Art 12 ↔ Art 19 — Content supports free expression and information access (Article 19), but embedded analytics tracking (Article 12) collects user behavioral data without explicit consent, creating privacy interference that subordinates privacy rights to engagement measurement.

ekjhgkejhgk 2026-03-06 14:07 UTC link

These headlines are crack for HN.

VorpalWay 2026-03-06 14:10 UTC link

How was this a surprise to anyone with more than three braincells?

But I guess it is good to have this study to point to in your workplace, instead of just seeing that it is self evident.

rdevilla 2026-03-06 14:12 UTC link

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.

We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.

The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

donohoe 2026-03-06 14:19 UTC link

Its describing every second LinkedIn post, no?

kevinsync 2026-03-06 14:39 UTC link

Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said “My job is to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not be doing around this place.”

Despite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization.

It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol

NoSalt 2026-03-06 14:40 UTC link

"synergistic leadership" or "growth-hacking paradigms" are, in my opinion, what my teenage son refers to as "brain rot". I don't know where these people come from who make up these terms, or what childhood trauma has done this to them, but I absolutely cannot tolerate any of it, it makes my skin crawl.

eel 2026-03-06 14:41 UTC link

Corporate BS is the topic I want to study if I ever pursue a PhD. Not only BS that is directed from the top down, but also BS from the bottom and laterally. I'm curious what in corporate culture allows it to grow and what slows it. I also wonder if it's always bad or if it's beneficial in small amounts.

Anecdotally I have seen BS used to delay or avoid making commitments. BS can mask someone's lack of knowledge, or lack of execution. Middle managers seem to be the position to squash or spread BS. They often have a hard time detecting BS because they are too far from the work. When I think back to the best Directors and skip-level managers I have had in my career, they were all great BS detectors. They didn't let smooth talkers in their organization rise based on BS alone. They didn't let dependencies wriggle out of their commitments based on BS.

dchest 2026-03-06 14:43 UTC link

Note that this isn't a study of actual workplaces, it's based on cognitive tests, so "bad at their jobs" may be a stretch. For example, "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities" may be good for business, e.g. when dealing with US government contracts in 2026.

hsuduebc2 2026-03-06 15:18 UTC link

>Overall, the findings suggest that while “synergizing cross-collateralization” might sound impressive in a boardroom, this functionally misleading language can create an informational blindfold in corporate cultures

I believe this is the whole point. To confuse listeners and subtly manipulate them into thinking that they don't understand so they will stay quiet. Politicians do absolutely the same, in today's world it's called "smoke screen".

foundart 2026-03-06 15:34 UTC link

A good takeaway line from the article:

> Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”

and a link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corpo...

Esophagus4 2026-03-06 15:35 UTC link

There does exist some purpose for corp-speak: it is a shared language for people in disparate parts of a large organization to communicate with. It is a tool, mostly for managers.

Managers use it with peers because their job is coordination and communication.

Managers shouldn’t talk to their reports in corp-speak, but think of it like a shared protocol for all messages in the corporate message bus.

headcanon 2026-03-06 15:56 UTC link

If anyone wants a chuckle, I vibe-coded an endless supply of "synergizing paradigm" terms as a slideshow for a fake corporation. It's fun to put on in the background on a tv somewhere to see if anyone notices.

https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/

Edit: repo link: https://github.com/chronick/global-business-solutions

dlcarrier 2026-03-06 16:30 UTC link

This is what offices exist for. In fields where efficiency matters, you end up with contractors, working remotely, getting paid by the project, and not being tied to one company. This is how lots of engineering and architecture works as well as many other fields.

In a work environment dominated by office social situations, language plays a key role in establishing social status, but there are other forms of posturing, with promotions generally based more on social status than job performance, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Technical buzzwords aren't even the only kind of jargon used in this manor, there's often an entire litany of language used outside of the job functions themselves. For example, human resources has its own language rules.

The author has come across this phenomenon and is attributing it to language alone, but there is far more involved here.

jimnotgym 2026-03-06 16:37 UTC link

In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things like, what kind of AI?

jvanderbot 2026-03-06 16:53 UTC link

It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language.

Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.

A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

etc etc.

