“Weaponized incompetence”: It came on like a whisper on TikTok, then you couldn’t escape hearing the phrase across the app and on other social media sites.
Weaponized incompetence ― or “strategic incompetence” as it’s sometimes called ― is the act of feigning incompetence at any one task (though usually an unpleasant one) to get out of doing it. When someone deploys strategic incompetence, their hope is that someone else will stare them down and say with a huff, “Fine, it’s easier for me to do it anyway!”
When a woman jokingly shared her grocery list for her husband ― a list that included pictures of items and a meticulous hand-drawn map of the store ― it went viral, but for all the wrong reasons: The comment section was flooded with shouts of “weaponized incompetency.”