The Age of Grifters - It's Only Beginning

It's a disease, a contagion spreading around the world, and it's got a long run ahead of it. The Triumph of Grifters.

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo captures this disease that has trashed once healthy societies  and warns there's plenty more where that came from.

We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker. 

Scams and fakery were not just ascendant this decade — they were often the dominant story line. It was a time of “life comes at you fast” and “milkshake duck.” The primary feeling of the 2010s was one of punch-drunken disorientation, of always having the rug pulled out from under you. And this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.

Doubting everything may be a workable plan for individual survival in a fracturing media universe dominated by algorithms and digital media of dubious authenticity, but pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin. Getting through modern life seems to require adopting a corrosive view of society that makes a hash of our fundamental ideas about the value of cooperation and trust among our fellow humans. We’re bringing on a death-spiral of distrust — and I fear that in the 2020s and beyond, grifters peddling alternative facts may come to suffocate us all.

...The grift wasn’t limited to politics. The tech industry welcomed hucksters with open arms. Look at WeWork, Uber and Theranos — once high-flying start-ups that promised to change the world in big ways and small, each unmasked for peddling false prospects, unreal tech or hiding systemic corruption and abuse. Facebook and other social media services were not just a haven of state-sponsored disinformation; with dodgy, easily gamed stats, social media increasingly came to provide a false view of the world.

...Our information system has slipped its moorings, and as a result, lying and scheming and fraud has simply become too effective a life strategy. As I argued in March, when the celebrity college admissions scandal broke, we’re seeing the “uberization” of corruption — bending the rules is becoming routine and pervasive, a push-button cheat code for modern life. 

It’s not a big leap from “Trust no one” to “swindle everyone.” Happy new decade, I guess.

It's hard to dispute Manjoo's contentions. We are at the mercy of an emerging oligarchy of grifters. We have become distracted, divided, confounded and I see nothing remotely inadvertent in our plight. It's the Lord of the Flies without the schoolboys, the desert island and the wrecked airplane.

Monday's post on Bernard Stiegler discusses the proletarianization of modern thought and cognition. We are succumbing to a madness triggering social disaffection. When we are forced to exist in two or more radically differing realities, communication fails and, with it, social cohesion. We are diminished, dangerously weakened, fearful and vulnerable and there are those who freely exploit us. That will cost us dearly.