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In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers - not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
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It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/
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That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of #MultiLevelMarketing (#MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food #Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:
http://thebezzle.org
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Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you.
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As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.
A "bezzle" is #JohnKennethGalbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."
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In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer - but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.
MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity - women, people of color, working people.
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They necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.
It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are told to suck in friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."
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The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this - they're also being scammed:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468
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This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing @[email protected]. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.
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One night, I was lying in my bed and watching spam roll in. They were for small businesses in the rustbelt, handymen, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were a million miles from the kind of thing we'd post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email - the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.
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Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.
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But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.
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The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses - the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever
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After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."
This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google.
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The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero."
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There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.
The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers - they were the scammees.
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@[email protected] it's funny that with microsoft trying to add an AI key, in the near future pressing the wrong key and accidentally writing a 500-word blog post wouldn't sound so ridiculous
But that's half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's submissions, It was a MLM! Coders in eastern Europe were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly - they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.
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The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at @[email protected], the great online #ScienceFiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence
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There was a 0% chance that #NeilClarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "#LifeHack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.
They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of #PassiveIncome, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-powered self-licking ice-cream cone:
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157
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This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's #MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
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@[email protected]
Well, if your bombs are cheap enough to produce and deploy, why not, carpet bomb the internet with a billion of them, and if you get a dollar for only 1/100000th of them, that's $10000 for you.
And if manage to make the $1 to be recurring monthly, ...
That was always the economy of SPAM. The handful of idiots per million emails sent who bought penis enlargement products. So we ended up with SMTP being so ugly that half a dozen big silos provide 99+% of email today.
Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty - it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin - they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.
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These people reason - correctly - that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute
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The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
The rise and rise of #botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon.
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The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it - rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
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That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment #CritiHype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
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The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value.
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Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings
No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:
https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/
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The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately - by warning them of things that they've missed - but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
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Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasiing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.
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And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.
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Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising - but not delivering - that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
http://thebezzle.org
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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@[email protected] should this entire thread be on public visibility? feels like spam when you post it tbh
@aen_[email protected] https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
A nice mastodon display tip from @[email protected]
@[email protected] whoa thanks 😊, i didn't know you could do that
honestly still makes it kinda unreadable but i subscribe to the email newsletter anyway
@aen_[email protected] Thanks!
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I've been thinking a lot recently about just how many jobs fit into this pattern, while wading through the job market atm.
It also made me think of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
@[email protected] @[email protected] MLM and LLM - too similar to be a coincidence?
@[email protected] there's infosec training like this
@[email protected] If the US won WWII through greater manufacturing might what will happen in the next major conflict that a lot of that has moved to China? Will the billionaires still think they got a cheap deal when they’re under Chinese control?
@[email protected] This shattering of mutual aid networks is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of MLMs, that they trade on trust and social connections. They also deeply harm attempts by people with chronic illnesses to create mutual support networks and create predatory networks that target the most vulnerable.
@[email protected] this is where I think the stock market & venture capital & real estate market is today. Lots of bets on companies that have never made money, houses destined to burn or flood before the mortgage is paid off, and the people who end up with stock in Uber or a 30 year mortgage in a new home in Paradise will end up the losers when reality in the form of insurance costs & the end of the free money hits. So many companies seem to exist purely due to the sunk cost fallacy.