how and why corporate jargon and technobabble lull the mind
Yes, sadly, some of the worst stereotypes about corporate culture really are true.
The very first thing I wrote which got a modicum of virality by 2009 standards was an article dissecting a grimly interesting study about workplace dynamics in which those who acted very confidently and came up with solutions quickly, were usually seen as better and more competent leaders, even if their solutions were wrong. Just show up, talk a lot, offering more answers, and you’ll likely be seen as leadership material.
Now, there’s a similarly fascinating corollary to this research, this one regarding soul-sucking corporate jargon. Today, far too many white collar workers will unironically ask if they can circle back so you can collaborate on synergies vis-a-vis low hanging fruit in B2B PaaS space when you have some bandwidth, of course. Meanwhile, they’ll take point on an agenda and get a slide deck together for your next touchbase.
If you either rolled your eyes into the back of your head so hard you heard your optic nerves crack, or re-read it wondering if anyone actually talks like this, and if so, what exactly in the name of Cthulhu’s left testicle you’ve just read, both are quite sane and normal reactions to corporate speak.
Known for its deliberate coldness, soullessness, and pretentiousness, it takes a, shall we say, certain kind of person to actually like using it. And if your initial assumption is that the person in question just likes showing off to obfuscate for their lack of actual, concrete competence in that area, well, science says you’re absolutely right.
In a study of a thousand Americans and Canadians, those who struggled to tell the difference between real corporate statements and a corporate buzzword salad that was randomly generated by a bot, calling both meaningful, tended to do poorly on tests of analytical thinking, problem-solving, and introspection. On top of that, they made poor decisions when presented with case studies used to teach how to solve common business problems.
Weirdly enough, despite objectively not being all that great at their jobs, the people in question were usually quite happy in corporate environments, highly engaged, pretty inspired by buzzword-larded speeches, and admired their executives as charismatic and highly competent. Hence, they wanted to adopt the same buzzwords, emulating the speech they saw as both profound and aspirational.
the psychology of profound nonsense
This makes me wonder if there’s a connection here with another study on how some of us perceive statements that sound profound even when they’re just nonsense to impress those who don’t know any better. It looked into 26 experiments with 13,500 test subjects from the same countries and found that people who tended to fall for pseudo-profound bullshit also didn’t exactly dazzle researchers on tests of cognitive reflection and mathematical reasoning.
Basically, they often failed at tests requiring them to overrule their gut feelings to get answers that were factually correct instead of just sounding like they were because they made intuitive sense to the test subject. As a result, they also tended to be avid conspiracy theorists and easily fell pray to disinformation as long as it matched their confirmation biases and sounded highly elaborate.
Combine this propensity for finding deep, important meanings in empty or downright obfuscatory phrases with a desire to sound clever and important like their bosses and people higher up in the socioeconomic hierarchy, and you’re almost certainly going to get a personality that loves corporate buzzwords for all the wrong reasons.
I would also bet this applies to common technobabble employed by our current tech oligarchs — who either aren’t technical experts or are completely out of touch by this point in their careers — so your colleague who keeps asking IT if they can make some tool “more agentic” without an elaboration of why they think this would help, or keeps saying “serverless cloud” in a design meeting as the architects and engineers groan and deflect, is probably guilty of the same mindset.
You see, yes, having a tool using a large language model employ multiple agents can improve its performance and results by splitting up complex tasks and doing them in parallel. And sure, serverless cloud is great for routine, predictable batch jobs you do not want to spend hours and human effort on micromanaging.
But summoning an army of agents for tasks with well defined sequential steps will just create a slow, expensive mess. Meanwhile, serverless doesn’t actually mean there are no servers. It means that you handed implementation over to your cloud provider, who will be happy to send you an eye-watering, heart-stopping bill for turning the dials up to 11 during a peak compute event for which you didn’t plan.
the passive mind is corporate’s best friend
None of this is important to the people in question. Those are trendy terms they see online, created specifically to appeal to them, and make them sound like they know what they’re talking about to their peers, or at least according to their perception of the world around them. It’s just harder to get away with it because those terms have concrete meanings and aren’t simply nebulous euphemisms, unlike “synergy” and “rightsizing.”
Point is that the corporate world is generally set up to welcome people who operate with gut feeling, like to just go with the flow, and focus on hierarchies to understand their place in life. Meanwhile, it’s often hostile, both passively and actively, to those who don’t, who ask too many questions and scoff at pretentious jargon all too often meant to sanitize the cruel, amoral, or inhumane, or puff up something simple.
Now, I know what you might be thinking as you’re reading through what sounds like a scathing condemnation of white collar office work, ironically enough, using plenty of polite euphemisms and implications.
“Hey! This asshole is saying that enjoying white collar work or being inspired by CEOs or entrepreneurs is for dumb-dumbs who like to use big words they don’t understand! Who does this condescending prick think he is?!”
While I understand why it comes across this way, there’s more context to consider. In the last decade and a half, I’ve yet to see any evidence that bad performances on the aforementioned tests is an accurate reflection of ability. Quite the contrary. Aptitude between people varies, sure, but effort and motivation significantly improve scores, meaning that you can train yourself for more active and skeptical reasoning.
And this is what’s so concerning here. Corporate jargon and peddlers of social media ready viral profundities prey on passive people, people comfortable in following along, people who are confused and irritated when confronted with too many options. Their job is to pretend to give them enough of what feels like substance to remain passive. But ultimately, any of us can ask for real meaning and demand real conversations that we need to have, not just the ones our current society is comfortable having.
See: Littrell, Shane. (2026) The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes, Personality and Individual Differences 255(113699) DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2026.113699
Sepúlveda-Páez, G. et al. (2025). Relationship Between Bullshit, Cognitive Skills, and Belief Systems: A Meta‐Analytic Review, ACP 39(1) DOI: 10.1002/acp.70029