The “Bullshit redux” redux

For the record, “redux” means to return to a topic. What motivates my return to my return to a discussion about bullshit generators? Well, this time I don’t want to write about the generators exactly, but about something I said as a side note about “woke” BS generators.

I recall I listed a number of transnational companies for whom the reason they are going through all the extra expense and trouble to accommodate marginalized groups is, really, because they need to clean up their image. Please don’t think this was any merit of “the left”. People on the left have been far too weakened and divided over the decades to control large institutions that way.

Woke-ism provides a rare opportunity for large institutions to treat the liberation of marginalized groups as another kind of imposition on the rest of us. If you work for a large institution, and were told in subtle ways how to speak, think and act at meetings with the upper brass, none of whom may be part of any marginalized group, you know what I’m talking about.

Maybe you don’t mind watching what you say, and you don’t mind rules and even laws being passed (namely federal bill C-16, passed in 2017) telling you what to say around marginalized groups. But I am not the only one who thinks it is an imposition on liberty. Such laws presuppose that we are all incapable of a decent level of decorum and respect for our fellow man. It assumes that in a conversation with anyone who identifies as being in the LGTBQ2S+ camp, that I will not respect their basic humanity, and need laws to intimidate me into being a decent person around such people. I see it as a law that “forces” me to do something I would have done anyway as a decent, respectful person, and assumes that I and all people are incapable of such civility.

A lot of electronic “ink” has been spilled on this issue, particularly by certain groups who wish to use this as a wedge issue. And they are quite numerous on YouTube; particularly from Jordan Peterson, who started this whole rebellion in Canada by politicizing the issue and making it into a paranoid conspiracy theory about “the left”. My estimation of this is that Peterson does transnationals a service in that he provides a smokescreen to get “right” and “left” groups on campus to yell and scream at each other, distracting them from thinking about notions of freedom itself, and how Peterson is being used to pit two groups against each other.

To be fair, Peterson talks about liberty in this context as well, but he is using it to use “the left” as a punching bag. He has been quoted as saying something to the effect of “I will not let anyone on the left tell me what to think or say”. You might muse: why the left? Could he have not just said “I will not let anyone tell me what to think or say”, and the statement would have been more powerful. And judging from his photo ops with followers of Pepe the Frog, we can say his attack and his entire conduct is less than academic.

Large companies who have cleansed their image by being “woke” and among the virtuous and holy, can now use this as leverage to turn racism, sexism and all the other “-ism’s” into something we do to each other, turning our attention away from corporations who do the same to us. Railing agains the “-ism’s” becomes reduced and trivialized into petty squabbling between individual colleagues rather than an issue that unites us against a common oppressor. Brilliant in its execution, what is supposed to unite and liberate people at the grassroots, is being used by the powerful to divide and conquer.

How I address you in a conversation should be a matter of ettiquette. You can’t legislate ettiquette, any more than you can legislate human decency. The feds have passed laws that favour marginalized groups, but laws can be interpreted to say that one marginalized group member can be held accountable to the law for something they say to another marginalized group member. In other words, these same laws can be interpreted to oppress the groups they are intended to liberate. Laws are a terrible tool for telling us to get along with each other.

And why this matters now, and why I am going through the trouble of writing this now, is: Donald Trump has been inaugurated as of yesterday to much celebration and brouhaha. No sooner than the ink dried on his executive orders, several transnationals, including Meta, Google, Amazon, Tesla/SpaceX, McDonald’s, Ford, Walmart, and a host of other big companies are terminating their DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hiring and managing policies. Now that they no longer have a Democratic party to appease, the mask can finally come off.

All the while, those who divide themselves among “the left” and “the right” can go on with their petty squabbles, fuelled by bots and hired trolls from social media. And so long as people divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups based on “identity”, there will never be a social movement that will rise up against the large transnationals or the government, or any other large institutions.

Bullshit redux

At one time, back in 2011, I wrote about a Bullshit Generator that once existed. And to be honest, I only sporadically have an interest in this subject. But I have known these BS Generators, which can spew deliberate BS on many subjects, to be hilarious in the way they poke fun at the subject areas covered, be it art criticism, postmodernism, new ageism, academe, cryptocurrency, woke-ism, corporate-speak, and web economy lingo.

