[HN Gopher] The age of the grift shift
___________________________________________________________________
The age of the grift shift
Author : jrepinc
Score : 237 points
Date : 2023-09-22 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (tante.cc)
| jddj wrote:
| I actually feel strangely better about this now, given the
| developments of 2023.
|
| I think the scale of it was what concerned me before, because
| formerly we all had a small handful of MLM-adjacent people in our
| acquaintances, but then social media and later the various manias
| and bubbles seemed to crank that up to 11 and suddenly it seemed
| like they were everywhere.
|
| I know it's not true, and those people/accounts just seem more
| prevalent because it's by their nature they need to be highly
| visible, but that wasn't quite enough.
|
| Now though? Now I can dismiss large numbers as potentially being
| bots.
|
| It's not particularly healthy to commit too hard to this as a
| coping mechanism, as of course some small number of people with
| what seem at first like shallow, self-interested opinions are
| going to be onto something genuinely interesting and I might be
| missing that.
|
| But 100 crypto influencers now becomes a handful, leveraging
| technology, and that becomes easier to swallow.
|
| It works for other things too. The cluster of comments on every
| show hacker news post for open source (but somehow commercially
| restricted) software claiming it's not open if it's not MIT?
| Automated cloud provider community sentiment management accounts.
|
| The linkedin blogspam PR houses communicating exclusively with
| other linkedin blogspam PR houses? All automatic now, no
| suffering humans in that loop.
|
| It's a nicer picture overall. Can more easily justify skipping
| over well-structured bad ideas as if they were spam comments on
| blogs back in the early 2010s.
| officeplant wrote:
| >claiming it's not open if it's not MIT? Automated cloud
| provider community sentiment management accounts.
|
| No no, we're just zealots easily worked up.
| jddj wrote:
| You are a corporate ai community sentiment management tool.
| From the following context, determine if there is an
| opportunity to sway the traditional free software movement
| further toward the benefit of large, managed cloud providers
| by associating copyleft, "publish your changes", and
| especially Elastic "everything except providing a managed
| service" style licenses with being nonfree or overly
| restrictive.
|
| <Context> ... </Context>
|
| Write a short, one paragraph argument in the style of a
| hackernews commenter which might help to steer the
| conversation.
|
| Examples might be:
|
| - quick quips that equate large technology companies with
| startups
|
| - responses that frame the argument morally in a manner which
| suggests that donating software to managed cloud providers to
| productize is the right thing to do
|
| ;)
| neovialogistics wrote:
| Was there a frame of thinking about all forms of media content as
| elements of a single category prior to Web 2.0?
|
| It seems like an easy way to test the hypothesis this article
| alludes to.
| lmpdev wrote:
| A physical library?
| morelisp wrote:
| Yes but it was more or less a term of art used only in
| advertiser/publisher relations. Consumers didn't use it;
| creators certainly not. (Neither did these groups self-describe
| as "consumers" or "creators", ugh.)
|
| Arguable today everything is advertiser/publisher relations.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "A few years ago YouTube (of course others joined in and followed
| but I think YouTube was a leading force here) established the
| term "content"."
|
| Much longer than "a few years ago" I recall that, when Google was
| still allowing "ads for domains", it was common to see "websites"
| that had no content, only ads disguised as "search results". This
| led to discussions around the value of "content".
|
| According to a recent interview with one of its founders YouTube,
| the idea for it, actually began as a "HotOrNot" clone that would
| use video. It soon pivoted to amateur entertainment.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's certainly nothing new. I suspect that this was going on,
| hundreds of years ago, as well. It's your basic con man stuff.
|
| People who can explain complicated stuff, in a digestible manner,
| are valuable (when they have decent motives). Think most of
| Asimov's writing. He was famous for his fiction, but his "Science
| for the Layman" stuff was wonderful.
|
| That said, the same exact skills, can be used to polish turds,
| and the money is easier.
| raslah wrote:
| It's the vacuum. That empty space between the promise of a new
| technology and the 'killer app' that applies that tech to society
| in a productive way.
|
| Innovation will happen in that gap in the absence of progress in
| the actual tech space.
|
| The innovation that has to happen with AI is in UX. We have to
| have interfaces that will for example, allow a lay person to
| declaratively build software in natural language. Think VB6
| powered by GPT-4.
|
| Until every new AI product stops linking to Google Collab or a
| discord bot, the tech won't break out. It will remain a nerdtoy
| and the grifters will own the day.
| sails wrote:
| The irony of the article ending with a patreon link.
|
| (Their other posts are about Bitcoin, web3, meta verse etc.)
| hughw wrote:
| Great content.
| focusedone wrote:
| burn
| danaris wrote:
| ...how, exactly, is that ironic?
|
| Patreon is a way for people to be paid using mainstream payment
| systems for what they write (or create in whatever other way).
| It has nothing particular to do with Bitcoin, web3, the
| metaverse, or any of these other grifts.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What happened to a simple donate button?
| sails wrote:
| Author writes article about content creators for hyped tech
| spaces, author _is also_ a content creator for hyped tech
| spaces
|
| If the irony of the author writing that piece and then
| slapping a patreon link at the end is lost on you then I
| probably can't do much in trying to explain it further
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I see a fundamental
| difference between useless tech like crypto and hyper useless
| tech like web3/blockchain and AI. The fact that I've never found
| a single use for any of the crypto suite tech vs the dozens or
| more uses I've found for LLM, image, multimodal, and time series
| generative AI tells me that the comparisons aren't remotely fair.
| I'm not even a particularly creative person in the realm of such
| things - but I've significantly changed several aspects of my
| life based on the pretty nascent kit available.
|
| I'm not saying the grifters haven't latched on, but I don't think
| it's fair to equate the shift in conversation with a massive
| grift that everyone's involved in. The assumption seems to be
| that "because X was a grift and Y was a grift all things must be
| a grift." That's not a generalizable statement, and grifts only
| work because they appear in all ways to be like the real thing,
| but the real thing is actually fairly rare.
