What if I have a mission and I like it and it’s totally authentic? My customers like it too. Are you calling me full of it for achieving that difficult goal?
I think you’re right about a lot of inauthentic mission statements, but I think crass swearing is the real “needless bullshit”.
> I must clarify that my complaint isn’t against having mission statements because some of them do make sense and describe the company’s culture and the products they ship.
>> Honest Tea: To create and promote great-tasting, healthy, organic beverages.
>> Patagonia: Build the best product, Cause no unnecessary harm, Use business to protect nature, Not bound by convention.
>> IKEA: To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them
Wouldn't most effective way to do this be preventing people from ever entering nature. In style of Chernobyl exclusion zone. And best way is to make so horrible gear that it forces people to stay home?
Some people have missions - great. Some don’t need them - great.
Frankfurt's philosophy and human psychology in that essay was a much needed tonic, to name a really quite specific /indifference to truth and consequences/.
It's frustrating that he chose to overload "bullshit" as it makes it hard to talk in a sophisticated and nuanced way with sensitive people. We surely don't need another neologism for what everybody already knows.
Actually when I say " /total indifference to truth/ " it hits a lot harder. Only one rather stuffy junior once pulled me up on "bullshit" and claimed offence. But when I say total indifference to truth, I've had far more senior figures say "isn't that a bit strong?" Well chosen words have power.
But it's still frustrating when you want to convey they precise nuance of Frankfurt's observations without saying BS.
I have the same discomfort with Doctorow's "enshitification". Once the novelty of throwing it into a conversation wears off, it becomes a struggle to find the perfect word for the precise process of cynical organisational exploitation that it describes.
Possibly there is a difference though, in that "enshittification" implies less intentionality or understanding of the second-order consequences (brand destruction), whereas "brand harvesting" leans into it in the most cynical way possible, implying that the value of a brand is something that one could rationally choose to liquidate.
It seems that it's basically the same thing as the debasement of a currency (like a brand, also a symbolic thing), or the Cantillon Effect, which (like brand harvesting) exploits the fact that information takes time to propagate and people take time to learn and react. There's a window where your adulterated beer still has the respected label, where your newly-printed dollars are not yet in general circulation, or where ad revenue is up and your customers haven't yet bothered to cancel their Netflix subscriptions.