On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine after years of diplomatic escalation. The news sparked a flurry of reporting, setting the stage for what many feared could escalate into a worldwide conflict. Global outlets covered the event with varying shades of concern, from the start of a new global crisis to the ominous possibility of nuclear threats. Both sides of the Atlantic watched with a mix of alarm and disbelief as the conflict seemed to knock on their very doors. Putin’s military initiative has been covered by Russian media as a "special military operation".
Well, that’s one way to describe invading a country.
War is obviously a nasty business and countries have always sought ways to interfere in each other's affairs in a deniable manner. Since the professionalization of intelligence services in the aftermath of the Second World War, this kind of behaviour has become known as covert action — essentially doing things that can influence events without it being completely obvious who's behind it, or what’s the real intent. A military offensive is only as plausible as a “special military operation” to the extent you are legitimized to claim your right to self-defense, while denying unprovoked violence.
Governments engage in ambiguous propaganda when they can plausibly refute accountability. The intention or execution of the act itself may not necessarily be secret, but the motif or sponsorship thereof remains intentionally hidden. This works even when plausibly deniable interventions are an open secret — implausibly deniable — like the CIA's failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, or large-scale paramilitary operations in Laos, Angola and Afghanistan.
But plausible deniability is not an exclusive prerogative of military operations.
I believe this kind of duality in language is surprisingly poorly conceptualized and often misunderstood, both in cultural discourse and professional practice. The infiltration of calculated ambiguity across domains other than the political or military casts a long shadow on our societal quest for truth-seeking and critical thought. At its core, plausible deniability is the hallmark of the power wielded by sociopaths who maneuver through the murky with a clean slate and who comfort their leadership with the reassurance of unpunished open secrecy. It’s the trademark of those who want their cake and eat it too.
So how do I define plausible deniability?
Plausible deniability is the act of allowing an entity to deny their involvement in a certain act. The nature of this definition is purposefully confused, and it shows blurred lines with deception, it’s “silent warfare” that conflates visibility with acknowledgement. Either way, it amounts to a rather vague concept often used too casually. Since the conceptual window of interpretation is intentionally left wide open here, I thought I could contribute with my very own definition: plausible deniability is, in essence, a very sophisticated expression of bullshit.
Similarly to warfare, corporate governance schemes are also breeding ground for plausibly deniable choreographies. In the OpenAI’s “Oops d’Etat”, it was very unclear from the beginning what the specific issue the board fired Altman over was. There were many speculations orbiting around one of the most discussed crisis in tech of all times. When there’s much at stake and complexity is hard to navigate, vagueness of lexicon offers a form of downside protection by creating asymmetry of information — only a tight circle of insiders know what’s really going on, and without that information you can’t take them down. Even if the board had personal motives to oust Altman, you wouldn’t directly accuse them of that, because you don’t really know the extent to which Sama has been “not consistently candid”. It’s like Putin citing Article 51 of the UN Charter to introduce “preventive self-defense” — at least to some Russian propagandists, it’s plausible that his words match his intentions.
Startups are actually another good example where you see a lot of this kind of behaviors. Think about Elizabeth Holmes. She was a master in creating the kind of verbal slippage between what Theranos was doing and what Theranos actually did. In one of her earliest talks, she said: “We’ve made it possible to run comprehensive laboratory tests from a tiny sample or a few drops of blood that could be taken from a finger and we’ve made it possible to eliminate the tubes and tubes of blood that traditionally have to be drawn from an arm”. This is the kind of experience that will tune your ear not only to the many sentence-level issues that can obfuscate clarity, but also to the rhetorical characteristic of what I believe is, in fact, technically dubbed as bullshit.
The dreadful truth is that the rhetorical slippage in characters like Holmes is a feature, not a bug of a certain culture of ambiguity-by-design. From the perspective of clarity and accountability, it is an important failure. But from that of business, it enabled her success, albeit for not so long. If those details sound like light imprecisions, it is because her legal team did enable that. Certainly, on the back of that her legal team pointed out a series of legal judo moves that would give Holmes the plausible deniability the she, mind you, did not make the claims she actually made. It’s you that misinterpreted that.
Crypto too is another territory where common language is distorted to provide ample latitude of meaning. When SBF was caught, he kept saying there was a liquidity crisis at FTX, which was 100% not true. A liquidity crisis implies that he took deposits, flipped them into good, but illiquid investments, and ran into trouble because people asked for more cash than FTX had on hand. FTX actually had a solvency crisis, where he took deposits, put them in completely inappropriate investments (many of which are now worthless, all of which were speculative nonsense) and is now revealed to have done that. He used the concepts of "bank runs" and "liquidity crises" because that's sort of an "aww shucks, got caught in an unfortunate circumstance". Less clarity slows down scrunity. (Sometimes it doesn’t).
So how did grey, blurry use of language become so widespread?
This semantic posture towards concept representation is typical of the modern age post WWII, and more precisely from the Cold War onwards. And for a reason! The Cold war was a period of very tense open secrecy, where two superpowers confront each others by pretending to always not be engaged in such rivalry, and claiming their distance from events even in front of evidence. From that historical moment onwards, we collectively witnessed a fragmentation of the objective truth, where each party claim righteousness on the shaky grounds of a progressively paper-thin alibi. There, we invented the “post-truth” world.
