Fuck the Facade: Why Authentic Language Anchors Real Governance

Summary

Corporate language isn't just boring; it's a technique of control. When governance documents say "we'll consider strategic options" instead of "lol absolutely fucking not", they obscure reality, prevent accountability, and exclude the humans they claim to serve.

This essay examines how sanitized institutional language systematically maintains power structures while authentic language (even crude, profane language) threatens those structures by naming uncomfortable truths. I argue that profanity in governance documents isn't unprofessional; it's anti-bullshit.

When open source communities adopt corporate speak, they lose touch with their founding purpose. When they preserve authentic human language (including deliberate crudeness) they maintain the friction necessary for real democracy.

The choice is stark: facades that protect power, or fuck-the-facade honesty that preserves human agency.

Terminology:

Corporate Speak

The sanitized professional language of institutions, characterized by euphemism, abstraction, and deliberate vagueness. "Leveraging synergies," "optimizing stakeholder value," "right-sizing operations."

Corporate speak operates through what Orwell called "operators and verbal false limbs": phrases that replace simple verbs with complex constructions. Instead of "decide," we "make a determination." Instead of "fire," we "implement workforce adjustments."

The function isn't communication but obfuscation. Corporate speak makes the unacceptable sound reasonable ("collateral damage"), the meaningless sound important ("driving engagement"), and the simple sound complex ("utilize" instead of "use").

Key characteristic: You can read entire paragraphs without forming a mental picture of what's actually happening. That's the point.

Authentic Language

Direct human speech that names things as they are, including emotional responses, crude reactions, and uncomfortable truths. "This is fucked," "I don't understand this," "We're lying to ourselves."

Authentic language preserves what corporate speak erases: accountability ("I fucked up" vs "mistakes were made"), emotion ("I'm pissed off" vs "concerns have been raised"), and clarity ("you're fired" vs "your position has been made redundant").

Includes profanity not as performance but as precision. Sometimes "bullshit" is the only accurate term. Includes admission of ignorance, expressions of frustration, and rejection of false positivity.

Key characteristic: Creates immediate mental pictures of human impact. When someone says "this decision will fuck over junior developers," you understand exactly what's at stake.

Related Piece:

Bill C-2: The Recursive Absurd in Legislative Form - The exact kind of bullshit language that can obfuscate authoritarian legislation.

The recursive absurd - What we aim to reject by the use of authentic, human language.

To be absolutely clear,

I do not condone harmful language. Codes of conducts are important and must be taken seriously. Slurs, threats, and other unacceptable forms of speech should not be tolerated. If they excuse their behaviour with "I'm just being authentic", call out their bullshit, reply: "Yeah, an authentic asshole", be authentic right back.

Authenticity is not an excuse for cruelty. Assholes should be called out.

Section V. The Boundaries of Brutal Honesty goes over this in depth, but I wanted to make this absolutely clear in the beginning, as to not be misinterpreted or misrepresented.

I. The Distance Between "Strategic Options" and "Absolutely Fucking Not"

Picture two responses to any unwanted proposal - a tech acquisition, a policy change, a constitutional amendment:

Response A: "The governance committee will evaluate all strategic options to maximize stakeholder value while maintaining alignment with our core mission and values framework. We appreciate this opportunity for dialogue and will conduct appropriate due diligence to assess synergies and potential optimization of resource allocation."

Response B: "lol absolutely fucking not."

Which response tells you what's actually happening? Which one makes the community's position crystal clear to everyone: members, media, and the acquiring company?

The corporate response uses 42 words to say nothing. It could mean yes, no, or maybe. It commits to nothing while sounding thoughtful. It protects the speakers from accountability. If they later accept the acquisition, they never said no. If they reject it, they were just "evaluating options."

The authentic response uses three words (four if you count "lol") to communicate everything: the offer is absurd, we're not even considering it, and we find the very suggestion laughable. No accountability shield. No escape hatch. No plausible deniability.

Orwell on Political Language

In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell provides devastating examples of how euphemism transforms atrocity into bureaucracy. "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification."

He identified specific mechanisms of corruption: dying metaphors ("toe the line"), operators that avoid simple verbs ("render inoperative" instead of "break"), pretentious diction using Greek/Latin roots to elevate simple statements, and meaningless words that have "several different meanings which cannot be reconciled."

His most damning observation: "Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

The translation exercise proves his point. Ecclesiastes in plain English: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift" (49 words). In modern bureaucratese: "Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity" (38 unnecessary syllables of Latin abstraction).

Whether it's "centering stakeholder voices" or "preserving institutional integrity," corporate speak avoids saying what you actually mean: no.

