’s not trying to persuade by arguing the facts — he’s trying say things that make him seem reasonable and trustworthy and assuming that if he does you’ll believe what he is saying. If what the author is saying agrees with what the reader already wants to think, that helps a lot in making the author seem honest and sincere, and that, in turn, will make the reader come back and load the page again. This is why so many people only go to sites that they agree with. They want someone more articulate than themselves to say what they already believe — they want to get a reward when they pull the lever and load the website.

Also, when sincerity becomes the overriding goal of your writing it opens up entire new areas for subject matter. Kids, pictures, art projects, lists of interest — are we really anxious to communicate, to convey useful information, or do we just want to make evident our sincerity and earnestness and a bit of our own wonderfulness? When Slate publishes an article with the title This Ziplock Bag Trick Might Change Your Life, do you believe they really care if you find out what the trick is; that is, are they really trying to communicate with you? Or is their earnestness about maintaining their image as a website chock full of essential and interesting articles, and oh by the way getting you to click through for the advertising on the page that contains this particular piece of life-changing information?

We say we want the truth but that is very insincere. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. And I would argue that the essence of real communication is that it is true, that it exchanges ideas or facts. Phony writing — bullshit — is a waste of time to read, since you have no idea if what the author is saying is true or not. What you know is that 99% of the time it wasn’t an issue to him, either.