If my impressions are correct, of course ICs are going to balk at these statements - they seem disconnected from reality and are magically disconnected from the effects on purpose. Yes, this is bad management to the ICs, but it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.

A good manager takes this direction in front of all their ICs, laughs it off as corpo speak, but was given the signal to have a private talk with one of their group who triggered the problem... I dunno maybe my time in management was particularly distopian, but this seemed obvious once I saw it.

bitwize 2026-03-06 16:54 UTC link

Corporate speak, as satirized in the Weird Al hit "Mission Statement", actually serves an important social function. It signals "I'm one of you, the business class, I will align my goals with those of the organization."

It's like that phenomenon of, you have these British people, Hyacinth Bucket types. They want to be seen as upper class when they're not. So they speak in an overly polite register that they think makes them sound upper class. Actual aristocrats, by contrast, speak rather plainly amongst each other. They know where they are in society, and they know that everyone else who matters also knows.

Similarly, the people who speak of operationalizing new strategies and leveraging core competencies are trying to sound impressive to those below, and like good little do bees to those above. The people who lead an organization to success speak in terms of the actual problems they encounter and the real things that need to be done to solve them.

xg15 2026-03-06 17:37 UTC link

> “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”

That's what she said.

hmokiguess 2026-03-06 17:38 UTC link

Reminds me of how a Plumbus is made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMGd_rzRdY

garethsprice 2026-03-06 18:28 UTC link

The headline says these workers "might be bad at their jobs," but considered in the context of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" thesis - that a huge chunk of white-collar work is pointless make-work for surplus labor - then in a hierarchy that rewards BS-fluency (which Littrell speculates), they are actually _good_ at their jobs.

The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for performance, but that is only the right metric if the organization rewards individuals on the basis of their ability to make good decisions. Which anyone who has spent time in a corporate setting will know is often far from the route to success in such a setting, regardless of what the organization would say.

If your role has no concrete output and your organization rewards BS-fluency, you need a jargon that performs productivity without being too specific - so this argot isn't useless, it maintains a hierarchy that the BS-fluent can be promoted through. Not so much a rising tide but a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart. And BS-receptive workers are more satisfied with their jobs, because by their organization's actual values (versus whatever might be written in the mission statement), they're succeeding.

The BS-intolerant and analytically competent are less satisfied because they're the ones running into the blockers that the BS is covering for - or working through them only to discover that there's no tangible work to do under all the jargon.

The takeaway for me is: if you're interviewing somewhere and the hiring manager starts talking about "actualizing synergistic paradigms" instead of telling you concretely what the team shipped last quarter, it is likely one of those organizations. Places that can tell you plainly what they do are the places where your work will matter.

Animats 2026-03-06 19:23 UTC link

Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.

Then came PowerPoint.

Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.

The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.

[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...

DrewADesign 2026-03-06 14:12 UTC link

Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.

ivl 2026-03-06 14:16 UTC link

It's like crack, but for being able to be a little derogatory to the masses.

Certainly not as unhealthy as crack.

throawayonthe 2026-03-06 14:27 UTC link

i don't think it's that self-evident - many people believe on some level that these hierarchies (like in the workplace i mean), so i think it can be useful to point out the self-reinforcing bs-generating structure and that bullshit from above is still bullshit

alexc05 2026-03-06 14:41 UTC link

that's a bit of a meta discussion and it'd probably reveal some super interesting things about how tech culture have changed in the last ~15 years.

I've been on HN since 2010 (lost the password to my first account, alexc04) and I recall a time when it felt like every second article on the front-page was an bold directive pronouncement or something just aggressively certain of its own correctness.

Like "STOP USING BASH" or "JQUERY IS STUPID" - not in all caps of course but it created an unpleasant air and tone (IMO, again, this is like 16 years ago now so I may have memory degredation to some extent)

Things like donglegate got real traction here among the anti-woke crew. There have been times where the venn diagram of 4chan and hackernews felt like it had a lot more overlap. I've even bowed out of discussion for years at a time or developed an avoidance reaction to HN's toxic discussion culture.

IMO it has been a LOT better in more recent years, but I also don't dive as deep as I used to.

ANYWAYS - my point is I would be really interested to see a sentiment analysis of HN headlines over the years to try and map out cultural epochs of the community.

When has HN swayed more into the toxic and how has it swayed back and forth as a pendulum over time? (or even has it?)

