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 “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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@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
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@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 @clarkesworld@mastodon.online
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
@pluralistic@mamot.fr @clarkesworld@mastodon.online MLM and LLM - too similar to be a coincidence?
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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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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
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.