“Bullshit 2.0” by Kieron O’Hara: Summary and Critique

📊 Expanding the DIKW Pyramid: Introducing Bullshit as a Fifth Tier

• O’Hara critiques the classic four-tier DIKW hierarchy — Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom — and proposes a fifth layer: Bullshit.
• “Bullshit is not built on any of the other elements, nor are any of the others crafted out of it. Bullshit is, as it were, the icing on the cake” (O’Hara, 2016, p. 1).
• This tier does not contribute to the epistemological ascent; rather, it disrupts it by simulating meaningfulness.

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🧪 Bullshit ≠ Data: Ritual vs. Reality

• Using the timesheet parable, O’Hara shows how bureaucratic processes become exercises in performance, not representation:

“It is not data. It is not information about work patterns. It is bullshit” (p. 3).

• The form is filled to meet expectations, not to report actual activities — highlighting the ritualistic nature of bullshit in organizational life.

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📚 Philosophical Foundations: Frankfurt, Cohen, and Beyond

• Harry Frankfurt (2005): Bullshit is speech unconcerned with truth, aiming to mislead about intentions.

“The bullshitter doesn’t really care whether what he says is true or false” (p. 3).

• Jerry Cohen critiques ideological and academic bullshit, targeting “Francophone philosophical culture” as especially prolific (p. 3).
• These predecessors focus on offline bullshit; O’Hara extends it to the digital world.

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🌐 Has Bullshit Gone Digital?

• In the online world, bullshit is rampant, from fake social identities to unread privacy policies and gamed performance metrics.

“A privacy policy is designed to be too complicated to be read – it is bullshit” (p. 5).

• Online tools like Invisible Girlfriend illustrate the commodification of deception-as-service.

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🧠 The Role of Intent: Bullshit as Strategic Communication

• Unlike data, which is semantically minimal, bullshit is laden with intent — typically to impress, soothe, or comply.
• “Bullshit is spread consciously almost everywhere… produced to achieve a particular goal” (p. 5).
• The goal is rarely truth; it is performance, acceptability, or ritual compliance.

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⚖️ The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

• Referencing Alberto Brandolini, O’Hara notes:

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it” (p. 4).

• However, he critiques this view as too monist, neglecting the social context and repetitive patterns of bullshit production.

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📉 Performance Metrics: Bureaucratic Bullshit Machines

• Bullshit becomes dangerous when performance data is mistaken for truth:

“We risk converting performance data… into bullshit (an apparent assertion about reality)” (p. 6).

• Examples include LIBOR manipulation, national economic statistics, and academic bibliometrics — all cases where data becomes detached from lived reality.

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📱 Social Computing and Pro-Social Bullshitting

• O’Hara discusses benign bullshit, such as crafting online personas or using polite fictions:

“On reflection I think it is more accurately represented as a benign species of bullshit” (p. 5).

• A study (Van Kleek et al., 2016) found users often “lie” online for privacy, empowerment, or politeness — not deception.

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🧬 Data’s Social Life: Interpretation as Risk

• Data is not truth until interpreted — and interpretation involves assumptions, design choices, and politics:

“Simply putting an interpretative scheme onto a dataset… takes all sorts of risks with the truth” (p. 6).

• Without critique, administrators or researchers construct entire epistemic systems on piles of bullshit.

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🧩 Design and Ethics: Can Bullshit Be Eliminated?

• O’Hara calls for ethical awareness and critical system design:

“Surely these could be designed out of the system, to the benefit of all?” (p. 6).

• But bullshit’s ritualistic value means it may never be eliminated — only understood, framed, and contained.

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💡 Final Thought: Bullshit on the Road to Wisdom

• “The route to wisdom may sometimes, perhaps even usually, be via information and knowledge, but… sometimes it ploughs right through a field of bullshit instead” (p. 7).
• O’Hara concludes that bullshit, in moderation and with awareness, can serve social and psychological functions — but uncritical acceptance poses epistemic threats.

🧱 DeconstructionDeconstruction Literary Theory aka Deconstructionism of Epistemic Hierarchies

• O’Hara subverts the foundational DIKW model by adding bullshit as a fifth epistemic category.
• This aligns with post-structuralist and deconstructivist approaches that challenge fixed systems of knowledge and truth.
• 📝 “The pyramid has neither three nor four, but five components… of which the most pithy is bullshit” (p. 1).
• 📚 Contributes to destabilizing binary notions such as truth/falsehood or knowledge/ignorance.

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🗣️ Bullshit as Performative Discourse

• Emphasizes that bullshit is performative, not representational — echoing speech act theory and postmodern performativity (e.g., Judith Butler).
• Bureaucratic and online rituals are seen as forms of linguistic performance, not truth claims.
• 📝 “The timesheet wasn’t a representation… but a device for presenting a particular soothing vision of smooth working” (p. 2).