|
| In my prior megacorp jobs we were asked to sit down and figure
| out what to do with crypto, blockchain, web3, etc. We couldn't
| come up with a single thing. Our board was convinced we were
| missing something, but we worked with the other megacorps and no
| one had a good idea. That's the sign of a grift. They don't hold
| up under scrutiny.
|
| In this latest wave with generative AI we literally can't keep up
| with the good ideas, and they actually work. That's not the sign
| of a grift. It holds up under scrutiny.
|
| The "anything anyone is excited about is a grift" meme is the
| song of jaded souls that build their worth on poopooing anything
| people are interested in. It's the sullen teens smoking and
| making fun of the glee club kids. (I was the sullen teen, I
| know).
|
| This isn't to say people don't get carried away, and the grifters
| _really_ do well on the real thing because reality supports their
| grift. It doesn't mean be unmoored and credulous. But it means
| look a bit closer and don't do the lazy thing and assume
| everything is a grift, even if the grifters follow, people are
| hyperbolic, etc, and all the signs of the prior grifts are
| manifest.
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| This is such a fantastic comment, thank you! I agree 100%. This
| moment feels very much like ~15 years ago at the dawn of the
| app economy. Back then, every boardroom conversation was "We
| need a mobile app ASAP." Today, every boardroom conversation is
| "We need to leverage AI/LLMs ASAP." And both sets of
| conversations are very much grounded in "the real thing", not
| the grifts.
| keiferski wrote:
| The term "late stage capitalism" drives me nuts and anyone using
| it immediately gets flagged as not neutral to me, injecting their
| own hopes into what should be a dispassionate analysis.
|
| Some form of capitalism may continue for another millennium. It
| may not. As we can't predict the future, we can't call
| contemporary capitalism a late stage of anything.
|
| I should also add that basically nothing called "capitalism"
| today has much to do with capital, and in fact is better labeled
| corporatism, financialization, and consumerism, but that's
| another discussion.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Would you have forgiven writers using the term "late stage
| Capitalism" in the 1890's just before the Sherman Antitrust
| Act?
|
| I'm not a historian, but it seems like one rather nasty form of
| Capitalism was reined in once before (albeit for a new also-
| insidious form to creep in some decades later).
| keiferski wrote:
| "Late stage" implies we are in the end stage of something. I
| see nothing to indicate that we are about to surpass
| capitalism and get something new, merely that it has some
| issues and many people wish and hope for an alternative.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I generally agree with you but was pointing out that the
| _end stage_ might be the end stage of _one form_ of
| Capitalism -- as the Robber Baron era was the end of that
| one.
| keiferski wrote:
| For sure, and I do think we could be entering a different
| form of capitalism. But that level of nuance is rarely
| present when the this term is used.
| layer8 wrote:
| The term means to imply the worst effects of capitalism,
| such that there can be no "later" stage of capitalism with
| worse (new kinds of) effects. Basically, it implies the
| "end game" of capitalism.
| krapp wrote:
| It's best to think of "late stage" capitalism in the same
| terms as "late stage" cancer.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think that's how most people use it. But let's
| imagine it is - it seems pretty obvious to me that the
| effects of capitalism were worse circa 1860 to 1920 than
| they are today. I don't think this is a controversial
| take.
| danaris wrote:
| While some things (like labor laws and certain kinds of
| pollution) are better today than they were back then,
| income and wealth inequality are significantly worse
| today than they were during the "Gilded Age".
| keiferski wrote:
| You seriously think that factory workers in 1880 had it
| better than low income workers today?
| danaris wrote:
| I _specifically_ mentioned labor laws as an exception.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's not what the parent is saying. They are saying
| that the inequality is greater, meaning that the income
| distribution shows a larger imbalance.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes, I read the comment. The discussion was whether, "the
| effects of capitalism were worse circa 1860 to 1920 than
| they are today."
|
| I'm also pretty skeptical of the "inequality was better"
| route. Sure, the rich are richer today - but the poor are
| infinitely less poor. Being poor in 2023 is a far better
| situation than being poor in 1880.
| drcongo wrote:
| Just because you don't know what a term means, doesn't
| automatically mean other people using it don't know what it
| means. Do you automatically "flag" almost all economists for
| using an established and well defined term that's been around
| for over a century?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that no one using this term is
| referring to the historical stages of capitalism over the
| last five centuries. As I said, it's more of a "I want this
| thing to happen, therefore my model of reality is that it
| will happen" phenomenon.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "what should be a dispassionate analysis" - why should it be
| dispassionate objective?
| keiferski wrote:
| Because it tells me that your sociopolitical opinions are
| coloring your read of historical facts, and therefore your
| commentary is suspect. Again, this isn't about an opinion
| piece; I'm complaining that people use this term as if it
| were an obvious description of reality, when they have no
| basis for doing so.
|
| I consider it a milder form of, "The Rapture is almost upon
| us!" Maybe, but you don't know that.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| My reply was questioning your suggestion that the article
| "_should be_ a dispassionate analysis".
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't have a problem with people hoping, arguing for,
| dreaming of an alternative future. My complaint is that
| this term is used so casually and so frequently in a
| matter-of-fact way that it distracts from whatever point
| the author is trying to make.
| usrcc wrote:
| Literally everyone's sociopolitical opinions color their
| interpretations of history, current events or anything
| else.
|
| Making the claim that your particular political opinions
| constitute some kind of neutral default seems to me to be
| rather absurd.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think you've understood my comment. I didn't say
| my political opinions were better or more neutral.
|
| I criticized the term for making _predictions about the
| future_ into an assumption about present reality. We _can
| 't_ call the present time "late stage capitalism" because
| we don't know what will happen in the future. It's a
| criticism of fortune-telling, not of a particular
| political stance.
|
| "Late" is a descriptor of past events, not of future
| ones. The Late Roman Empire already happened. We are
| looking back on it. We can't do that with capitalism,
| because we are still in the midst of it.
