I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies. It was also stubbornly alive and human. People built websites about Babylon 5, model rockets, train timetables, shareware, and whatever else had colonised their minds. Most of it had no business model. That was the literal point. The web felt like a public square assembled by obsessive amateurs.
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 I started writing about cryptocurrency in 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.
I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice. They stream, post, recruit, promote, refer, astroturf, and close. They turn every friendship into a lead and every conversation into a qualifying call. They do not clock out because the market follows them into bed. The smartphone is a shop counter that sleeps beside their head.
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.
Crypto has become the subject of my verbal ire so often because it is the apotheosis of the grift economy. It takes alienation, precarity, gambling addiction, technological mystification, and a thick slurry of libertarian derp, then synthesises them into the ultimate predatory investment product.
Crypto also perfected the recursive structure of the modern online grift. Promotion creates price movement. Price movement is presented as proof of adoption. That proof recruits new buyers. Their money creates more price movement. Every participant has a direct financial incentive to become a publicist for his own position. The asset comes with its own volunteer propaganda network. It is a pyramid scheme with a podcast department.
Much to my dismay, the rest of the internet has learned the same lesson. The cheapest product is empty promises untethered to reality. The most scalable labour force is the addict. The best marketing conceals itself inside identity. Sell people a worldview, and they will advertise it for free because criticism of the product now feels like criticism of the self.
Language models will make this cheaper and worse. The cost of producing plausible lies has been driven to precisely zero. One person can generate a landfill of articles, videos, testimonials, investment analysis, and synthetic experts before breakfast. The grift no longer needs conviction, charisma, or even a pulse. It needs a language model, an affiliate account, and access to a population whose critical faculties have been sandblasted by twenty years of algorithmic media.
There is a temptation to regard the people caught in this machine with simple contempt. Some deserve it. A person who knowingly ruins strangers for commission has made a moral choice. But contempt is not an analysis. Precarity supplies the recruits. Alienation supplies the audience. The collapse of stable work, affordable housing, local institutions, and plausible routes to material security is what makes the pitch of the grift economy so seductive. The grift offers agency where ordinary life offers delay. It offers community where society offers isolation. It offers a jackpot where work offers a performance review and another year of rent increases.
Then it metabolises those injuries into new injuries. The lonely man buys a doctrine that makes him intolerable to women. The indebted worker gambles his remaining savings on a crypto token. The frightened patient abandons medicine for supplements. The politically powerless person spends fourteen hours a day screaming at strangers while the people with power quietly cut his wages and public services. The promised escape reproduces the condition that made escape desirable.
It is a desperately sad way to live. There is no craft in it, no solidarity, and no completion. No compassion or joy. Every relationship becomes an audience. Every interest just becomes grist for the content mill. Every conviction becomes a content strategy. The grifter can never rest because absence kills engagement. The mark can never rest because the next post might contain the secret. Both wake to the same notifications, trapped on a dopamine treadmill driven by opaque algorithms that can never slow down.
The worst advice from the 90s, “just say no,” starts to look less stupid when our greatest technical innovation learns to turn distress into inventory. Disconnection is not Luddism in that environment. It is the refusal to mistake a predatory system for a social world.
Complete disconnection is nearly impossible. Modern life no longer permits it. But an appliance is used for a bounded purpose and then put away. Emails, train times, articles, and files all have endpoints. Infinite feeds of drivel do not. They carry the casino into bed and let an opaque RL loop select the emotions that arrive before breakfast.
The internet is indisputably an inhuman place. Not because it contains no humans. Billions of us are in here, screaming frantically at each other while feeling utterly alone. It is inhuman because the systems governing it are utterly alien algorithms that cannot recognise human ends. They recognise engagement, conversion, retention, and growth. Grief is a market segment. Loneliness is a targeting signal. Friendship is a retention mechanism. Political conviction is ad inventory. Nothing can simply matter. It must perform.
Life inside this environment means adopting its categories. Thoughts are assessed by their reach, experiences by their shareability, and people by their usefulness to an identity. A person becomes legible to the machine by becoming less legible to himself. Eventually the system no longer needs to impose its values. Its subjects carry them in their pockets and enforce them on their own minds.
The physical world is not pure. It contains salesmen, casinos, demagogues, fanatics, and bores. It also contains stubborn limits. A conversation ends. A pub closes. A book runs out of pages. Your friend gets tired of hearing you talk and tells you to shut up. Reality supplies friction, and friction is one of the few remaining defences against appetite without limit.
We are not going back to the early internet. Nor should we romanticise it. The old web had plenty of sewage. What it also had was space beyond the market. A person could make something without becoming a brand. A conversation could end without a conversion. A community could exist without turning its members into marks for an investment scheme.
The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand. An RL loop can optimise engagement, retention, and conversion. It cannot tell us what a human life is for. The final grift is letting the loop decide what your life should be.