Marius’s essay, The Rise of the Bullshittery, starts with a blunt observation: LinkedIn is crowded with “thought leaders” without ideas, “founders” without meaningful products, and “AI experts” whose expertise goes little beyond paying for ChatGPT or Claude. His point is not just that self-promotion has become excessive. Drawing on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 1986 text On Bullshit, he argues that the bigger threat is speech that is indifferent to truth altogether.
That distinction matters. A liar still has to reckon with the truth, because the lie is built in relation to it. The bullshitter does not. The goal is to appear capable, confident, and worth listening to. Short sentence. In Marius’s telling, that logic now sits at the center of many online professional spaces, where visibility often outruns substance.
Professional reputation is being displaced by algorithmic reach
The essay contrasts an older model of career building with the current one. The old version was slow: learn a skill, do the work well, and build trust over time among people who can tell quality from noise. It was never perfectly fair, but competence still tended to carry weight. Marius says that bargain has broken down, because professional opportunities are now filtered less by informed judgment and more by algorithmic visibility.
He cites a 2024 study covering more than 6,500 U.S. state legislators, which found a positive relationship between the spread of low-credibility information and social media attention. The implication is stark: lower reliability can attract more visibility. Marius extends that pattern beyond politics, arguing that anyone who depends on an audience for work is pushed into the same distorted competition, where being heard can matter more than being right.
LinkedIn is presented as a marketplace for professional theater
In the essay, LinkedIn becomes the clearest case study. Marius describes it as a late-night shopping channel for the professional class, except the product on display is someone’s career. He points to a recognizable category of mentor-influencer figures who package vague advice, weak opportunities, and inflated claims in the language of credibility, often leaning on prior employment at famous companies.
The frustration, in his account, is not that grifters exist. It is that platforms reward them. An algorithm cannot reliably distinguish between a thoughtful post written by someone with 10 years of experience in a field and a five-paragraph post produced by a large language model in 20 seconds and dressed up with emojis. Both are content. The one that generates more reactions rises, and that often means the cheaper, louder, and more exaggerated version wins distribution.
Marius says the same pattern repeats across Medium, X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack. Different interfaces, same economics. Engagement is the currency, and empty performance is a frequent byproduct. The work that suffers most is the kind that cannot be compressed into a short hook or a fast emotional hit.
AI has cut the cost of producing convincing nonsense
The essay treats AI as an accelerant rather than the original cause. Marius compares large language models to shipping containers in global trade: they did not invent the activity, but they industrialized it. Anyone with a browser can now generate 1,000 words on nearly any topic in minutes, with clean grammar, a confident tone, and a structure that sounds informed.
That does not mean the writer understands the subject. It means the output can pass a weak standard of review: it sounds plausible enough. Marius argues that this “close enough” threshold is becoming the practical filter for many publication channels, and sometimes for readers and viewers as well. As the cost of producing polished language falls, the burden of separating knowledge from performance shifts onto the audience.
The “bullshit jobs” debate is pulled into the content economy
Marius also brings in David Graeber’s 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, to widen the frame. Graeber argued that large portions of modern professional work, especially in finance, consulting, middle management, and public relations, produce little obvious social value. Marius notes that this argument is contested. A 2022 study found that fewer than 8% of European workers saw their jobs as useless, far below the 20%–60% range implied in Graeber’s framing.
Even with that qualification, Marius says one part of Graeber’s diagnosis still holds up: too much professional output is made primarily for other people who are also producing output. Slide decks for the sake of slide decks. Strategy documents for the sake of strategy documents. Posts written because posting itself has become mandatory. Such work may still serve internal incentives or platform business models, but its connection to real customers, real problems, and real outcomes can become extremely thin.
The real cost falls on people who refuse to fake competence
The sharpest section of the essay focuses on those who keep treating the work itself as the point. Marius lists engineers who insist on shipping usable software, writers who want to understand a subject before publishing, and designers who test products with real people. In a market tilted toward performance, those people are competing against others who are willing to stage demos, announce wins before anything is built, and maintain a constant stream of self-amplifying content.
His claim is not that honest work has disappeared. It is that the incentive structure no longer points cleanly in that direction. Over time, people notice. They adapt. The cynicism, fatigue, and quiet bitterness found in many professional settings follow from that misalignment, according to the essay.
Marius’s answer is limited but clear
He does not present a clean solution. Instead, he offers a narrower response. Audiences should actively reward serious, sourced work when they encounter it, and where possible pay for versions made by humans rather than letting all value be absorbed by platform layers. Creators, on the other side, should resist performing beliefs they do not actually hold, even if that means giving up visibility.
The essay closes by returning to Frankfurt. A bullshitter feels no embarrassment because there is no real commitment to truth at stake. An honest person can feel embarrassment because the claim actually matters to them. Marius suggests that this capacity for embarrassment may now be one of the few remaining markers of good-faith work in a system that often favors surface over substance.