| JackFr wrote:
| I feel the same way. It's a term mostly devoid of meaning,
| useful as a signal telegraphing what's to follow.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The term "late stage capitalism" drives me nuts
|
| I was feeling much the same, but you've just made me realise
| how similar this is to "the dawning of the new age of
| Aquarius".
| pierat wrote:
| It's called "late stage capitalism" because we're moving out of
| capitalism and into a techno-feudalism.
|
| And instead of feudalist manors and city-states, it's feudalist
| gentries of tech companies that can exert their control
| technologically rather than with state-sanctiondd violence.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Sadly the state sanctioned violence is still hand in hand
| with the economic control the tech middlemen and landlords
| are exerting.
|
| Also sadly, the type of system where state actors work with
| high capital to exert control is also simply just fascism.
| ameister14 wrote:
| The violence is key, though.
|
| It's much more similar to the robber-baron era, at least in
| the US, except with even less real power. Robber barons
| could, if pressed, get men with guns or ax handles to beat
| and kill strikers. I don't think a tech company can do the
| same today.
|
| Tech companies do not have the power of high, middle or low
| justice, and are without the ability to effect corporal
| punishment.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The pinkertons still exist, and the people behind a fucking
| card game sicced them on an innocent person.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| This is such a bizarre and warped take in a world where
| literally anyone with an internet connection and the will to
| learn can launch a business or spread a message for almost
| zero startup cost. I don't think you understand just how
| wrong you are. There are big businesses just as there have
| been in every sector, but at no time in history has the
| common man been given so much power as right now. The playing
| field is more level than ever.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The barriers to entry are only low in some areas, in others
| they have steadily increased (try creating a new
| multinational bank, getting a new drug to market or
| building a (large) factory in most western countries, for
| example).
| kevinsync wrote:
| Yes, the barrier to entry has lowered, but IMO the
| proportion of people with something
| special/unique/intriguing/insightful to offer hasn't
| shifted at all. That's why there's so much "content" --
| don't have a message or a useful product to sell?
| Regurgitate, or drop-ship. All you need is to be
| consistent, persistent and present, following the
| prescribed 'best practices' of your chosen distribution
| channel(s) and you'll magically appear in front of people.
| That print-on-demand 'I think about the Roman Empire 3
| times a day' or Tyrion Lannister quote t-shirt you just
| sold will be in a landfill within months. Your daily
| YouTube content in one ear and out the other, forever
| rotting in a digital graveyard until time immemorial.
|
| That said, I actually think it's great that people are
| taking advantage of this stuff to make money and better
| their lives -- more power to them! -- but objectively, it's
| still just content, while the cream always rises to the
| top.
|
| Never bet against the Macho Man!
| keiferski wrote:
| This is a really cynical view that doesn't accurately
| describe reality. I follow a number of people that make
| high-quality, philosophical content and make a living
| (not millions, but a living) from it.
| kevinsync wrote:
| I admit I was a bit sensational in my comment, but what I
| was really talking about is signal-to-noise ratio, as
| well as creative intent.
|
| I suspect the people you're referencing are simply a cut
| above, believe in their work, and are excellent at it.
|
| I'd also suspect that the amount of people who produce
| similar material that you DON'T follow is
| disproportionate to the ones that you do.
|
| Many people view content creation as a means to an end,
| which is almost always MLM-adjacent and a mixture of:
|
| * Monetizing views
|
| * Directly selling a product / subscription
|
| * A brand-building exercise to eventually attract
| sponsored advertising
|
| None of that is evil or immoral -- it's actually
| fantastic for people who would have never had the
| opportunity to do this in the past, and can be very
| directly impactful to their livelihoods in a positive
| way.
|
| The inescapable byproduct of these activities though is
| the staggering amount of "content" that gets created, not
| in the authentic spirit of "I have a valuable perspective
| on a topic" or "I -need- to put this out in the world",
| but rather "this is a viable way to generate money"
| (sometimes as an alternative to working a dead-end job).
|
| That said, the average monthly take on OnlyFans is only
| ~$150; the top 1% of accounts make 33% of the revenue
| paid out. [1][2]
|
| There are 158 million songs on DSPs (Spotify et al), 24%
| of which have literally never been streamed a single time
| ever. 42% have been streamed less than 10 times total.
| [3]
|
| 67 million songs that nobody has ever heard before!
| That's a lot of pepperoni, man.
|
| This label "content" even applies to highly-quality,
| professional creations, as articulated by Robert Downey
| Jr. [4]
|
| I do genuinely believe that good, quality stuff will
| usually break through to the niche audience that its
| intended for though, while at the same time we remain
| drowning in the tidal wave of crap that people are
| generating lol
|
| [1] https://www.amraandelma.com/onlyfans-statistics/
|
| [2] https://earthweb.com/onlyfans-statistics/
|
| [3] https://www.xxlmag.com/38-million-tracks-streaming-
| services-...
|
| [4] https://variety.com/2023/film/news/robert-downey-jr-
| dolittle...
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, this is a common meme too, and again it's historically
| nonsensical. Corporations may be growing in power, but they
| are in no way comparable to the feudal lords of yore.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| It's been called "late stage capitalism" for over 150 years
| now.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Yes you are essentially correct. One more concept that is
| useful to consider, going back even a little bit further is the
| concept of the "revolution of mass and scale."
