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.

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Identity Theft as Systemic Risk

This blog post was initially written in French, L’usurpation d’identité comme risque systémique

I mentioned it (very briefly) the other day in my post L’écosystème du bruit et la fabrique de l’autorité, but I genuinely loved Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger. It opens with a striking anecdote: during the 2020–2021 pandemic, she was repeatedly mistaken for Naomi Wolf, to the point of being blamed for statements made by “the other Naomi”. From there, she asks a set of unsettling questions about identity.

In We are not Alone! (At least, Most of us aren’t), co-written with Baptiste Coulmont, we wondered about the probability of having a strict namesake (same first name and last name). In Doppelganger, the confusion is “only” about the first name. I devoured the book. Klein starts from a sociological intuition and turns it into a narrative. The more everyday life is digitized, the more identity becomes an interface: traces, authentication procedures, and the idea that access itself functions as proof. She describes, very concretely, the anxiety of realizing that after a hack, someone who “seems to be you” is flooding your friends with messages. And she insists on the fragility of this construction: one compromised account, or a deepfake, can bring it down in an instant.

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L’usurpation d’identité comme risque systémique

J’en avais parlé (très rapidement) l’autre jour, dans mon billet L’écosystème du bruit et la fabrique de l’autorité, j’ai vraiment beaucoup aimé le livre de Naomi Klein Doppelganger, qui commence en expliquant comment, pendant la pandémie de 2020-2021, elle a été confondue à de nombreuses reprises avec Naomi Wolf, au point de se voir reprocher les propos que l’autre Naomi avait tenus. Elle se pose beaucoup de questions passionnantes sur l’identité. Dans We are not Alone! (At least, Most of us aren’t), écrit avec Baptiste Coulmont, on se posait la question de l’existence d’un homonyme (prénom et nom), mais dans Doppelganger, c’est une confusion seulement à cause du prénom. J’ai dévoré le livre, qui part d’une intuition sociologique que Naomi Klein met en récit. Elle constate que plus la vie quotidienne se numérise, plus l’identité devient une interface, reposant sur des traces, des procédures d’authentification, et sur l’idée qu’un accès vaut preuve. Elle décrit très concrètement l’angoisse de découvrir, après un piratage, qu’une personne qui “semble être vous” inonde vos proches de messages, et elle insiste sur la fragilité de cette construction, qu’un compte compromis ou un deepfake peut faire tomber en un instant.
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