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🎭 Fictionality and Ritual in Everyday Texts

• O’Hara applies narrative theory and ritual studies to nonfictional bureaucratic forms like timesheets and policies, treating them as fictional constructs that simulate reality.
• 📝 “It is seriously misleading if we try to use it… as a piece of data… It is bullshit” (p. 3).
• 📚 Blurs the boundaries between fiction and administrative discourse, expanding what counts as “text” in literary theory.

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🧠 Reader-Response and Intentionality

• Echoing reader-response theory, O’Hara distinguishes between the producer’s intention and the reader’s interpretation of bullshit.
• 📝 “Consuming bullshit involves acting uncritically on whatever is provided” (p. 6).
• 📚 Reinforces the role of the audience in constructing textual meaning and misunderstanding.

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🔎 Post-Truth and Simulacra

• Builds on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra—where representations (like data or metrics) replace the reality they refer to.
• 📝 “If administrators… take it as representations of reality, then they will seriously be misled by a huge great pile of bullshit” (p. 6).
• 📚 Links literary concerns with reality, simulation, and signification in digital culture.

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🧬 Social Semiotics of Data

• Treats data not as neutral symbols but as socially coded and ideologically shaped — a semiotic turn in interpreting information systems.
• 📝 “Data does not just magically appear… it is crafted, built, created, argued about” (p. 5).
• 📚 Bridges critical theory with digital humanities and textual materialism.

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🤖 Posthumanism and Algorithmic Texts

• Considers the role of non-human agents (algorithms, social media, fake profiles) in producing bullshit — aligning with posthuman literary theory.
• 📝 “Social machines… from altruistic encyclopaedias to the foulest trolling” (p. 7).
• 📚 Extends literary theory into the ethics and ontology of machine-generated discourse.

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🧩 Ethical Aesthetics and the Role of Design

• Raises questions about the design of texts (e.g., privacy policies), connecting aesthetics with ethics — a growing concern in digital literary theory.
• 📝 “They are designed to be unreadable and unread… it surely does not have to be this way” (p. 6).
• 📚 Challenges the literary community to rethink the aesthetic form of functional texts.

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🎭 Identity, Masquerade, and Authorship

• Bullshit is a masquerade, not just of truth but of authorial integrity — echoing Barthes’ “Death of the Author”.
• 📝 “Users told fibs… to craft an authentic online persona” (p. 5).
• 📚 Challenges fixed notions of identity, authorship, and authenticity in digital narrative spaces.

🧩 Conceptual Ambiguity

• While O’Hara critiques epistemic clarity, his own definition of bullshit remains fluid and inconsistent, blending ritual, deception, performance, and data misrepresentation without always distinguishing them.
• Critics may argue that this lack of ontological precision undermines its theoretical utility.

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🔄 Redundancy with Frankfurt

• Much of O’Hara’s argument revisits Harry Frankfurt’s foundational work (On Bullshit, 2005), often without substantial philosophical innovation.
• 🗣️ Critics may say: “Is this Bullshit 2.0 or just Frankfurt 1.5?”

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📊 Overextension of the DIKW Pyramid

• Adding bullshit as a fifth tier challenges but also confuses the structural logic of the original model.
• Some epistemologists might object that bullshit is not a category of knowledge, but a meta-commentary or misuse of existing categories.

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🌐 Digital Generalizations

• O’Hara frequently references online environments, privacy policies, and social machines, but provides limited empirical or technical depth.
• Critics might view the web-based examples as anecdotal rather than robustly supported.

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🎭 Ethical Ambiguity

• While he acknowledges bullshit as sometimes necessary or benign, O’Hara fails to rigorously define ethical limits—when is it truly harmful versus socially functional?
• This opens him to criticism for normalizing deception in sensitive domains like politics or academia.

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⚖️ Insufficient Critical Engagement with Power

• The essay skims over systemic power dynamics behind institutional bullshit (e.g. state propaganda, corporate greenwashing).
• A Marxist or Foucauldian lens might challenge his framing as too individualistic or ritualistic, downplaying ideological function.

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🔍 Lack of Literary-Theoretical Anchoring

• While Bullshit 2.0 aligns with literary theory conceptually (performance, ritual, simulation), it offers no engagement with actual literary criticism or narrative theory.
• Thus, its contribution to literary discourse may feel implied rather than explicit.

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📉 Underestimates the Epistemic Stakes

• O’Hara treats bullshit with a tone of ironic detachment, which some may find too casual for a topic with high social and political consequences.
• Critics might argue this fosters complacency, not critique.