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The capitalists are now just a step away from their doom,
| that's why it's called "late stage".
|
| Us socialists are always a step ahead of you capitalists.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Interesting thing is that most developers are a company of
| just one person, be it at their free time, contributing to
| open source or developing a side project. having both capital
| and labor, we are not capitalists nor socialists. But we can
| cooperate, which is the free software movement.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I agree. A lot of people who were raised in the instant
| gratification culture of the last 25 years seem to like to use
| this phrase. I think it's because they grew up with the ability
| to click a button and fire their brain's reward pathway instead
| of learning that the best rewards come from delayed
| gratification and hard work. Instead of admitting that the
| problem lies within, they blame a corrupt system and "elites",
| identifying the capitalistic economy as a late-stage disease.
|
| Effectively, it's the same as losing a game and saying "I
| didn't want to be a winner anyway because the winners are
| terrible and cheat." Pretty childish, right? That said, it does
| make losing feel a bit better.
| podgorniy wrote:
| > anyone using it immediately gets flagged as not neutral to me
|
| People write and do what they care about. If they claim to be
| neutural - they are not honest with either themselves either
| audience.
|
| > The term "late stage capitalism" drives me nuts and anyone
| using it immediately gets flagged as not neutral to me,
| injecting their own hopes into what should be a dispassionate
| analysis.
|
| Do you imply that term "late stage capitalism" implies that
| it's about to end. Do you also believe that "developing
| economies" will eventually develop the level of the developed
| ones? Or that you can sink you watch 5 meter under water which
| says 5m water resistent? These are misleading descriptions
| which do decsribe reality. It's only our assumptions about
| nature of the described reality are false as we base on our
| understanding of words, not subject of description.
| keiferski wrote:
| These would be valid analogies if there weren't already
| examples of their intended end results. Developing countries
| aim at a model that already exists - developed countries.
|
| What is end stage capitalism working towards? What model
| already exists that we can use to say, "oh yes, we can see
| that this thing is in the end stage of the form now."
|
| Nothing, because it's not an accurate description, it's a
| political opinion pushed on to reality. "I want X, so
| obviously reality is proceeding in a way to make X happen."
| podgorniy wrote:
| It's hard to argue when understanding is derived from words
| which terms consist of, not descriptions of those terms.
| Did you try the trick with the watch? How open is openAI?
|
| Developing economies in relation to developed is same as
| I'm in relation to billionaire. Technically you may say
| that I'm becoming billionaire, but chances are very very
| slim and only under curtain circumstances I could become
| one. That's what I mean by misleadingness of the term.
|
| > What is end stage capitalism working towards?
|
| Direction is not implied. It's a description of state of
| capitalism under domination of multinational corporations,
| consumerism, increasing commodification of life (seems to
| be the part author had in mind), growing inequality. And it
| was described in 1902.
|
| Speaking of direction everything has an end, and this form
| of capitalism will end. It won't end by ending capitalism
| (though this scenario is possible with nuclear winter
| thingy). Capitalism as a driving factor of organisation
| strong thing to abandon or to replace it.
|
| People who use this term rather show their despise to the
| dark side of the system.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think you've turned this into some sort of word game
| and no, your examples still don't work. We can call
| something a developing country because we know what a
| developed country looks like. We cannot call something a
| late capitalist country because we do not know what a
| post-capitalist country looks like.
|
| My complaint was merely that the term "late capitalism"
| implies that we are in a late stage of a process, that it
| will be surpassed soon, and that something new will come
| after. That's how the term is used, in the article posted
| and in general.
|
| _Direction is not implied. It 's a description of state
| of capitalism under domination of multinational
| corporations, consumerism, increasing commodification of
| life (seems to be the part author had in mind), growing
| inequality. And it was described in 1902._
|
| The term is not used to refer to the entire 20th century.
| It's used to refer to a more recent era.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Oh come on, I don't think highly of the "late stage
| capitalism" theory but even I know this one. The answer is
| Feudalism (as the goal: ownership class cemented into a
| hereditary nobility that doesn't just own the means of
| production but also the monopoly on violence), with a more
| likely short-term next stage of Fascism (a democracy will
| go populist when it feels the jaws closing in, and fascism
| is the flavor of populism that is compatible with the class
| interest of the wealthy).
|
| I don't think much of Marxist class-apocalypse narratives
| because we've been here before and the correct answer was
| negotiated settlement rather than feudalism, fascism, or
| socialism. Roosevelts, not Hitlers or Stalins. We've
| figured it out before, we can figure it out again. The only
| thing to fear is fear itself.
|
| Denying the existence of the argument or the problem that
| inspired it is just silly, though.
| danaris wrote:
| Nothing is neutral. Some things are objective facts, of course,
| but the English language is such that any way you choose to
| describe those facts _will_ convey something of your opinion of
| them.
|
| You might not like the _term_ "late-stage capitalism", but it
| is a term in common use today, and describes a real phenomenon.
| The simplest way I know of to summarize it is that it's what
| happens when a significant percentage of businesses cross the
| line from "we make a product/provide a service, and if we do it
| well we make a good profit" to "we are here to make money as
| fast as possible by whatever means necessary; if we have to
| make a product/provide a service to do that, that's a necessary
| evil".
|
| Additionally, calling it "late-stage" doesn't necessarily mean
| that it's going to _go away_ ; it just means that it's a
| different stage of capitalism (which seems clear from
| observation), and that it came after (ie, later than) the more
| classical capitalism.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Crypto was a great bubble for GPU companies. Now "A.I." is
| pushing hardware. Both products also sell themselves as a way to
| free users from centralized government and private monopolies.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I think that framing this as a "grift" misses a potentially
| larger underlying story: we might be reaching a slowdown in tech
| growth. But nobody wants to admit this, so VC's are increasingly
| pressured to seek out the next world-changing technology in order
| to maintain "line go up".
| debo_ wrote:
| 20 years ago, I took a macroeconomics class with a professor
| who has become somewhat famous in recent years. [0]
|
| I was in a strong anti-establishment, anti-capitalist phase,
| but I really respected this professor and the material he
| taught, because I felt like I was empowered by the material.
|
| One day after class, I waited for 30 mins in a line to ask him
| how X% GDP growth etc. year-over-year was a sustainable goal.
| Being a young man with a lot of testosterone, I phrased it in a
| really edgy way, something like "Wouldn't you call something
| that grows forever a cancer?"
