The Marketplace of Expertise and Authority: Notes from the Noise Ecosystem

This blog post was initially written in French, L’écosystème du bruit et la fabrique de l’autorité

For a few months now, I have been trying to write a post about greenwashing. And of course it takes time, because I tend to get lost in all kinds of details… and this time was no exception. For now, I want to lay the groundwork by describing the ecosystem that allows greenwashing to exist—and to thrive.

My starting point will be LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is a stage on which people display professional respectability. And I admit it: I sometimes linger on LinkedIn, often to stay informed by following a few actors in the insurance world. I wrote a post two months ago, Bridging the Risk Perception Gap?, explaining that for my research topics it is almost indispensable.

Of course, I know it is a theater: an unsettling mirror, a mirror world in the sense Naomi Klein discusses in Doppelganger. You see endless posts with the intellectual depth of motivational posters, but sometimes (and that is what makes the game so frustrating) you also see an interesting chart that looks serious—yet almost never a solid source explaining how it was produced. For instance, I see graphs like this one, which interests me for professional reasons and triggers a thousand questions.

Fig. 1. Fictional chart created for illustration purposes, inspired by a chart seen on LinkedIn. No source provided.

At best, the post will mention a source—a source that points to another document produced by an agency with a strange status, which points to a note, which points to an “observatory”. And in the end, you no longer know what you are supposed to take away, except the feeling that somewhere there exists an expertise that produced some kind of analysis.

I learn that Japanese people drive three times less than Americans. But is that mileage per driver, or per vehicle? Does it account for the fact that Japanese households tend to have one car per household, while Americans tend to have one car per person? In short: it raises a thousand questions, but it rarely points to a thousand paths toward answers. Often it stops there—and you have to do the research yourself to find primary sources.

About a decade ago, André Spicer published a great book, Business Bullshit, which helps make sense of LinkedIn posts: the confident, consensus-driven tone; the way statements are produced with an astonishing indifference to whether they are true, falsifiable, or even well-defined. Spicer emphasizes that bullshit is not simply lying. It is, above all, a loosened relationship to truth—because the objective is not to describe the world, but to produce an organizational effect.

In my post La société du bullshit three years ago, I talked about LLM “bullshit”. But with a bit of distance, it looks like a form of corporate bullshit that we find precisely on platforms like LinkedIn. The aim is to inspire trust, coordination, adherence. Many journalists and scholars have described this. More recently, Cory Doctorow gave a name to something many of us felt without formalizing it: enshittification.

“Enshittification” describes the dynamic by which platforms, after attracting users, gradually reorganize their rules and interfaces to serve partners first, then advertisers, then their own rent extraction—until the experience degrades for everyone. It is a multi-stage story we have all lived through. And LinkedIn is a perfect example. It is not a place where you “read content”; it is a machine that selects what circulates, rewards quick reactions, makes recycling profitable, and penalizes long, sourced arguments. Still, sometimes you find an idea—an argument you can reuse in a paper to get a sense of what “the market wants” (which matters in my field, insurance).

What worries me most is that I now see cases where real life starts to resemble LinkedIn. I find myself in meetings with people whose legitimacy is rather hazy—not so much to present study results they actually produced (as in academia), but to deliver a kind of verbose, empty logorrhea.

On one side, there is bullshit talk in the organizational sense: not necessarily false, but calibrated to produce trust and buy-in without paying the cost of proof. On the other, an enshittified informational environment in which the circulation of documents, labels, slides, and “summaries” makes scientific research harder to see, slower to access, and less attention-profitable—hence easier to marginalize, even when everyone claims to “follow the science”.

For someone who spends almost all their time reading academic papers, it would be almost funny—if it were not bleak and worrying. A serious paper (as it would be written by a serious gentleman, or by a mushroom, as the Little Prince might say) often begins by properly defining the objects of discussion. And that takes time. Then, when there are data, you have to talk about selection bias, justify a causal reading of a correlation, add a thousand precautions. Clearly, it “wastes time” (on details).

