Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

by Carl T. Bergstrom

Riffing on Allen Ginsberg, tech entrepreneur Jeff Hammerbacher complained in 2011 that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” The problem is not merely that these “best minds” could have been devoted to the artistic and scientific progress of humankind. The problem is that all of this intellectual firepower is devoted to hijacking our precious attention and wasting our minds as well. The Internet, social media, smartphones—we are exposed to increasingly sophisticated ways of diverting our attention. We become addicted to connectivity, to meaningless checking, to a life of fragmented attention across myriad streams of digital information. In short, the algorithms driving social media content are bullshitters. They don’t care about the messages they carry. They just want our attention and will tell us whatever works to capture it.