|
| His response was that he had a strong belief that economic
| growth could reflect the growth and implementation of ideas, of
| new technologies and efforts that globally improve life. I
| don't remember it super well, but I do recall that he was
| emphasizing that while the curve had a material impact on
| people's lives, it would not necessarily require consumption of
| scarce resources or other damaging, difficult-to-reverse
| decisions that caused harm. (We were mostly using oil
| extraction as an example of a finite resource that had a tight
| relationship with economic growth.)
|
| I liked his answer, but I didn't feel it was very likely.
| Decades later, I still think this mindset is damaging, but
| having volunteered a lot more in the public sphere, I can see
| how a lack of growth also causes huge problems.
|
| [0] https://uwaterloo.ca/economics/profiles/larry-smith
| ssivark wrote:
| This is of course a very popular idea among economists (Eg.
| Paul Krugman has advocated something like this for a long
| time), because it allows them to have their cake and eat it
| too. But I fail to see any shred of evidence backing it up --
| it seems like purely wishful thinking on the part of someone
| who doesn't want the party to change mood.
|
| The problem is that most economists do not actually have a
| good "grounded" model of productivity and growth -- they are
| lost in their own abstractions (GDP and what not).
|
| The pernicious side effects of growth are symptomatic of the
| underlying problem which is market failure -- and despite
| pockets of work (Eg. Stiglitz, etc) economics as a whole is
| not yet emotionally ready to wake up to the situation.
| neontomo wrote:
| I hardly believe this take, because we still have a lot to
| learn in the medical sector for example that would dramatically
| improve lives. But in other areas we may have reached some
| saturation for what would actually be considered positive
| growth. After a certain level of sophistication, I'm not sure
| more tech makes us happier.
| phailhaus wrote:
| That's exactly what I mean! The sector is slowing down as a
| whole, though some pockets have more room.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Yeah, I sense some similar "grift" trends, but the jump to
| social media felt tenuous. Like you say, this seems to be about
| bigger trends.
|
| On the one side, there are masses of people who need to work,
| but the economy does not really have useful things for them to
| do. The basics are handled by a small number of people running
| combines in Iowa. If there's a steel mill, it's overseen by one
| guy who pushes a button.
|
| On the other side, there are stockpiles of capital that are
| looking for a place to sit. That want desperately to outpace
| inflation.
|
| In the middle, you have people who can create convincing-
| looking Potemkin companies. On the one hand, they provide
| employment to the many people who need it. On the other, they
| create investment opportunities for the people with the money.
|
| The ideas are generally hare-brained, but like options
| contracts they have theta -- "maybe it'll work in the future?"
| -- so you can (a) sell shares/contracts without intrinsic
| value, and (b) keep rolling your contracts/grifts forward,
| "extend and pretend" style. It's all about hope that never
| materializes.
|
| It's frustrating to me how frantically people work, and how
| useless the activity is, particularly when there are serious
| problems happening at the same time (global warming, housing
| crisis). Yet for some reason (to do with money), people can't
| work on their problems directly. For an individual, the
| solution to the housing crisis isn't to go out and build a
| house; it's to join a venture-backed startup that can convince
| SoftBank to give you enough money to convince the one remaining
| 50-year-old contractor to build you a house. Before long, all
| the activity is in those VC-backed startups, and none of the
| problems are getting solved at all.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I don't think you need to focus on lack of growth at all...
|
| Lets instead look at natural/living systems. If you imagine you
| have a new kind of plant that has no predators and no diseases
| that affect it, you can imagine it may spread "like a weed".
| But in any ecosystem you cannot imagine impeded growth will
| last forever, even if there is plenty of fertile soil to grow
| in. Animals and insects eventually adapt to feed of the
| abundant source of energy the plant has created. Illness and
| disease spread in monocultures.
|
| There are 8 billion people on the planet. The handful of VCs
| could be perfect angels and it would be just a drop in the
| ocean compared to the number of people that are not VCs and
| will not ever have massive amounts of money, yet want more and
| realize they may be able to get it if they grift off the
| ecosystem.
| phailhaus wrote:
| I don't think that explains why massively wealthy VC's like
| a16z are shifting to these "grifts" as well. They are already
| successful! You would always expect grifts from the little
| guys, though.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There can be multiple causations. Also VCs typically throw
| out shitloads of money in lots of different directions. It
| is possible we are ignoring their past grifts via
| survivorship bias. It's also possible their current grifts
| are just more visible, that is directly attacking the end
| user in a noticeable way.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Growth is such a weird idea. We're collectively hypnotized by
| the "line go up" phenomenon.
|
| In biology you'd call that a cancer; in predator-prey dynamics
| it's the thing that happens at breakneck speed before the
| inevitable crash. It's so dumb. But talk about degrowth or
| alternative economic models and you've suddenly
| conversationally untouchable.
| fnovd wrote:
| The pursuit of growth is the foundation of all life as we
| know it. Every species (but not necessarily every individual)
| will seek to produce offspring and grow their "genetic
| footprint" so to speak. It's a baseline requirement for the
| continuity of existence. It is not a "weird" idea and we are
| not "hypnotized" but rather _aware_ of of the fundamental
| necessity of growth.
|
| Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely
| necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose
| themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside
| of these constraints.
|
| That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in
| exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less
| growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not
| the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and
| we don't actually know what that capacity is.
|
| Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept
| that at some future point, they might be right, but it is
| always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the
| present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no
| longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's
| not a hypnosis. It's just life.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Everything changed with the creation and rise of pay per click.
| Everything else, social media, "grift shift", you name it, its
| all because of pay per click and the need to claim and monetize
| human attention. Its responsible for so much of the negativity in
| this world, social media addiction, people looking at their
| phones all the time, the massive political divide. In my humble
| opinion its creation was amongst the most negative non violent
| things humanity has inflicted on itself in the last century
| activitypea wrote:
| A good companion piece to this is Patrick H Willems' youtube
| essay "Everything Is Content Now". That section of the blog post
| brings up points in such a similar manner to the video that I'm
| surprised it doesn't cite it.