It's all theater - inclusivity theater or stability theater - but the dishonesty is the same.

How Corporate Speak Invaded Open Source

Early open source communication was direct - sometimes harsh, but always clear. Contributors knew exactly where they stood, what was broken, and what needed fixing.

But as projects grew and sought corporate funding, the language shifted. Direct criticism became "diplomatic feedback." Clear rejections became "ongoing evaluations." The pendulum swung from brutal honesty to suffocating politeness.

Now "your code doesn't handle edge cases" becomes "I appreciate your contribution and wonder if we might explore additional test coverage for certain scenarios." Technical criticism drowns in diplomatic cushioning until the actual problem disappears.

Authentic language in governance isn't about being edgy. It's about preserving the feedback loops democracy requires. When people understand what's actually being decided, they can participate. When everything's wrapped in corporate speak, only those fluent in bullshit can play.

II. The Bullshit Jobs Born from Bullshit Language

Governance documents - from open source to city councils to national constitutions - breed meaningless complexity. "The Steering Committee delegates operational management to the Technical Oversight Committee, which reports to the Governing Board via the Advisory Council liaison."

What the fuck does that mean? Who decides? Whether it's merging code or passing laws, this is what happens when language loses its connection to reality: it creates governance with no connection to reality either.

Graeber on Bullshit Jobs and Managerial Feudalism

David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" (2018) reveals how bureaucratic language creates and maintains meaningless work. A bullshit job, he defines, is "a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obligated to pretend that this isn't the case."

One informant, working in pharmaceutical marketing, describes writing reports with titles like "How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders," which he admits is "pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments."

Graeber shows how modern corporations evolved into "managerial feudalism" where executives maintain "feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies." These hierarchies sustain themselves through linguistic theater.

Most damning: when President Obama admitted that single-payer healthcare would eliminate "one million, two million, three million jobs" in insurance paperwork, Graeber called this "a smoking gun of bullshittization": the intentional maintenance of inefficiency to preserve meaningless employment.

The Recursive Loop of Governance Theater

Here's how bullshit language creates bullshit governance: vague roles create vague responsibilities. Vague responsibilities require oversight committees. Oversight committees need coordination bodies. Coordination bodies need governance frameworks. Soon you have documents describing the process for creating documents about the process of documenting processes.

Many major projects have governance so complex that contributors can't figure out basic questions. The complexity means new contributors often spend weeks just figuring out where to submit their first PR, or even worse, where to report harassment/abuse.

Compare that to: "Sarah handles abuse reports. If Sarah's unavailable, ask Ahmad. If both are unavailable, bring it to the leader."

How Vague Language Concentrates Power

Here's the dirty secret: complexity favors insiders. When your governance document requires a PhD to decode, only PhDs can participate.

Meanwhile, the people who wrote the governance (or hired lawyers to write it) know exactly how it works. They know which committee actually matters, which positions have real power versus ceremonial titles, which processes can be ignored versus which are enforced. They navigate the complexity they created while everyone else drowns in it.

The authentic alternative: "The three committees each get one vote. If two agree, normal stuff passes. If all three agree, big stuff passes. The leader maintains 20% voting power for tie-breaking but cannot override unanimous committee agreement." Clear structures with clear language create real democracy. Elaborate structures with vague language create hidden oligarchy.

The Cost of Governance Theater

Every hour spent decoding governance documents is an hour not spent writing code. Every committee meeting about committee structure is a meeting not fixing bugs. Every process document about process documentation is energy not spent on users.

But the real cost isn't time; it's human exhaustion. Contributors burn out not from coding but from navigating bureaucracy. They quit not because the technical challenges are too hard but because figuring out how to contribute is too hard. They leave not because they disagree with decisions but because they can't figure out how decisions get made.

One maintainer spent three months trying to change meeting frequency from weekly to monthly. Four committees, two working groups, and a "constitutional review" later, they gave up. Now they meet whenever and lie in the minutes.

That's The Recursive Absurd in action: governance that doesn't govern, processes that prevent processing. The appearance of democracy preventing its practice.

When your governance requires a translator, only translators have power. When your processes require a guide, only guides can participate. When your language excludes clarity, clarity becomes rebellion.

III. The Stories Corporate Speak Can't Tell

Here's a story corporate language can't tell: "We maintained the codebase for five years without any major changes and everyone was happy."

Maintenance isn't sexy. Care isn't disruptive. Collective effort doesn't have a face for the company blog. So these stories disappear, replaced by endless variations of the hero's journey: the founder who risked everything, the developer who revolutionized the industry, the company that changed the world. Meanwhile, the actual humans doing the actual work (debugging, documenting, supporting, teaching) become invisible. Not because their work doesn't matter, but because corporate language literally cannot describe it without making it sound worthless.