I wonder what other people's perspective is of how the culture here has changed over time. I truly think it feels a lot more supportive than it used to.

hibikir 2026-03-06 14:51 UTC link

It's a bit better: They are forms of obfuscation and lowering information in a channel. They are designed for environments where being clear is very risky. In certain organizations, you are better off being unclear than asking for approval or consensus on a tricky decision: You produce an incomprehensible, vague mess of a message, and avoid argument, as argument in those places leads to paralysis.

Now, does this mean it's the right way to talk everywhere? Of course not. And since it's often seen as safe, it's overused. But it doesn't just arise, as a bug. plain language that means what it says creates more conflict, and isn't always better.

Esophagus4 2026-03-06 15:27 UTC link

LinkedIn is the worst purgatory world of this study for sure.

lo_zamoyski 2026-03-06 15:35 UTC link

That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it. Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate logic suffers from known paradoxes and permits nonsensical and vacuous inferences (like those caused by material implication). More subtle effects are expressed in, for example, the problem of bare particulars.

Formalism is a product of prior (semantic) reasoning that isn't formal. And because formalism is syntactic, not only can you still jam your semantic nonsense through it (through incoherent subjects and predicates, for example), but the formalism, stripped of semantics, can itself allow for nonsense. So formalism can actually aid and abet bad reasoning. The danger, of course, is the mistaken notion that "formal = rigorous".

Formalism is also highly impractical and tedious in many circumstances, and it can depart from human reasoning as expressed in the grammar of natural language enough to be practically inscrutable. There is no reason why natural language cannot be clear and well-written. So, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree here.

The problem with LLMs isn't that they're not "formal". It's because they're statistical machines, not reasoning machines, yet many people treat them like magical oracles.

ta988 2026-03-06 15:36 UTC link

But how much of that is real as in has measurable positive impact vs random decision making.

el_benhameen 2026-03-06 15:59 UTC link

A delightful update to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

darreninthenet 2026-03-06 16:04 UTC link

As a highly experienced consultant once said to me, forget all the objectives, priorities and corporate culture bullshit, whatever anyone tells you, your job is to make your boss look good.

persedes 2026-03-06 16:05 UTC link

Agreed, I think it also acts as a hiring filter to scan for candidates that have been exposed to this kind of language and can speak it fluently. The bigger the cooperation, the more widespread that is though, don't see it as often in mid sized companies. Was looking into a director role at a large org and there were lots of very new words thrown at me very quickly.

utopiah 2026-03-06 16:09 UTC link

Which is precisely why proper scammers, not to say "top" management, is excellent at spotting keywords, or even better shibboleh, and using them. If they must they'll even learn and adopt new keywords from HBR or whatever trendy management publication can help them look the par.

fnands 2026-03-06 16:14 UTC link

Some of those pictures are delightfully cursed

vjvjvjvjghv 2026-03-06 16:17 UTC link

You may be right but often I feel it’s a tool to sound confident while at the same time having no idea what they are doing.

linolevan 2026-03-06 16:20 UTC link

This is awesome. Almost all of these are believable even if you're looking at pretty carefully. I need this on a firestick or something.

AnimalMuppet 2026-03-06 16:38 UTC link

But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms", isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?

You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.

dkarl 2026-03-06 16:48 UTC link

Bullshit is so dangerous because it could mean something. That VP could mean, it's time to look beyond the set of mature technologies we've been considering and look at newer technologies that we would normally ignore because they come with risks and rough edges and higher cost of ownership.

So it might be a substantive decision that affects how everybody in the room will do their jobs going forward. Or it could be a random stream of words chosen because they sound impressive, which everyone will nod respectfully at and then ignore. And like an LLM, he might have made it into his current position without needing to know the difference.

PunchyHamster 2026-03-06 17:04 UTC link

Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR person for your own department, not just a manager, especially if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks

PunchyHamster 2026-03-06 17:07 UTC link

The corpo-speak sounds like mostly way to communicate contentious things in nice way, everything done to not sound negative or aggresive, while knowing (or hoping) that other side gets the message.