The ecosystem I am describing sells the exact opposite. It sells clarity. It sells speed. It sells conclusions ready to be heard by people who want to make decisions quickly. And it creates immense noise pollution. Noise does not prevent science from existing, but it makes it less visible, less audible. And sometimes, more insidiously, it replaces it—not with anti-science, but with decor science. Science cited as a credibility accessory, without the demand for proof surviving the format.

Legitimacy as an asset, authority as a product

To understand why this market of noise prospers, we have to talk about legitimacy. Mark Suchman, in Managing Legitimacy, starts from a simple observation: legitimacy is not an intrinsic property. It is a shared perception—the idea that what is being done is appropriate, desirable, and consistent with norms and beliefs. In that perspective, an organization does not seek only to be efficient. It also seeks to be judged acceptable. It seeks to reduce the uncertainty its environment imposes on it.

Producing legitimacy therefore becomes work. And like any work, it can be internalized, outsourced, and industrialized. Many of the intermediaries I have in mind are precisely producers of legitimacy. They transform vague expectations into coherent narratives. They manufacture justifications that resemble demonstrations. They make a decision “tellable” even when it does not follow mechanically from facts. They help answer the implicit question behind any organized activity: why are you doing this, and why now?

And as Suchman also notes, legitimacy is a social resource. You can accumulate it, lose it, rent it, subcontract it. This changes the nature of the jobs orbiting organizations. Firms, agencies, think tanks, report producers rarely sell truth. They sell a form of authority: a tone, a format, a seal.

In the Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting, this idea appears clearly, particularly in Michael Faust’s chapter, Sociological Perspectives on Management Consulting. Faust explains that in some situations the goal is not so much to obtain information as to obtain validation—because hiring institutionally approved agents brings legitimacy. Content can even become secondary.

This helps explain the stability of “corporate-friendly” discourse. The dominant discourse is the one that maximizes legitimacy at minimal cost. It signals responsibility without requiring painful transformation. It signals control without forcing anyone into uncertainty. It proposes solutions compatible with existing structures. And because those structures fund, recruit, invite, and publish, they mechanically hold a large share of public space.

It is tempting to moralize and say this world is cynical. Sometimes it is. But there is a simpler—and probably more worrying—hypothesis: many actors sincerely believe what they write, because their constraints lead them to write things that are believable. When you live off flow, you need flow. When you live off access, you need to maintain access. When you live off trust, you avoid statements that reduce trust.

The result looks like natural selection. The most disruptive analyses rarely end up at the front of the shelf. This connects to a classic idea in organizational sociology: decoupling (as formulated in Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony by John Meyer and Brian Rowan fifty years ago). Organizations adopt rules, policies, programs because doing so produces legitimacy—even if implementation remains partial, symbolic, or simply postponed. Patricia Bromley and Walter Powell describe how decoupling helps satisfy external expectations without immediately transforming internal practices, notably in From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk.

In an environment saturated with demands, decoupling is not an anomaly. It is a survival strategy. And the noise ecosystem is often the infrastructure that makes that strategy comfortable.

A long history of spin and theatrical expertise

It would be easy to believe all this was born with social media, or with the fashion for newsletters. Having launched a newsletter for a research project—trying to satisfy the foundation funding us—I have reflected a lot on my own practice. But the staging of authority is clearly much older.

Stuart Ewen, in PR!: a social history of spin, reminds us how the professionalization of public relations was built on a simple intuition: in mass societies, opinion is a terrain to govern. Edward Bernays (author of the “bible” published a century ago, Propaganda) even spoke of engineering of consent: the idea that there exists a technical work of organizing consent.

This short historical detour matters because it reminds us the problem is not only “bad information”. It is the existence of an industry of persuasion that produces narratives, categories, words, and “obviousness”. Spin is not trivial noise. It is a social technology: a way of making some things feel natural and others unthinkable. And that technology learned long ago to disguise itself—to not look like advertising, but like expertise.

