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/
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.
11/
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.
13/
@pluralistic@mamot.fr 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?
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/
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 @clarkesworld@mastodon.online, 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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr 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
@pluralistic@mamot.fr there’s infosec training like this