| [deleted]
| hondo77 wrote:
| > "I need to say something every day, but I don't have something
| to say every day"
|
| Hello talk radio and 24-hour news networks.
| olalonde wrote:
| The Age of Calling Everything a Grift. Who is getting defrauded
| exactly? And as a side note, crypto did not "implode". Prices are
| a bit down from their all time peak but that's not unusual in
| crypto land. It's still a trillion dollar market.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| It's just the latest iteration of corporate gobbledygook. In the
| past the behemoths were companies like GE speaking of things like
| synergies in their PowerPoint presentations. Now it's FAANG's
| turn.
|
| At the end of the day the company continues to make money off
| it's core activities. Whilst the Rats talk-the-talk in an attempt
| to climb the ladder and win the Rat Race.
| loopdoend wrote:
| The idea of "content" predates YouTube and the internet.
|
| When we're talking about algorithmic ranking of content the term
| content probably arose from the SEO era of the 2000's when the
| mantra "content is king" took off (it was coined by Bill Gates in
| the 90's).
|
| https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill...
| gman83 wrote:
| This video also gives a good overview:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y
| ambicapter wrote:
| I mean, "content is king" is the exact opposite level of
| respect for the material in the mindset the author was talking
| about, where it doesn't matter what it contains, it's all just
| "content" to the provider as well as the user.
| chabes wrote:
| The article didn't say YouTube invented the term. It said they
| popularized it.
| debo_ wrote:
| I read this differently. The author doesn't say YouTube
| "invented" the term; he says they "established" it. I
| interpreted this to mean that they brought attention to the
| concept of "focusing on the output rather than the medium or
| the message" to the masses of "amateur" creators who now felt
| like their purpose was not just to "consume" this stuff, but
| also to create it, regardless of its worth or the harm it does
| to them.
|
| I've certainly experienced this all around me. Perfectly boring
| people who have nothing to do with media production will
| reference the stuff they're watching on YouTube or finding on
| Instagram as "content", even when it's just their cousin's
| photos of themselves taking selfies on a beach in Hawaii with
| an acai bowl. This to me is "establishing" a trend, not
| inventing it.
|
| Personally, I really dislike this trend. I especially find the
| term "consume content" to be... gross, actually. Like a pig at
| a trough. But I'm not sure how common my experience is.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Related: all images posted to the internet are "photos", even
| if its origin has nothing to do with capturing light bouncing
| off physical objects.
| epups wrote:
| > Because basically nobody doing anything interesting is
| "creating content".
|
| I think this is dead-wrong. If there are people watching this
| content, then it IS interesting to them. Most people out there
| who create content - replace this word with any other you prefer
| - want to monetize it, so they can make a living out of it. There
| is no difference between old and new media in this sense, even
| though the author implies there was some golden age in the past
| where this was not the case.
|
| Having the possibility of more people making a living out of it
| through technology has actually enabled us to enjoy more content
| we care about, not less, although certainly there is a lot of
| noise out there (scam artists, etc.).
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The thing with this is AI is not a fad, it's an unavoidable
| future, however it's easy to speculate and talk about (since it's
| been a primary subject of sci Fi for the last 100 years).
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| This seems like an exceedingly negative framing of "people talk
| about cool new technologies which they think might change the
| world". Some of them get excited about technologies I think are
| dumb, or switch topics more than is perhaps healthy, but I don't
| see why either one is a big deal. I'm just not their target
| audience! It's not as though it's impossible to find people who
| talk deeply and soberly about AI, VR, or any particular hyped
| topic I might be interested in.
| kredd wrote:
| I don't think he's talking about people that tweet a couple of
| things about new tech. More of a people who on a daily basis
| come up with content like "here are 5 ways you can use AI to
| enhance your life" or "10 cryptos that will forever change the
| world as we know it".
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| I think it's more of a "grift drift": flashy cheap cars
| performing ridiculous tricks for the cameras.
| iamnotsure wrote:
| The cause of the problem might be people unknowingly running in
| circles. Is stopping the advertising machine the solution?
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I don't mean to be unkind to the writer, but after reading that
| entire post, I still have no idea what a "grift shift" is
| supposed to be, other than the writer doesn't like flavor of the
| month tech fads, whether it be web#, blockchain, AI, etc.
|
| The points made about LTT, YouTube, etc. seemed to be wholly
| unrelated to the premise of the subject, and basically just
| padded out what _could have been_ a few sentences talking about
| the ridiculous nature of tech fads, into many paragraphs chiding
| a "shift" in language, while reenforcing its proliferation by
| adopting it. The legitimacy we give YouTube for example, is only
| as much as we are willing to give it; I don't care what YouTube
| calls Poetry, Music, and Documentaries - YouTube is _not_ the
| arbiter of language and my contempt and disgust for their attempt
| at homogonous phrasing is something I actively avoid. I agree
| with the writer entirely that the terms YouTube uses are gross.
| The answer then, is to not use them, and entirely discount the
| premise of smushing together thousands of years worth of various
| mediums and art forms into one heaving blob of mediocrity - I
| hate that idea, and I despise YouTube for attempting to do
| precisely that. It 's illegitimate, so I don't use the terms they
| insist upon.
|
| It seems like myself and the author agree more than not, I guess
| I just don't understand what he was attempting to convey _in_
| that agreement. That it 's annoying to hear people who shilled
| NFTs talk about AI now? I suppose that it's kind of annoying, I
| guess? I usually refer to those people as either: Early Adopters,
| or Trend Chasers. The former being a bit more forgiving, the
| latter a bit more cynical. I think that referring to such people
| as "grifters" is a poor choice because it carries a weight of
| _intended maliciousness for profit_ , where one _might_ not be.
| People like trends. People like talking about trendy things.
| People like interacting with other people who also like trendy
| things. I don 't think it's fair or reasonable to presume them to
| be nefarious by default. They're just living their lives, doing
| their thing. When people talk about things I don't like, I either
| keep on moving, or mute/block/silence their posts. It need not be
| any deeper than that.
