BS of the Month (Jan 2025): The Cardinal Sin of Spinning a Harm as a Blessing
At LiteralMayhem, we’re interested in stories. Narratives. Especially those that qualify as “spin,” i.e., professional tweaking of story/narrative with the purpose of persuasion. And especially-especially spin that qualifies as BS.
Each month we give a BS of the Month Award in recognition of the damage that PR and marketing pros can do in the real world with their spin. For January 2025, those winners are…
2nd Runner up… Jamie Dimon
Biden-flation sucks! Trump inflation? Get over it!
Jamie Dimon said that if Donald Trump’s tariffs are a little inflationary, well, we all have to just get over it, because National Security!
This is the same guy who back in April 2024 was seriously alarmed over inflation and warned that the Fed would have to hike rates, which could “soar past 8%,” according to ABC News. In May 2024, he was adamant that government spending would absolutely, positively, unavoidably lead to stagflation. (Fortune)
By the end of 2024 inflation was 2.9%, employment was strong, growth was 2.8% (just shy of the 2023 number) and in Q3 the Fed delivered a “super-sized rate cut” and the “Federal Open Market Committee lowered its target range for the federal funds rate to 4.75%–5%, from the 5.25–5.5% range in place since last July.” (AXIOS) (An example of Dimon’s idea of “ineffective government” that’s not pro-business enough.)
So… Suffering higher inflation from a years-long COVID supply-chain hangover and price gouging is really all the government’s fault because they spent too much to keep the economy from crashing, and that’s a big NO-NO, even though the worst did not come to pass and our stellar recovery outpaced all our G10 rivals.
But kickstarting inflation again—after it’s been mostly tamed—because you want to start some doo-doo that The Wall Street Journal called the “Dumbest Trade War in History,” and then blithely write it off as a “national security” necessity, well, to Dimon that’s a giant YES-YES!
And it’s a pile of bull.
1st Runner up… Mikey Shulman
Music is hard work! Waaa! Stealing is easier, and it’s still original art!
There is so much BS in and around AI that it’s hard to narrow down just one instance that’s deserving of a BS Award. But Mickey Shulman’s BS is emblematic of the worst and most pervasive BS of the entire industry.
The first part of Mikey’s gold-plated bullshit:
It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
Holy crap on a cracker. That’s truly a wonder of dipshit, spoiled, clueless brovomit. Watch any decent documentary on musicians and it’s easy to see that musicians love making music. They will go through hell and back, live in poverty, and sacrifice everything to make music.
But that’s not the worst of Shulman’s BS. Here’s the worst bullshitty bit:
If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people. And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now.
That’s emblematic of the biggest, most dangerous, and most impactful BS of the entire AI hype bubble, which falls into the category of “democratization” (another post on that coming soon). The entire argument in favor of AI in creative fields is that it enables your average everyday person to generate outcomes beyond their current ability without doing the work to learn how.
Great take from Deeply Wrong here: “AI is not democratizing art, it is in fact a form of theft or plagiarism leading to the devaluation and dehumanization of art.” More than anything else, “AI art” steals the work that an artist puts into making art. Chuck Wendig has it right (h/t Deeply Wrong) when he wisecracks:
Congratulations. You said a thing and pushed a button and now the ART BARF ROBOT barfed art for you. Slow clap from the cheap seats.
A good take from 404 Media here. New Yorker article on why AI will never make art here.
When people like Shulman sputter this drivel—i.e., that you can take the work out of being an artist and still make “art”—it adds momentum to the growing mythology around AI that effort is unnecessary for success. People then internalize that story and start to think that, hey maybe there’s something to it. Let me have a go at a song, or a book, and see if the slop will actually sell on Amazon.
Global enshittification ensues. So his BS is bigger than his shitty program, it hurts us all in more ways than we can count.
BS of the Month Award: Keir Starmer, Peter Kyle, and the entire UK AI policy writing team
Offense: Industrial-Scale Gaslighting—Spinning Harm as a Blessing
Let’s start with a parable: My husband and I used to have premium season tickets to one of America’s biggest pro-soccer franchises, which came with a $25-per-seat food credit for the buffet in our well-appointed skybox clubhouse. Said benefit was part of the legal purchase contract that we signed when we subscribed for the seats.