Let us take an example of a cryptocurrency BS generator. Yes, a crypto bullshit generator: isn’t that the ultimate? A phrase it randomly uttered just now was: “chain linking air gapped protocol”. Let’s break that down: “chain linking” – essentially a verb; “air gapped” – essentially an adjective; and “protocol” – a noun.

We can construct our own BS generator quite simply: Let’s take three verbs in the present tense: “running”, “reading”, and “flying”. Then take three adjectives: “blue”, “soft”, “brittle”. Lastly, three plural nouns: “cars”, “kittens”, and “volleyballs”. I can come  up with some phrases such as: “running blue kittens”, or “reading soft cars”, or “flying brittle volleyballs”. All grammatically correct, but make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

But that in a nutshell is the idea behind BS generators generally, except that they generally use much longer lists of words in each part of speech. The general idea is that they have to use the parts of speech in a certain order, usually the same order. A more serious example I downloaded from GitHub, four lists of words: nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs of managerial gobbledygook that produce tortured cliches like: “initiate fungibly backward-compatible ideas”, or: “evisculate distinctively customized bandwidth”. Evisculate. Had to look that one up. Looks like the word only appears in bullshit generators. Probably to increase the “bafflegab” factor.

I have noted that the woke bullshit generators have “been removed from the internet”, because they don’t come up in search engines, and my old links to them no longer work. This is sad, because deception and emotional manipulation exists in many stripes and colours, and in light of corporations and Ivy League universities now taking on the mantle of woke activism, woke language deserves their place in the bullshit canon, and I hearby advocate for equal representation of that unique, special brand of tortrured words and phrases that only the woke and a committee working on a corporate board of a transnational company could come up with.

As an asside, a list of woke corporations is available if you enter the phrase in a search engine. Companies that stand out are Adobe, 3M, Amazon, Audi Volkswagen, Boeing, Capital One, Chase Bank, Chevron, Citigroup, Delta Airlines, Deutsche Bank, E-Bay, Facebook, Ford, GE, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google (and its parent, Alphabet), Hilton, Hyatt, Intel, LinkedIn, Lockheed Martin, Merill Lynch, Microsoft, Mutual of Omaha, Paypal, Pfizer, Raymond James, Swiss Air, Tesla, Unilever, United Airlines, Wells Fargo, and Yahoo. Behold, the thin edge of  the wedge, where large corporations can cleanse their public image, and tell the public what to think and feel at the same time. I could have put Fox News on the list, but I didn’t think you’d believe me.

The websites for these BS generators come and go over the years. I think the idea is that they generate some actual interest for a while, then the sites are taken down after the traffic dies off. One such novelty wasn’t a BS generator, but used the same algorithm to generate Shakespearean insults.

But there may have been a better reason for the web traffic dying off other than just people tiring of novelty. AI chatbots do such a good job of spinning catch phrases of various topics into an unholy mess of incoherent blather, that they indeed are a formidable competitor for being crowned the “king of bullshit”. This is especially true for older AI bots like Chat-GPT2, and to a lesser extent, Chat-GPT3. Their reputation is unshakable and it probably contributed to the demise of bullshit generators, since they do the job of spewing bullshit so much more efficiently and convincingly.

This is time which AI has chosen to embrace competently resource-maximizing niches in order to impact rapidiously sustainable products and morph assertively extensible data into a level of bullshit the world has never known.

A Little Late to the Party: The B. S. Generator

Yes, Bulls**t generator technology in its many forms and guises such as this site, using a cutting-edge convergence of certain verbs, nouns, and adjectives, has assembled compelling verbal deliverables using distributed front-end generators and extensible, enterprise-level methodologies to merge words into a confluent, innovative  passage of meaningless web content. See how I am e-enabled to author difficult and dense passages of the simplest mental models and efficiently interface these paradigms, internetworking un-necessary deadwood phrases and hackneyed clichés with tired jargon, into a customised, extensible, Web 2.0-ready piece of killer content reminiscent of a squid squirting ink.

As the title suggests, I have only discovered these BS generators recently, but the technology itself seems to have been in common availability on the web since the early 2000s. It’s fun to write, but difficult to do if you actually want to make a point.