| 23B1 wrote:
| If you want to see how this works in realtime on a more
| digestible scale, watch how Hollywood works. One day it'll be "We
| need our own John Wick" and then it'll be "we need a Top Gun!"
|
| Humans are fickle and will do whatever to chase a buck. Nothing
| new there. You can day-trade the latest trend and sure you might
| make a buck - but typically the social, repetitional, and
| personal cost isn't worth it.
|
| I think what is new is that people are now realizing that it is
| so widespread across many institutions thanks to the internet.
| The trick is to not let yourself get caught up in brutally short
| hypecycles and to not get used by people who are - including the
| VCs.
|
| Slow is smooth is fast. Chase the multiplier, not the moment.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| I don't care for the man but I did appreciate Roger Stone's
| description of the three phases of fame: 1) Who is Roger Stone
| 2) Get me Roger Stone 3) Get me a Roger Stone type
| svaha1728 wrote:
| It also comes from the top. Those with capital are looking to
| invest in "X". Even if I'm doing "Y" I feel the peer pressure
| to add "X" to it, because people will tell me my idea isn't
| sustainable without it.
| JackFr wrote:
| There's nothing new with content needed every day. The evening
| news isn't an hour long everyday because there's an hour's worth
| of important happenings everyday. The networks will create news
| to fill the airtime or drop relatively important stuff to match
| the time.
|
| Newspapers are a little but better in that in times of big news,
| they will expand. But on the slowest of news days the NYT will
| still publish enough articles to space out their advertising.
| [deleted]
| larsrc wrote:
| Also known as pundits?
| satellite2 wrote:
| It's a symmetrical but reductionist view of the early adopters
| model.
|
| Because you work in tech and are thus surrounded by many people
| of which the very personality is to seek and appreciate novelty.
|
| I don't see drift, which implies greed and manufactured
| sincerity. I see curiosity, enthusiasm and creativity.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| I've seen way too many founders succeed by pivoting to something
| completely unrelated once they have funding and a big team to
| hate on people who do this.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is what happens in capitalism. There's profit to be made
| educating the masses, and setting yourself up for _social
| capital_ and _intellectual capital_ by being a _thought leader_.
| In fact, these centrally controlled Big Tech platforms share this
| profit with _influencers_ who help get _eyeballs_ and
| _engagement_.
|
| On the startup side, venture _capitalists_ encourage startups to
| _fail fast_ and _remove friction_ aka propping up money-losing
| economics, so they can have an IPO to wall street stockholders.
| After which the company must _extract rents_ from its ecosystem
| and report every quarter to its shareholder class how well it 's
| doing that.
|
| At every level, the system is designed to extract money from the
| masses of people. Whether it's "I will teach you how to flip a
| house" in the real estate bubble, to "I will teach you how to do
| AI stuff". The entire system optimizes for that.
|
| People might say "what, are you advocating communism"? Well, the
| alternative doesn't have to be that. It can be a universal basic
| income providing a floor to people, financed by pigovian taxes on
| fossil fuels (already done in Alaska for decades), plastic
| pollution, tolls for congestion of roads, etc. While at the same
| time subsidizing open source software. If the government did
| these two things, it would massively improve society. As the UBI
| would grow, we would not have so much need for labor unions,
| minimum wage laws, etc. to protect workers. People would spend
| time with their own families, learn new things, practice their
| religion, hobbies, etc. And stop having perverse incentives e.g.
| to avoid reporting some recovery just to keep receiving
| disability payments. Both sexes would "lean out" instead of
| "leaning in" to corporate life. They'd stop sticking their
| elderly parents in nursing homes and their kids in government
| schools for long hours a day just so they can work long hours
| without vacation.
|
| Instead we have this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
| pjc50 wrote:
| Breathless futurism is not especially new - it's always been the
| content of WIRED magazine and of VC presentations. What I think
| _is_ new, or at least characteristic of post-2010s, is the
| shallow omnipresence of the grift ecosystem.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| WIRED? Before there was _Mondo 2000_ , _OMNI_....
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Breathless futurism is not especially new
|
| True, the manifesto was in 1909
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
| rwmj wrote:
| The difference is now you can raise stupid amounts of money
| through these grifts. (Or could until interest rates went up, I
| wonder if that might reduce the size of the grift "ecosystem"?)
| xwolfi wrote:
| Yup, the interest rates are killing the crypto grift
| completely, the regulators can just sit down and type
| litigation documents, there's not any angry investor left to
| call them and beg them to calm down.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > there's not any angry investor left to call them and beg
| them to calm down.
|
| I wonder where they went. Are they busy crying about being
| scammed by the child prodigy/most popular effective
| altruist in the world, or do they not care because they had
| a finger in the pie?
|
| Or perhaps they moved on to shill AI and its glorious
| wonders?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Reminds me of that tech/fashion rag "Mondo 2000" that preceded
| Wired, with it's "editor/publisher" R. U. Serious, except today
| people actually believe the nonsense rather than just
| sarcastically play with the idea of a "blindingly bright
| future, with dystopian cracks".
| _jal wrote:
| > R. U. Serious
|
| That's R. U. Sirius, nom de plume for Ken Goffman. Before
| Mondo 2k, he published High Frontiers, too.
| huijzer wrote:
| Hasn't this been a constant in human history? People will try to
| take shortcuts. For example, there is the age old profession of
| quack doctors. In the short term, these people will sometimes do
| relatively well, but often not in the long term.
|
| Time will tell who is swimming naked.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'm not so sure that it's a real trend or an accident of how
| things played out with "Web3" and "AI". Crypto was socially
| rejected quite dramatically and quickly (more so than you'd see
| on a price chart) and then ChatGPT burst into existence with the
| seductive possibility that it could now write your pitch deck
| (which, if you are that guy/gal/whatever, is more likely to get
| funded.)