But after just one season, the food credit apparently was too expensive a perk, and out of the blue we got an email (late on a Friday before a long holiday weekend—another favorite PR tactic of burying bad news) that the perk was being yanked and replaced by an “upgrade” of free hotdogs and beer at our seats. Good for us because we wouldn’t have to endure the indignity of waiting in a long buffet line.
The buffet was quite good. Sandwiches. Salads. Sushi. A carving station. Nice stuff. And at stadium pricing we always ended up spending more than our $25 allotment. Hot dogs and beer (which we don’t eat or drink) were definitely NOT an “upgrade” of our “experience.”
We let the management have it, canceled our premium seats and got seats closer to the field. We ended up liking the un-posh “experience” better anyway, and the cost savings covered our food many times over. Now, someone who’d never had the perk in the first place would take our old seats and never feel like they were missing a thing, and management really didn’t care. But that disappointment never left us.
Too often, the first instinct of PR and marketing people is to try spinning bullshit into gold by gaslighting people, trying to convince them that harm is really a blessing. As the UK’s AI policy team has been doing for the past year.
Lying is one thing. And yes they lied through their teeth, by writing in their AI Opportunities Action Plan that there’s confusion around IP…
Rights holders are finding it difficult to control the use of their works in training AI models and seek to be remunerated for its use. AI developers are similarly finding it difficult to navigate copyright law in the UK, and this legal uncertainty is undermining investment in and adoption of AI technology.
The first part is true enough, but the second part is a lie. AI developers aren’t having difficulty “navigating” copyright law. The law is crystal clear. They just want to avoid the expensive, laborious process of asking for permissions and paying for content. They want a shortcut. A loophole. A “carve out” in political euphemism.
(Graham Lovelace at Charting GEN AI has been doing exhaustive coverage of the UK’s AI policy fight here and here. TechPolicy.press here. Luiza Jarovsky here.)
But the lying isn’t what wins them the BS of the Month Award—it’s the gaslighting over their proposed solution: a “mechanism for right holders to reserve their rights” based on an “exception [to copyright law] to support use at scale of a wide range of material by AI developers where rights have not been reserved.”
According to The Guardian:
Chris Bryant MP, the data protection minister, said the proposal was a ‘win win’ for two sides that have been at loggerheads over a new copyright regime… ‘This is about giving greater control in a difficult and complex set of circumstances to creators and rights holders, and we intend it to lead to more licensing of content, which is potentially a new revenue stream for creators,’ he said. [emphasis added]
What utter bollocks. It is most definitely NOT “greater control.” Rights holders already have all the control they need. And there is no “mechanism” needed to “reserve” rights, because copyright holders already have them.
The government wants to strip rights holders of their control and impose a new burden on them—forcing creators to proactively assert and protect rights that are already asserted and protected. Then they try to sell this utter bollocks as a “win” for creatives.
(That project is currently flailing but never underestimate the cynicism of politicians in eventually voting against the interests of their constituents.)
PR gaslighting is one of the worst offenses that the profession foists on the public. It’s the kind of nauseating kick in the gut that leaves people feeling shocked, cynical, and just plain furious.
Why do PR and marketing people do this? I have been working in this business for three decades and I still don’t have an answer except that, in general, people suck. Elite PR people, like most monied elite, are motivated by self-interest, and power, and status, and protecting their position. Those with a conscience compartmentalize and rationalize until they either quit the profession or stop feeling the sting of guilt.
PR pros love to talk about how they provide frank advice to help guide the decisions of executives toward best outcomes for “all stakeholders.” In reality, the vast majority are just hacks collecting a paycheck and publicly slinging wagonloads of bullshit to justify whatever their bosses+clients want to do.
The upshot of this specific kind of PR-Comms devilry, at this scale, is that it erodes public faith in institutions large and small. It leaves people feeling vulnerable, angry, and alone against the world. It does damage not just to careers and livelihoods, but to our ability to function cohesively as a society.
All big words, but very well warranted.
And so, for that cardinal sin of the erosion of public trust and faith, by virtue of their industrial-scale national gaslighting of millions of people, we hereby grant the Golden Dookie to Messrs. Starmer and Kyle and all their cronies. Well done!
