Future-Ready for Nothing: The Bullshit Grammar of Neoliberal Crisis Management
There is a sentence that now appears, in one variation or another, in every university strategy document, every consultancy pitch, every leadership job advertisement, every transformation roadmap that crosses my desk.
It promises to address complexity, improve performance, and build resilient, future-focused solutions.
Read it once and it sounds like competence. Read it twice and the floor drops out. There is nothing underneath. The sentence is a surface with no depth, a grammar with no referent, a confident voice speaking into a void it has manufactured and then volunteered to manage.
I want to take this language seriously precisely because it asks not to be taken seriously, because its power lies in sliding past the reader before the reader can ask the only questions that matter.
Address complexity of what? Improve performance for whom, measured against what, in service of which end? Build resilient solutions to which problem, a problem that, you will notice, is never actually named? This is not careless writing. It is a precise technology of evasion, and it is doing exactly the work it was built to do. The banality of the empty slogans and the near absolute photocopy from one pitch to another exposes the bullshit school these managers are taking their lessons from. Some or the other big five consulting corporation that has manufactured the training programme, wrapped it in sheen, and marketed it as the next leadership mantra.
Bullshit, in the technical sense
Harry Frankfurt's small classic drew a distinction we have allowed ourselves to forget. The liar, Frankfurt argued, still honours truth: she knows what is true and bends her statement away from it. The bullshitter does something more corrosive. He is indifferent to whether his words correspond to anything at all. Truth and falsehood are simply not the axis he is operating on. He is producing an effect, the impression of seriousness, capability, forward motion, and the actual state of the world is beside the point.
This is the right name for "future-focused solutions." z
The strategy deck is not lying about complexity. To lie about complexity it would have to first commit to a claim about the world that could be checked. It does no such thing. "Complexity" here is not a description; it is a mood. It gestures at difficulty-in-general so that the expert who has arrived to "address" it can never be found wrong, because nothing falsifiable was ever asserted. Notice, too, that the sentence offers solutions without ever stating a problem.
A solution detached from a named problem is the perfect commodity form: infinitely sellable because permanently unfalsifiable, a product that can be invoiced forever because it can never be delivered or refused.
The vocabulary, word by word
Take complexity first. The world is, of course, complex. But in this dialect "complexity" performs a specific ideological operation: it converts political-economic arrangements, which were built by particular people, serve particular interests, and could be dismantled, into something that resembles weather. Complexity is presented as an ambient condition to be navigated, never a structure to be changed. You do not abolish weather; you buy better umbrellas, and someone is always selling umbrellas. The moment a question of power ("who decided this, who profits, who pays") is rephrased as a question of complexity ("how do we navigate this challenging environment"), the political has been quietly converted into the technical, and the only people authorised to speak are those fluent in the technical register.
That conversion is the whole game.
Improve performance completes the move by hollowing out the very idea of a good. Performance against what? The word is deliberately empty of substance so that it can be filled by whatever the metric happens to measure, citations, throughput, engagement, "impact," enrolments, units shipped. Performance becomes its own justification, an end that has eaten all its ends. This is the audit culture in its purest distillation: a world in which the number stands in for the thing, and improving the number stands in for improving the world, until eventually no one can remember there was ever supposed to be a difference.
Then resilient, and here we reach the most revealing word of the lot. Resilience presumes shocks. It assumes, as a fixed background condition, that crises will arrive and arrive again, and it quietly accepts that our task is not to prevent them but to absorb them. Who absorbs? Always the same bodies: the worker told to be agile, the community told to be resourceful, the casualised academic told to be adaptable, the precariat told to upskill and reskill and pivot. Resilience-talk is how the system externalises its own fragility downward and then rebrands the resulting suffering as personal virtue. The world has been made dangerous by specific arrangements of capital, and the dangerous world is then handed back to those it endangers with the instruction: be resilient. Structural violence is re-described as a deficiency of individual fortitude. The shock is naturalised; only the response is up for discussion.
And future-focused, the temporal sleight of hand that holds the whole edifice together. The future is invoked precisely in order to escape the present. There is always a future arriving for which we must prepare, and this perpetual preparation is itself the product on sale. "Future readiness" is a state you can never reach, by design, because arrival would end the contract. The future is the place to which present claims for justice are perpetually deferred; not yet, not yet, first we must become future-ready, while the present, where actual people are actually suffering under actual arrangements, is rendered a mere staging ground.
This is progress as Benjamin described it: a storm blowing from paradise, piling wreckage at our feet, and we are told to keep our eyes fixed forward on the horizon so that we never look down.
