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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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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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 @clarkesworld, 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:
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