None of this was entirely innocent. There were scams, viruses, Nazis, pornography, and chain emails from deposed Nigerian princes. But then predation moved from the periphery to the centre. It used to be an abuse of the network. Now it is the network’s organising principle. The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm.
The modern internet is now a highly optimised machine for detecting human vulnerability, amplifying it, and placing a payment link beside it. Any insecurity can become a commercial niche, including the desire to escape commercial life itself. There is always a course, a newsletter, a private community, or a referral code waiting at the end of the funnel.
The bleak part is not that grifters exist. Every society has hucksters. It is that much of the population has been conscripted into the downline. Ordinary people now spend their lives promoting investments they barely understand, products that do not work, and political claims they have never examined. Many earn nothing. They are unpaid distributors for someone farther up the pyramid. The consumer, salesman, and product have collapsed into the same exhausted person.
People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model. The feed supplies alternating doses of outrage, fear, envy, lust, and hope. Each feeling arrives with something to buy. People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise. Then they purchase a bet, a coin, a supplement, a course, or an enemy. Finally, they repost the pitch. Consumption becomes distribution. The mark becomes the salesman.
This is an industrial system for manufacturing weakness at scale. A legitimate business can survive a satisfied customer. A grift cannot. It needs the customer frightened, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy forever.
When Istarted writing about cryptocurrencyin 2020, I still carried a naive assumption about the size of this economy. I thought people were generally decent and the grifter class was a small pool of degenerates with rotten moral character, preying on those made vulnerable by the material conditions of our time.
Obviously most of these people are not succeeding. The maths simply can never work out. That is part of the trick. The aspiring influencer with forty-seven followers is not an entrepreneur in any meaningful sense. He is free labour for the platform and cheap distribution for the person selling him the dream. The affiliate marketer buys a course about affiliate marketing, then recovers the cost by selling the same course to the next affiliate marketer. The life coach coaches new life coaches. The dropshipper sells tutorials to failed dropshippers. The pyramid is social before it is financial. Everyone stands on someone else while insisting they are about to escape.
This arrangement blurs the useful moral distinction between predator and prey. Many online grifters are themselves marks. They believe the rubbish they sell because belief makes the selling bearable. They have sunk money, time, identity, and public dignity into the scheme. Admitting the product is worthless would mean admitting that years of their life were worthless too. It is psychologically cheaper to recruit another victim. The fraud sustains the faith, and the faith sustains the fraud.
A normal trade ends when a need is satiated. You need a chair. Someone sells you a chair. You sit down and stop thinking about chairs. However, an online grift can never satiate. It must preserve the need that feeds it. The grievance merchant cannot resolve your grievance. The wellness influencer cannot let you feel well. The trading guru cannot let you become financially secure. The manosphere podcaster cannot let young men become calm, loved, and socially competent. Satisfaction is churn. Misery is recurring revenue.
The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
This creates a brutal selection environment. The honest financial adviser explains diversification and gets twelve views. The crypto lunatic predicts a thousandfold return and gets twelve million. The physician says a chronic condition requires careful management. The wellness crank says seed oils are poisoning your soul. The historian describes an ambiguous event with contingent causes. The political influencer identifies a secret cabal and gives you the address of a pizza parlour. One of these people has the better business model. It is not the one burdened by reality.
The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward. The next refresh might bring approval, outrage, profit, or vindication. Usually it brings nothing, which makes the next refresh more urgent. Social media fused the Skinner box with the commission structure. The addict is handed a referral code and told he is now a small business owner.