Disruption or just "Best of Bullshit"?

// Cover picture: "Are you lonely? I can change that ..." from Blade Runner 2049

"The Internet makes everything better," it was once said. I can still remember well how I firmly believed as a young person: The Internet would liberate us! I was convinced that knowledge would finally be distributed fairly among all people, that we would collectively become smarter, better, and more intelligent. The digital revolution is a tool of enlightenment; so was my vision.

But if you scroll through your feeds today, you will see a different picture: instead of collective intelligence, we are experiencing an endless loop of digital hot dog legs, holiday envy and, particularly perfidious, the artificial self-optimization mania on business platforms like LinkedIn.

The Myth of Innovation and Bullshit Bingo

We love terms like "agile", "dynamic" and "disruptive". But if you take a closer look, the "new" is often not so new. Rather, a new language has emerged to conceal the technological standstill: corporate bullshit bingo.

We juggle with anglicisms and hollow phrases to simulate a depth that does not exist. It is rhetorical packaging for an empty box. If you want to know how deep this swamp of phrases really is, you should take a look at the work of my old friend Hans Rudolf Jost. In his book „Best of Bullshit: Worthülsen aus der Teppichetage“ 15 years ago, he masterfully dissected how language is misused to conceal emptiness of content.

Whether "customer centricity" or "mindset shift", it is precisely these empty words that Jost exposes, and that provide the fuel for digital self-presentation today.

LinkedIn is "Best of Bullshit" in real-time transmission.

LinkedIn: The stronghold of digital narcissism

This linguistic disintegration is particularly evident on LinkedIn. In the past, a CV was a document. Today it is a permanent performance in an arena of buzzwords. Every banal work step is inflated into a "game changer". If you don't post how "humbled and honored" you are about the next certification, you won't take place in the digital economy. It is the "best of bullshit" in real-time transmission.

"Lonely together": The drug is ourselves

MIT professor Sherry Turkle aptly called it: "Alone Together". We voyeuristically delight ourselves in our own lives and those of our contacts. We pay the seemingly free services with our privacy and undivided attention.

‍"Zuckerberg & Co. are the dealers of a narcissistic age in which we ourselves are our own drug." – Sherry Turkle

While we present ourselves as "visionaries", hardly anyone notices how society is shifting: the middle class is becoming the poor upper class, while a handful of the super-rich earn from our desire for recognition.

Conclusion: Modern slavery

Instead of the hoped-for liberation and collective intelligence, we often only witness the destruction of existing structures, which are then replaced by digital dependence (taxi drivers without a license? How innovative). We have become unpaid workers who generate attention in their spare time to feed the algorithms of the tech giants. One man knew all this long before the first mouse click:

‍"The masses are basically ready for slavery." – Friedrich Nietzsche

It seems that we have not only adapted to disruption but have completely submitted it. We polish our own chains with the shine of 500+ contacts and hope for a "like" that briefly makes us feel important.