An economy of empty roles
None of this is merely rhetorical. This grammar builds an economy. Every hollow phrase is a market opportunity; every market opportunity is a job advertisement; every job advertisement is a career for someone who has learned that the path to security in this system is not to make anything, grow anything, teach anything, or heal anything, but to manipulate the empty signifiers with a straight face. These are, in the only honest description, bullshit roles, and I use Graeber's term advisedly, because his analysis cuts deeper than most people who quote him allow. His scandalous observation was not simply that useless jobs exist. It was that they proliferate, that an economy supposedly obsessed with efficiency manufactures, in vast numbers, positions whose own occupants privately suspect contribute nothing. They persist because they serve a function that has nothing to do with production: they discipline. They channel the educated into harmless symbol-shuffling. They keep people busy, indebted, and grateful, and therefore quiet.
And note the moral inversion that comes with it, which Graeber named precisely: the more obviously necessary your labour, the nurse, the cleaner, the carer, the teacher, the worker who grows the food and the worker who collects the rubbish, the less you are paid and the less you are respected. Meanwhile the strategist who synergises future-ready resilience solutions sits near the top of the pay scale, producing nothing that could be missed if it vanished overnight. The bullshit economy does not merely waste labour. It insults the labour that sustains us, and then asks that labour to be resilient about it.
The parasite needs the wound
Here is the circularity I most want you to see, because it is where the analysis turns from critique into indictment. The same system that produces this vocabulary produces the crises the vocabulary claims to manage. Extremist neoliberalism, the gutting of the public, the privatisation of the commons, the casualisation of work, the foreclosure of the future through climate inaction and debt, generates fragility, precarity, and breakdown as its ordinary output. And then, having broken the world, it generates a professional apparatus to "address" the breakage: the resilience officers, the transformation consultants, the future-readiness leads, the strategists of complexity.
This apparatus does not, cannot, want the wound to heal. The resilience consultant requires the world to remain fragile; that fragility is his market. The future-readiness officer requires the future to remain foreclosed; foreclosure is her job security. The crisis-manager has no incentive to end crisis, because crisis is the substrate on which the entire role feeds. So the same managerial class that profits from "managing" precarity has a structural stake in the persistence of precarity, which is why the language can sound so urgent about problems it will never permit itself to solve. It is parasitism dressed as stewardship, and it has captured the very institutions, the university chief among them, that once held some residual obligation to name structures rather than serve them.
What the words bury
From within the culture-centred approach, this is recognisable as a communicative monoculture: a register that does not merely dominate but that crowds out, starves, and finally erases every other way of speaking about what is happening to us. It is a structure that produces a culture of language, and that culture of language then disciplines the agency of everyone who must speak in it to be heard. To get the job, win the grant, pass the review, you must speak future-ready; and once you speak it, you can no longer say the things the dialect was built to make unsayable.
What does it make unsayable? Everything material. The bodies. The labour. The names of those who decide and those who pay. Where the strategy document says "navigate complexity," the subaltern says we are being dispossessed, and these are the people doing it. Where it says "build resilience," the worker says stop breaking the thing you are telling me to endure. Where it says "future-focused," the community organising at the margins says we have demands about the present, and they are owed to us now. The monoculture has no slot for any of this. It cannot register a claim of justice; it can only register a challenge to be optimised. That incapacity is not a bug. The erasure of the structural, the material, and the subaltern is the precise ideological labour the language exists to perform.
A different grammar
So I will not be future-ready, and I will not address complexity, and I have no resilient solutions to offer. I want, instead, the older and more dangerous grammar, the one I learned long before I learned this one, in a register of May Day and street theatre and the flat materialist insistence that words are never innocent of class. A grammar that points. That names the structure instead of mystifying it, names the beneficiary instead of dissolving him into "stakeholders," names the wound and the hand that made it. A grammar in which "the future" is not a market to be readied for but a thing we build together, in the present, against the people currently foreclosing it; in which resilience is replaced by solidarity, because the answer to a manufactured shock is not to absorb it more gracefully but to remove the people manufacturing it; in which performance gives way to purpose, and complexity to honesty.
The neoliberal zeitgeist is empty, and it parades that emptiness as readiness because emptiness is the one thing it has to sell. Our task is not to fill it with better solutions. It is to refuse the sentence entirely, to stop letting it slide past, to stop the floor from dropping out, to plant our feet on the ground it has emptied and ask, every time, the questions it was built to prevent: for whom, against whom, who pays, and who decides. Those questions are not future-focused. They are owed now.
