1
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).
1/
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
14/
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.
15/
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."
16/
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.
17/
@[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.
18/
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
19/
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
20/
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.
21/
@[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.
22/
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
23/
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.
24/
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
25/
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
26/
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.
27/
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/
28/
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/
29/
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.
30/
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.
31/
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
32/
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
33/
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
eof/
@[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/
@[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!
A nice mastodon display tip from @[email protected]
@[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