On BS – And Influencer Marketing

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash.

In this tumultuous world of ours, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grad-school ethics class, and particularly Harry G. Frankfurt’s seminal essay On Bullshit.

Frankfurt doesn’t get talked up in my circles. I don’t hang with a lot of people who can dismantle Wittgenstein, much less care to read a 67-page discourse on what differentiates lying from plain old bullshit.

However, it’s important to distinguish between a lie and bullshit (which we’ll call BS from now on, so as not to totally peg the NSFW-o-meter) as we evaluate all the messages being thrown our way – and not just what might be delivered in a TV ad or a political speech.

Simply put, the difference between BS and an outright lie is that a liar lies knowing what he’s saying is wrong, and a BSer says what he says without caring whether it’s right or wrong.

Frankfurt says it better, of course. “Both [a BSer] and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth … 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 … 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.”

(Sorry that wasn’t a three-line paragraph. I’ll try to control myself in the future.)

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash.

He also writes that, “It is just this lack of connection to this concern with truth – the indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

Well, if that doesn’t sound like modern marketing I’ll eat my Roger Federer hat, Nike swoosh and all.

What brought this to mind was an excellent piece by Gord Hotchkiss on the essential falseness of influencer marketing.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that influencer marketing is up there with three-line paragraphs on my list of marketing whipping kids. I consider influencer marketing to just be spokesperson marketing with a layer of BS added. 

The influence behind the influencer says that we don’t care if you believe that Instagram star Poulay Richay uses Prune Whip Anti-Aging Putty every day as a part of her famous beauty regime (which up until last Thursday featured Blue Sauerkraut Anti-Aging Spackle With Kielbasa Extract). But if you do, cool for us.

Hotchkiss takes us a more thoughtful approach to the issues with influencer marketing, yet in the end he brings it back to Frankfurt.

“The whole point of influencer marketing is to make it appear that these people are genuine fans of these products, so much so that they can’t help evangelizing them through their social media feeds,” he writes. “This – of course – is bullshit.”

Absolutely. The truth-values of the BSer are of no concern. The influencer doesn’t care whether you believe that they use and endorse these products; Hotchkiss uses the example of two-year-old twins who are wildly popular Instagram “endorsers,” even though they’re totally unable to discern their Huggies from their Luvs.

Furthermore, one of the other characteristics of BS is that people use it when they’re put into situations where they have to talk a lot about things they know very little about. (Well, hello, Donald Trump!) 

An influencer can be perceived as the opposite of that: “I’ve tried every anti-aging grout there is, and here’s my favorite,” they might say, and it sounds plausible – until you consider there are (this is BS, but hang with me) 768 brands of wrinkle plaster out there, and giving them all a fair run would take 83 years.

It’s hard to separate the truth from the BS these days, simply because there’s so much BS and so little truth. Frankfurt acknowledges that towards the end of his essay, and notes that people have reacted to the proliferation of BS by valuing what’s sincere instead of what’s right.

We’ve all gone that route – but have we ever stopped to look through it?

On Bullshit was written in 2005, before the ascendance of social media and its associated evils, but Frankfurt nailed it – influencer marketing, organizations’ desperate desire to be “genuine,” and the casual and callous disregard for truth that hangs over it all like Beijing smog.

Knowing what BS is won’t stop BS or BSers, but it’s a start, no matter how small. And if can help turn the tide against influencer marketing, it will have accomplished something important.