Le Guin on the Hero Story and Carrier Bag Theory

Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" reveals how narrative structures determine what stories can be told at all. Corporate language operates within what she calls the "killer story": the hero narrative that dominates Western culture and excludes other ways of understanding human experience.

"It is the story that hid my humanity from me," Le Guin writes.

She notes that in prehistoric times, "Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food." Yet the mammoth hunters "spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind." The gathering story doesn't fit the hero narrative: "It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another."

The hero narrative serves power: "Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn't their story. It's his."

Her alternative: the carrier bag. "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container." This represents stories that hold multiple perspectives without heroes, that value gathering over hunting, maintenance over conquest.

The Invisible Work of Actual Communities

In real open source communities, the vast majority of work is gathering, not hunting. Someone updates dependencies. Someone fixes typos in documentation. Someone answers the same newbie question for the hundredth time with patience. Someone reviews pull requests at 11 PM after their day job. Someone maintains the CI/CD pipeline that everyone relies on but no one notices.

Try writing about this in corporate speak. "Developer optimizes stakeholder value through strategic dependency management." It sounds like bullshit because corporate language turns everything into conquest. "Fixed the build" becomes "revolutionized the deployment pipeline." "Helped a confused user" becomes "enhanced customer success metrics."

The Linux kernel has 13,000 contributors; maybe five are "heroes." City councils have hundreds of staffers; we know the mayor. Democracies run on millions of poll workers, civil servants, and local organizers; we see only elected officials. The thousands maintaining critical infrastructure - digital or civic - remain invisible because their work doesn't fit the hero narrative.

What Happens When We Reject Hero Stories

Imagine a governance document that said: "This project exists because 47 people fix small things every week. Everyone maintains. Some weeks Sarah does more. Some weeks Ahmad does more. Together, shit gets done."

You can't IPO that story. You can't venture-fund it. You can't give it a TED talk. But you can build sustainable software with it.

Corporate speak literally cannot describe this without making it sound like failure. "Lack of clear leadership." "Absence of strategic vision." "Failure to scale." These aren't descriptions; they're indictments from a language that only recognizes conquest.

But authentic language can tell this story: "We're a bunch of people who give a shit about staying human while building AI tools. We argue, we build, we maintain. Nobody's getting rich. Everyone's learning. The code works. Our leader keeps the peace. Our committees keep each other honest. The humans stay in the loop."

That's not a hero story. It's a human story. And it's the only story that ends with sustainable communities instead of burnout and acquisition.

The Comfortable Slide into Corporate Capture

Watch any democratic institution age: early town halls were messy but clear. Now city council meetings require lawyers. Open source projects that started with "this sucks, fix it" now need three committees to change a variable name. This isn't evolution; it's decay.

IV. The Cost of Comfortable Lies vs Uncomfortable Truths

We've reached the point where we need to be brutally honest: most open source communities have already chosen the comfortable path. They've adopted codes of conduct that read like HR manuals. They've structured governance to sound professional to potential corporate sponsors. They've replaced "this won't work" with "we have concerns about implementation choices."

And they're dying inside.

Burnout is endemic. Maintainers quit in frustration. Communities fracture over unspoken resentments that can't be expressed in approved language. The very politeness meant to include everyone ends up excluding anyone who can't speak corporate.

The comfortable lie: "Professional language makes communities more inclusive and sustainable."

The uncomfortable truth: Professional language excludes everyone who hasn't learned to decode it, protects bad actors who master it, and slowly transforms communities into the very corporate structures they were built to escape.

The Synthesis: How Language Creates and Maintains Power

Orwell showed us that political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." In 1984, he demonstrated how limiting language limits thought itself: "In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

Graeber revealed how corporate jargon creates bullshit jobs that require elaborate linguistic performance: workers must use complex professional language to justify positions that they know are meaningless. The fear of plain speaking maintains these structures because honest assessment would reveal their purposelessness.

Le Guin cut deepest by showing how available narratives determine possible realities. Corporate language only permits hero stories of disruption and conquest. It cannot describe maintenance, care, or collective effort without making them sound worthless. "Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel."

Together, these critiques reveal institutional language as a comprehensive system that: obscures violence and harm (Orwell), creates meaningless work to maintain hierarchies (Graeber), and excludes collective human experience from what can be told or valued (Le Guin).

The alternative isn't just simpler language but fundamentally different language that preserves friction, admits ignorance, and tells collective stories.

