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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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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr 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.
This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing @boingbot. 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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