“Post-truth” became a popular term to describe when objective circumstances are less influential than emotional appeal or personal belief. But post-truth is not exclusively about politics. It’s about a problem regarding truth in everyday life. Perhaps unsurpinsingly, post-truth also coincised with a pronounced decline in societal religiosity. Typically, in the absence of grand unifying theories that provide a sense of progress and comprehension, people turn to less empirical avenues for meaning, such as ideologies, conspiracy theories, or pseudo-sciences. Where a unifying spiritual and moral ideology lacks in attractiveness, individuals tend more to groupthink, where membership in a community is conditioned on accepting the community's "truths," however unfounded they might be. Consequently, they are also a lot more susceptible to believe very implausible truths, and acknowledge them as true. This is also why the Russian doublespeak of a “special military operation” can reinforce the autoritarian construct of an imperialistic Russia, one that uses force within its own domain, of which Ukraine is nothing but a part.
A post-truth world also rises from the ashes of stagnation theory. In a post-truth world, when innovation and scientific discovery slows down, people start valuing truth not for its actual importance but for how useful it is to them. This slowdown makes people doubt scientific experts, leading to increased skepticism about things like validity of booster shots. If even physics, the most foundamental among scientifi disciplines, stops advancing, what credibility so-called experts of downstream scientific fields might hold? The erosion of trust makes people more inclined to embrace unverified evidence on the basis of personal appeal.
One of the many effects of the proliferation of “grey language” is the engorgement of a class of “clueless” people. In “The Gervais Principle”, Venkatesh Rao illiustrates a brilliant management theory of comapany hierarchy inspired by the TV show “The Office”. Though I believe the theory to be an incredibly sophisticated analysis of how corporates build and preserve power, it’s not a wild stretch to imagine how it can also apply to other hierarchically organized social structures.
The fascinating aspect of this theory is that, while most most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, the Gervais Principle would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop. Let a natural, if declawed, individualist Darwinism operate beyond that point. It may be horrible, but like democracy, it is the best you can do. It is a much more cynic explanation of organizational dynamics, and one where the vagueness of accountability structures is key to power preservation.
In the Gervais Principle, the Sociopaths sit at the top of the organizational pyramid. They are creatures fluent in power talk, corporate speak, and any other permutation of the art of the vague. At the bottom, the Losers are those who have struck bad economic bargains, living paycheck-to-paycheck, who have no loyalty to any collective and try to maximize their personal fulfilment. The Clueless are the ones who lack competence to rise to the top, and build a perverse sense of loyalty to the system, even when the system doesn’t reward them for that. They are capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm, no matter how pathological those running it turn out to be. When cast adrift in the open ocean, they are the ones most likely to be utterly destroyed.
In Douglas Adams’ vicious history of our planet, humanity was founded by a spaceship full of the Clueless, sent here by scheming Sociopaths. The ability to direct other people’s action or divert the attention from yours with the use of ambiguos language is both the feature of Sociopaths, and the curse of the Clueless. How? By shifting blame from the locus of the “agent” (SBF operating a ponzi) to the one of an external “principal” (a liquidity crisis in the market), leaving the Clueless cursed (or broke).
Where there’s no objective truth, there’s also no objective guilt, and there’s always ambiguity of individual responsibility. Sociopaths understand that, and exploit this aperture between intent and action to obtain a free pass for all sorts of wrongdoings, as the true Machiavellian charaters they are. This is deference of action with a built-in insurance policy. If my plan succeeds, I can get whatever I want. If I fail, I get a slap of the wrist, and eventually blame it on others, circumstances, or incompetence.
The worrying side of the story is less about Sociopaths’ behavior, though.
Like crime rates climb when sanctions are unexpected, Sociopaths only emerge as a response to a system that allow them to exist. Sociopaths need a layer of enough Clueless padding the risk of a nuclear explosion for every risk they decide to take. The Clueless get manipulated, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that they construct a sophisticated delusion to tell themselves they are not.
I mean, fool me once, …
What I suspect is happening in a post-truth world is a vicious cycle where more Sociopaths rise to the top facilitated by the murky waters of a progressively ambigous use of language. As a consequence, they need more and more Clueless to enforce their plots and take their blame if shit hits the fan. Clueless are too smart to remain in the anonimity of Losers, but too incompetent to see what’s truly happening, so they participate in the game. They fabricate sophisticated delusions to justify the correct use of descriptors such as “special military operations” or “liquidity crisis”. They are enthusiastic and bright-eyed, but in their loyalty to a pathological organization, they lose their own identity, along with critical thinking.
This barely scratches the surface of the social consequences of an ever-growing class of Clueless functionaries. The absence of a collectively shared truth creates a world of fragmented interpretations of reality, and an almost secure promise of conflict. It also promotes the idea that the path to the top is paved with a combination of deep-seated delusion that culminates in Machiavellian distortions. And the proliferation of greyness in language transmits the impression that the only way to fend off the sirens of plausibly deniable language is a constant paranoia about what’s true and what’s not. I’m sure there’s much more to be investigated here — I take a mental note to come back to this topic again.