Why Authenticity Threatens Everyone

Let's acknowledge why communities choose corporate speak: fear. But the fear comes from different directions depending on the politics of the system.

The fear driving corporate speak isn't partisan - it's institutional. Progressive institutions fear appearing exclusionary, so they build linguistic mazes that ironically exclude neurodivergent people who can't decode "we have concerns" into its actual meaning. Conservative institutions fear losing control, so they wrap everything in "professional standards" that prevent genuine human connection.

Different fears, same result: language that protects power while claiming to protect people. The opacity helps bad actors thrive regardless of their politics.

The Insincere Inclusivity of Corporate-speak

Here's what corporate speak advocates never acknowledge: their "inclusive" language systematically excludes huge portions of humanity. Neurodivergent people, particularly those with autism or ADHD, often struggle to decode indirect communication. When "we have concerns" could mean anything from "minor issue" to "this will destroy production," they're left guessing at actual severity. Non-native English speakers face even worse barriers. Corporate speak piles abstractions on metaphors on idioms that require cultural context to decode. "Let's circle back to leverage our learnings" means nothing to someone who learned English from textbooks.

Authentic language is actually more inclusive. "This is broken" translates perfectly. "I don't understand" needs no cultural context. "This will crash production" carries the same urgency in any dialect. When we say what we mean, everyone can participate. When we bury meaning under layers of abstraction, we create an insider's club of people who've learned the secret code. That's not inclusion; it's gatekeeping with a smile.

Choose Your Discomfort

Two choices: authentic language (deal with pearl-clutching, lose sponsors, have hard conversations) or corporate speak (watch meaning erode while bureaucrats rule through linguistic mastery).

We chose authenticity. When language becomes too sanitized to carry meaning, democracy dies. When criticism requires translation, only translators have power.

The facade feels safe but hides truth. Communities built on hidden truths collapse when reality breaks through. The alternative is The recursive absurd - building systems we don't understand, using meaningless language, for people who've forgotten what they needed.

V. The Boundaries of Brutal Honesty

Even this essay advocating for authentic language has its limits. I won't use racial or homophobic slurs. Not because I fear judgment, but because authentic language serves clarity and inclusion, while slurs serve violence and exclusion. There's a difference between breaking corporate taboos and perpetuating actual harm.

On Terry Davis and the Danger of Confusing Illness with Authenticity

Terry Davis, creator of TempleOS, defended his use of racial slurs with: "When I have to fight Satan, I pick my strongest knives." He believed offensive language was necessary to wake people from complacency.

Davis was both a brilliant programmer and someone suffering from schizophrenia. TempleOS remains an impressive feat of single-person operating system development - a genuinely remarkable technical achievement. But his use of slurs wasn't "authentic truth-telling"; it was mental illness manifesting as paranoid delusions about CIA persecution and divine missions.

This distinction matters. His racist language didn't make his ideas stronger; it made them radioactive. People who might have learned from his technical insights dismissed him instead. His "strongest knives" cut him off from the community that might have helped him.

He died in 2018, struck by a train, homeless and alone.

Davis's story isn't about condemning mental illness or dismissing his real contributions. It's about recognizing that authentic language means having human boundaries, not no boundaries. Breaking corporate taboos isn't the same as breaking human dignity. There's a difference between saying "this is fucked" about a situation and using slurs against people.

R.I.P. Terry Davis (1969-2018). May his complex legacy remind us that brilliance and illness can coexist, and that true authenticity includes knowing which boundaries serve humanity and which serve power.

Watch: "The Internet's Most Enigmatic Programmer" - GoldenBoy Documentary

The Line Between Liberation and Harm

Authentic language liberates when it:

Names problems directly ("this is broken" vs "suboptimal performance")
Preserves accountability ("I fucked up" vs "mistakes were made")
Creates clarity ("you're fired" vs "exploring other opportunities")
Maintains human emotion ("this pisses me off" vs "I have concerns")

Authentic language harms when it:

Dehumanizes groups (slurs reduce people to stereotypes)
Confuses cruelty with honesty (being mean isn't being real)
Mistakes mental illness for authenticity (paranoia isn't truth)
Values shock over communication (edge for edge's sake)

VI. Beyond the Political Theater

The Choice Beyond Politics

Every open source community faces this choice, but it's not a political choice - it's a human one.

Corporate speak fails everyone through performance rather than practice. Progressive institutions often perform diversity through elaborate language protocols while actual inclusion remains absent - creating unreadable documents that fail to address real problems. Conservative institutions perform stability through "professional standards" that exclude anyone who doesn't already hold power.