This is exactly what makes LinkedIn so strange when viewed with an academic eye. You see an expertise that sometimes mimics the codes of science: charts, indicators, barometers. But chains of evidence are often blurry. That does not mean everything is false. It means form can function as a shortcut. It produces an impression of rigor, to the point where many actors no longer feel the need to trace claims back to the source.

This is where Cory Doctorow’s analysis becomes important: platforms are not neutral. They organize an attention economy. They create incentives that favor content that “optimizes” well—what is quickly understood, quickly shared, cheaply rewritten. At some point, he says, everything becomes a kind of two-sided market where users are caught between sellers and buyers, and the intermediary becomes the center of gravity.

When you combine this attention economy with the older industry of spin, you get something very strange: a system in which persuasion no longer needs to be crude. It can be soft, consensual, reasonable. It can present itself as a literature review, a briefing note, a “state of the art”. And it is precisely this shift that makes the ecosystem so invisible—and therefore so effective.

Think tanks, consulting, and the industry of “in-between”

In this landscape, think tanks occupy a fascinating position. Thomas Medvetz, in Think Tanks in America, stresses their location at the boundary of multiple worlds: research, politics, media, business. They borrow resources from each, and their strength comes from that hybrid position (mediator, translator, sometimes arbiter).

Diane Stone, in Capturing the Political Imagination, reminds us that influence does not come only from producing ideas. It comes from producing adoptable ideas—ideas with frames, with words that resonate with an imagination, with coalitions, with calendars, and above all ideas that can travel without breaking.

And then there are the media. Andrew Rich, in Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise, notes how competition for attention pushes toward rapid, media-friendly outputs. In that competition, the think tank that survives is often the one that markets its results best—until the boundary between analysis and advocacy becomes porous. That does not mean there is no serious work. It means the structural incentive rarely favors methodological doubt.

Lauren McDonald, in Think Tanks and the Media, shows how these organizations become suppliers of ready-to-use content, available experts, and easy quotes. In time-constrained journalism, those resources are precious—and structuring.

This world connects naturally to consulting. Here too there is an “in-between” dimension. The consultant is a translator: turning political problems into managerial problems; value conflicts into indicator trade-offs; scientific controversies into roadmaps; sometimes even debate into planning. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, in The Big Con, describe something that can be frightening (and that matches what I sometimes perceive): consulting becomes a major decision infrastructure, to the point where many organizations lose their capacity to think without it.

Miikka Ylönen, in Consultocracy and its discontents, argues we should take seriously this “government by consulting” as a political phenomenon. It is not only buying skills. It is delegating part of the very definition of the problem. And we know it: the one who defines the problem has already won part of the debate.

The key point, again, is legitimacy. In many situations, an organization does not buy an answer; it buys a credibility device. And that is exactly what Faust’s chapter emphasizes when it highlights the consultant’s role as a carrier of legitimacy, sometimes independently of the intrinsic quality of the recommendation.

In this landscape, the question of funding and transparency becomes central. The problem is not that funders exist. The problem is that funding structures can become invisible, while still shaping priorities, topics, and angles (the blanks and the silences). A piece on On Think Tanks, The price of independence, stresses the importance of funding transparency to evaluate real independence. And a report like Big Ideas and Big Money from the Quincy Institute documents, with examples, the role of major donors in the US think tank ecosystem.

Which brings me back to my initial puzzlement. In the corporate world, visibility is easily confused with solidity; presence with proof; format with method. And the intermediary ecosystem is extremely good at playing on those confusions—because that is where its (very profitable) rents come from.

Governing by metrics and “grey literature”

There is another dimension, less visible but just as decisive: the contemporary passion for metrics. Organizations like to measure because measurement gives the illusion of steering. Measuring allows disagreements to be converted into numbers. And numbers have a social virtue: they allow decisions without arguing—or at least with the impression of deciding without arguing.