It is awfully unproductive way to do it but I'm sure HR approves.

jjk166 2026-03-06 17:40 UTC link

In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.

janalsncm 2026-03-06 17:42 UTC link

Reminds me of corporate ipsum

https://www.corporate-ipsum.com/

gregw2 2026-03-06 18:00 UTC link

A bit of "hacker history"... at the dawn of the web 1993 was birthed the first app (that I know of) along these lines: "Buzzword Bingo".

It got mentioned in WSJ of all places as news of it spread.

For the history+app from its creator, see:

https://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/

(Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo )

I'm glad to see, 25-30 years later, the hackers/cynical-tech-workers who birthed it getting justified by actual social science research.

stephbook 2026-03-06 18:09 UTC link

Understandable. None of us is one of those sheeple! /s

wmeredith 2026-03-06 18:13 UTC link

It's called busy-ness for a reason.

alexjplant 2026-03-06 18:21 UTC link

Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera. Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by people trying to sound cooler than they are.

On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.

hyperman1 2026-03-06 18:29 UTC link

There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct reports, then their underlings, etc.

So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases.

These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.

leonardoe 2026-03-06 20:30 UTC link

This observation really resonates with me. I have spent a lot of energy trying to communicate that ditching formal languages for natural language is a terrible idea in some (most?) domains. The power of formal languages comes precisely from their "limitations".

Software is not the output. The output is the theory-building process by which one arrives a formal description of both the problem and (hopefully) the solution. Avoiding the effort to express a problem (or a model of the problem) in a formal language is a self-defeating enterprise.

pessimizer 2026-03-06 21:01 UTC link

I absolutely think that this is the result of the chaotic formation of a bizarre American religion (that is largely universal among the world's "middle class" now.) It's Silva Mind Control -> Leadership Dynamics -> Holiday Magic, Scientology, Large Group Awareness Training (as you can still see in the Landmark Forum), Synanon, etc.; mixed up in a pot with hippie language/consciousness raising, 70s-80s spiritual self-help Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts/Seth neo-Spiritualism; all banged in with garbled Cybernetics, RAND corporation papers, military operations jargon and the 70s-80s obsession with personal physical fitness and orthorexia.

In the end, you just have this universal language to justify and excuse power and blame victims for being weak enough to be victimized. Powerful people move with the energy flow and direct it, and weak people move against it, twist it, and are twisted by it. Mastery of this makes money and happiness flow towards you, and resistance to it makes money and happiness flow away from you.

Very convenient moral calculus for people who inherited money and hand it to people who do what they say. Convenient justification to do anything that pays, no matter how corrupt and harmful. If it were really harmful, it wouldn't pay in the end. And isn't everything harmful, in a way, to some extent?

In the 80s, you start to see books laying out fairly incoherent systems for total personal, business and societal organization, but the premises are really drawn from all of the previous nonsense. It's easy to say it's stupid, but leading into this time (and dying during this time along with its practitioners) the overwhelmingly dominant psychological theory was the cynical word salad of Freudian psychoanalysis. This stuff was honestly more based in the real world.

> Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication.

This is the time when the terminology was finally settling. There was to be a new priesthood of consultants. Tbh, I don't think that it's designed to be popular, it's designed to supply language to justify predatory acts. This was also the rise of the "think tank," which came to dominate society through writing laws and supplying the language to help politicians deliver for their donors.

I still think that the real harm was done by the popularization of Freud, training the public to speak about the real world in speculative, scientistic, psychological terms. This sort of management language just washes over people trained not to ever verify their theory-theories against any sort of real outcomes (i.e. Freud), other than the post hoc justification of wealth.

My father went into "organizational development" in the late-80s at Allstate Insurance. Bringing this all full-circle, it turned out he was also being trained in crypto-Scientology: https://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate2.html

Sorry about the rant, it might come off as word salad. I wish it was.

nostrademons 2026-03-06 22:31 UTC link

> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.

Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.

If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.

mikkupikku 2026-03-06 23:44 UTC link

You all will hate me for pointing this out, but it strongly correlates with women entering the executive ranks of corporate America in the 80s. Complain about new age corporate jargon and see who joins in and agrees with you; more men than women. Complaining about it is masculine coded, just like pretending to not know the difference between red and maroon. And who are the most enthusiastic workplace champions of the latest corporate culture initiative? Almost always women. These are gross generalities with many exceptions, but I stand by it.

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