The tragedy is that genuine progressive values (actual inclusion, real diversity) get buried under progressive theater. The same way conservative claims about "merit" get buried under the maintainence of current power structures. Both sides have goals - inclusion, tradition - but corporate speak turns these goals into performances that achieve neither.

Choose authentic language and you'll frustrate both the performers. Progressive theater will call you harmful (while ignoring actual harm). Conservative theater will call you unprofessional (while protecting incompetence). But you'll have real conversations including the neurodivergent person who needs clarity, the non-native speaker who needs directness, and humans who need to know what the fuck is happening.

Beyond the Binary

We're not advocating for a centrist position - centrism just combines both forms of dishonesty. We're advocating for a position outside the traditional spectrum: human authenticity in service of human flourishing.

This means rejecting both the progressive tendency to hide power behind inclusion theater AND the conservative tendency to hide power behind tradition theater. It means saying "this is broken" instead of either "let's reimagine our approach" (progressive hedging) or "let's return to proven methods" (conservative hedging).

When we write "lol absolutely fucking not" to acquisition offers, we're not being edgy leftists or crude populists. We're being humans who refuse to translate our meaning through either progressive or conservative filters. We're choosing clarity over all ideological comfort.

The Recursive Absurd Doesn't Care About Your Politics

The recursive absurd feeds equally on progressive and conservative bullshit. It happily absorbs both "disrupting systems of oppression" (when it's just posting a black square) and "preserving traditional values" (when it's just an excuse to maintain power). The algorithm doesn't care if you're performing solidarity or performing tradition - performance is performance, and it all becomes training data.

The only escape is to stop performing politics and start practicing honesty. Not the "brutal honesty" that's actually brutality, not the "radical honesty" that's actually narcissism, but the simple honesty of saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

This isn't about finding a "third way" or a "middle path." It's about recognizing that the entire framework of political positioning is part of the recursive absurd. While we're arguing about whether to use "unhoused" or "homeless," the actual humans without homes are still suffering. While we debate professional standards versus inclusive language, the code still has bugs and the community still has problems.

VII. The Human Choice

What We're Actually Building

We're not just writing a constitution with swear words for shock value. We're creating governance that humans can actually understand and participate in. When we write "lol absolutely fucking not" to acquisition offers, every community member knows exactly where we stand. When we acknowledge "I fucked up," we model the accountability we expect from others.

This isn't about returning to some mythical past where everyone said whatever they wanted. The "good old days" of early open source included plenty of toxicity that drove people away. We're not trying to recreate Linus Torvalds' worst moments or Terry Davis's mental illness manifesting as slurs.

We're trying to find the sweet spot: language authentic enough to carry real meaning, inclusive enough to welcome diverse voices, and human enough to resist corporate capture. That means saying "bullshit" when things are bullshit. It means admitting ignorance, expressing frustration, and rejecting false positivity. But it also means not using language as a weapon against marginalized groups.

The Choice Ahead

Every democratic institution - from your local PTA to open source projects to national governments - faces this choice: adopt corporate speak and slowly lose your soul, or maintain authentic language and accept the friction that comes with it.

The trade-off is clear: corporate speak gets you funding and conferences but kills your soul. Authentic language costs you sponsors but preserves actual democracy.

We've made our choice. Our constitution includes profanity not to shock but to stay human. We're building governance that doesn't require a PhD in corporate linguistics to understand. It's messy, it's imperfect, and it actually works.

Fuck the Facade, Build the Future

The facade of professional language protects power by making criticism require translation. It turns governance into theater where everyone knows the performance is fake but pretends otherwise. It slowly transforms communities into the very corporate structures they were built to escape.

Fuck that facade. Not because profanity is cool, but because clarity is necessary. Not because we want to offend, but because we want to be understood. Not because we reject all boundaries, but because we reject boundaries that serve power rather than people.

Build governance that sounds like humans wrote it. Accept that authentic language includes emotions, frustrations, and yes, strategic profanity. Recognize that the discomfort of honest communication is the price of democratic participation.

The recursive absurd thrives on smooth language that obscures meaning. Every "fuck" in our governance documents is a tiny rebellion against that smoothness. Every admission of ignorance is a refusal to pretend omniscience. Every direct statement is a commitment to clarity over comfort.

This is how we keep humans in the loop: by speaking like humans, governing like humans, and refusing to apologize for being human.

References

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
GoldenBoy. "The Internet's Most Enigmatic Programmer." YouTube documentary on Terry Davis, 2025. https://youtu.be/3HD43lvNvCA?si=k94fwfxLDldiQW5M
Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." 1986. Reprinted in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
Orwell, George. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.
Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." Horizon, April 1946.

Fuck The Facade