There is a word for this: “commensuration”, i.e., transforming different things into the same unit of measure so they can be compared, ranked, aggregated. Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens, in Commensuration as a Social Process, explain how commensuration turns different qualities into comparable quantities. It is not just a technical tool; it is a social process that simplifies, hierarchizes, makes some dimensions visible while making others invisible. Once a phenomenon is converted into a score, it becomes portable, comparable—and above all, governable.

The noise ecosystem loves metrics because metrics travel well. A barometer can be repeated in one sentence. A ranking comments itself. A score compares itself. And above all, a metric installs an agenda without announcing it. The one who proposes the barometer decides what counts. The one who proposes the indicator decides what is desirable. The one who proposes the benchmark decides what “best practice” is.

This connects to another term: “grey literature”. Notes, reports, white papers, syntheses—editorial objects that do not pass through the same filters as academic publishing. They have real utility: they can make dispersed data accessible; they can quickly document a field. But they are also a space where methods can be light, incentives to conclude are strong, and conflicts of interest can be blurry.

Amanda Lawrence’s Influence seekers: The production of grey literature treats grey literature as a research object. She describes the production of these documents as influence-oriented activity, structured by networks and decision constraints. These are not technical details; they are conditions of possibility for what becomes visible.

We quickly see that the noise I described is not only an excess of communication. It is a transformation of chains of evidence. In an ideal world, a claim rests on data, methods, and debate. In the real world, it often rests on a report citing another report citing another report. At some point you reach a primary source—or you do not. But meanwhile, the claim has already produced its effects.

Manufactured ignorance and the attention economy

It is hard not to look at even more radical analyses suggesting that ignorance can be produced. Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, in Agnotology, remind us that ignorance is not only the absence of knowledge. It can be manufactured, maintained, organized. Not necessarily through direct lying, but through selecting questions, staging artificial competitions between results, focusing on attention-grabbing details, and informational overload.

Does this ring a bell? It resonates with corporate experience. We do not lack information; we lack the capacity to sort it. And that capacity is a resource: whoever controls the informational agenda controls part of decision-making. Overload, repetition, endless commentary can become an occupation strategy: a way to define reality continuously—not by producing facts, but by imposing frames of interpretation.

This links back to André Spicer’s diagnosis. Bullshit language gives an impression of depth while remaining remarkably empty, because emptiness is functional: it allows agreement without precision; it avoids conflict; it lets everyone feel aligned because no one is sure what was actually said.

And it links back to Cory Doctorow’s diagnosis. Enshittification is not just a moral critique. It is a description of what informational ecosystems become when they are structured to extract attention and value. In the end, the system prefers what reacts quickly to what is solid and robust. It prefers what triggers to what demonstrates.

Science does not disappear in this landscape. It continues: it publishes, it debates. But it stops being the default horizon of proof. It becomes an optional resource—one piece in a file, alongside a consulting report or a think tank barometer. And that changes everything: public debate starts to run on proofs of appearance rather than traceable proofs.

When noise becomes a strategy: a prelude to greenwashing

There is one domain where this mechanism appears very clearly: climate. For a simple reason: if we take the ecological transition seriously, it must be genuinely disruptive. It affects assets, rents, supply chains, consumption habits, infrastructures. It imposes trade-offs, losses, redistributions. In that context, producing legitimacy becomes a major stake.

Saying you act can be worth almost as much as acting—at least in the short run. Saying you have a plan can be enough to calm criticism, reassure investors, seduce regulators. And because action is costly, the temptation to invest first in narrative is very strong. This is where decoupling matters: an organization can adopt commitments, frameworks, and words that produce legitimacy while leaving real trajectories unchanged—or only marginally adjusted. Does that sound familiar?

There is also a discursive dimension, strictly speaking. William Lamb, Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, Timmons Roberts, Stuart Capstick, Felix Creutzig, Jan Minx, Finn Müller-Hansen, Trevor Culhane, and Julia Steinberger, in Discourses of climate delay, describe many narratives that accept the existence of the problem yet justify inaction or insufficient efforts—through shifting responsibility, promoting non-transformative solutions, etc. What is striking is that these discourses can sound reasonable. They can contain fragments of truth. Their effect is not to deny. Their effect is to slow down.

For those who think I exaggerate (or do not see what I mean), type “green+finance” into any search engine. The first page often suffices. You will find beautifully formatted pages, educational dossiers, barometers, white papers, observatories, “centers” whose status is sometimes hard to identify. It is a good preview of this economy of authority, where proof is often replaced by signs of proof.

In that context, net zero promises are an ideal observation site: enormous symbolic power, considerable technical plasticity. An InfluenceMap report explicitly talks about “net zero greenwash” when it documents gaps between communication commitments and policy engagement (see the title “Net Zero Greenwash”: The Gap Between Corporate Commitments and their Policy Engagement), notably via lobbying or industry associations. We can debate metrics and selection. But the phenomenon is there. Communication and political action are not always aligned.

We could add another layer—less moral than institutional. We often hear that we need political leaders who “know the business world”, as if familiarity guaranteed realism. The problem is that proximity also increases exposure to its stagings. If you spend your life in spaces where legitimacy is manufactured through format, tone, narrative, and seals—following Suchman’s intuition in Managing Legitimacy—it becomes difficult to distinguish information from validation.

André Spicer, in Business Bullshit, helps explain why. This language is not only empty; it is functional. It produces consensus, avoids conflict, gives the impression the problem is already framed and that all that remains is to “roll out a roadmap”. Justin Parkhurst, in The Politics of Evidence, reminds us that the risk is not only to do politics without evidence, but to make evidence itself a political object—selecting what justifies a trajectory already chosen.

Under those conditions, misalignment between communication and political action is not an accident. If decision-makers swim in the same corporate storytelling as those whose activities they must regulate, we should not be surprised if public policy tends to embrace compatible, gradual, non-conflictual, and often non-disruptive solutions—even when urgency would require the opposite.

A text from Carbon Market Watch, Zeroing in on greenwashing, highlights another mechanism just as structuring: substituting emissions reductions with “neutralization” promises via carbon credits (an idea legitimized by many academic colleagues). The article argues these practices can produce neutrality claims while leaving real emissions largely intact, and that the technical foundations of these claims are often hard to audit for non-experts. We are far from slow, careful scientific discussion. We are in an economy of slogans verifiable only by specialists (and even then).

It is unsettling that even regulators, when they try to frame these discourses, describe the problem in negative space. The UK Competition and Markets Authority, in its Guidance for businesses on making environmental claims, recalls very basic principles: claims must be clear, must not omit relevant information, must be substantiated. The guidance explicitly notes that omissions or overly broad presentations can give a misleading impression of environmental benefit.

This is where greenwashing finally enters my post, because it concentrates everything: legitimacy as key, decoupling as strategy, metrics as language, grey literature as vector, and the attention economy as accelerator. Thomas Lyon and A. Wren Montgomery, in The Means and End of Greenwash, emphasize that greenwash is an umbrella term covering varied forms of misleading communication, and they invite us to categorize and measure them rather than treating the phenomenon as a purely moral accusation.

I will stop here, partly because this introduction is already too long, and partly because greenwashing deserves to be treated as an object in its own right. This post mainly tried to describe an ecology of “scientific” authority: a milieu where intermediaries produce noise, and where that noise is rarely disruptive. It does not primarily serve to transform. It serves to stabilize, to make acceptable, to make presentable. And that is precisely why it is so interesting.

Because once you look closely, you understand that noise is not an accident of informational modernity. It is often an instrument of governance. In the next post (I spent three months writing this introductory one, so we may have to wait a bit), we will have to go into detail: the forms of greenwashing, net zero promises, labels, standards, multi-stakeholder devices. And above all the uncomfortable question running through all these pages: in a world where you can buy legitimacy by the ton, and where it becomes difficult to distinguish the engagement that matters from the engagement that is merely performing.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (February 21, 2026). The Marketplace of Expertise and Authority: Notes from the Noise Ecosystem. Freakonometrics. Retrieved March 5, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15qt7


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