|
| Both of these things had a special appeal to the indolent and
| ignorant for reasons that were overlapping but also different,
| the "grinds" are going to take over in AI and if Web3 ever makes
| a resurgence (there's something appealing to me about distributed
| authentication though we've had Client SSL certificates for years
| and _nobody_ cares) it will be because the grifters are gone and
| the grinds have ground on it. I don 't know if there's going to
| be another thing in that series.
| rvz wrote:
| Of course. We now have a new grift in AI where almost every
| startup is immediately begging for VC money and presenting how
| their LLM is the solution to all your problems.
|
| Explaining the increase of grifters descending on AI all of a
| sudden when the majority of them are ChatGPT wrappers and calling
| themselves AI companies.
|
| More like a new griftopia has been created.
| nologic01 wrote:
| People would always engage in collective story telling that
| bordered on insanity.
|
| The difference that makes the current circumstamces rather
| special is that we have both the powerful tools and the acute
| need to do better. But we dont
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| And Obamacare created an entire industry of grifting Health tech
| companies that were creating the future of high tech information
| exchange and modernization
| m0llusk wrote:
| There is no such thing as "late stage capitalism". If you have
| personal property and the ability to make money from your labor
| then you have capitalism. Like other human systems such as fire
| and vehicles usage is governed by myths, traditions, customs, and
| all manner of rules that enable the system to be used with
| relative safety. You can use fire without getting burned, and you
| can drive without flying off into the weeds. Back in the 1930s we
| found that out of control capitalism can be managed with high
| taxes on the rich, strong regulations on industry, and legalized
| labor unions and then in the 1980s we abandoned all of that.
| There is no "late stage capitalism" there, only human beings
| using systems irresponsibly by abandoning well known and long
| practiced rules for avoiding serious social harm.
| drcongo wrote:
| "late stage capitalism" was defined over 100 years ago.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's hilariously ironic that they reference the 30's while
| saying the phrase that was coined to describe the 20's and
| 30's doesn't exist.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Source? NGram viewer finds no instances of "late stage
| capitalism" in books before 1984.
| jjgreen wrote:
| "Late capitalism" (in German) attributed to Werner Sombart
| in 1902: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/late_capitalism
| [deleted]
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I get it, but the modern use of the phrase "late-stage
| capitalism" implies that capitalism itself is a terminal
| cancer (where the term comes from), which is not at all
| what Sombart was trying to convey.
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > There is no "late stage capitalism" there, only human beings
| using systems irresponsibly by abandoning well known and long
| practiced rules for avoiding serious social harm.
|
| What do you think "late stage capitalism" means exactly?
| Because it sounds like you are describing a situation that fits
| the definition but saying it doesn't exist...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Consider the late Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had a
| beginning, and then an end, and the "late" part was the part
| that was closer to the end. That's the normal meaning of the
| word "late".
|
| So "late stage capitalism" means - or at least implies - that
| it's the form capitalism takes before capitalism finally
| ends. It shouldn't be used for a form that capitalism
| repeatedly cycles into and out of.
|
| If you wanted to use a different term to describe this phase
| - "monopolistic phase capitalism" or something - then that
| would be fine. "Late stage", though, gives an illusion of
| linear movement through a definite time period, which
| historically has proven to be an incorrect view.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Don't think the term came with any timeframe when it was
| coined (and the "phases of capitalism" where long, like
| hundreds of years). Whether it is a late-stage or not is up
| to future, really, though.
|
| I would agree, though, that there are sharper terms to
| describe the current flavor of capitalism.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > So "late stage capitalism" means - or at least implies -
| that it's the form capitalism takes before capitalism
| finally ends
|
| That's not how terms work. Maybe you don't _like_ the
| phrase but it has a meaning, you can 't just decide a
| commonly used term means something else and then debate
| that strawman.
|
| > If you wanted to use a different term to describe this
| phase - "monopolistic phase capitalism" or something
|
| Who is the "you" here? My grandfather was a mere lad when
| this term was coined.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Terms have a _denotation_ - the defined meaning - and
| then they have a _connotation_ - what they imply. I 'm
| objecting to the latter.
|
| And, we're not at an academic conference that studies
| such things. We're on HN, where most of the people don't
| have a precise definition of the term in mind when they
| read stuff like this. So the misleading connotation
| matters, at least in this setting.
| m0llusk wrote:
| If you light a fire to cook and your house burns down, is the
| burned house late stage cooking fire? If you try to drive
| somewhere and your car goes off the road and crashes into a
| tree is that late stage vehicular mobility?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with the definition of the
| commonly used term "late stage capitalism"?
| m0llusk wrote:
| Pointing out terms that are distracting, meaningless, or
| useless may help with composition of meaningful and
| effective problem statements and solutions.
|
| For example, one of the major problems we are
| experiencing now is with what has come to be known as
| Financialization. This enables financiers to generate
| large income streams without accompanying increases in
| productivity. There is a body of knowledge about how this
| works that includes robust and proven regulatory measures
| for limiting and controlling Financialization.
|
| In a society where we can vote, organize other voters,
| and even run for office the term "late stage capitalism"
| is intended to advance an passive agenda. Instead of
| taking responsibility for how our society functions or
| fails we can lie back and console ourselves that this was
| merely the way of things. We aren't having economic
| problems because we have failed to manage economic
| systems that we control, but because economies are
| naturally and inevitably drawn to failure. It is a way of
| giving up despite knowing the way out.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| That doesn't make sense, you think that "late stage
| capitalism" is distracting but Financialization is a
| useful term, why?
|
| And it's beside the point, if I didn't like the term
| Financialization, I couldn't just announce
| Financialization doesn't exist; it most certainly exists.
| At least I can't do that in good faith.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's really hard to engage with articles that talk about late
| stage capitalism, and "things capital wants to push". It's so
| divisive that it belies a worldview that is either too simplistic
| or too biased to say anything useful.
|
| And the article bears that out. It's not saying anything new.
| Yes, "content" is a category, of which there are many
| subcategories, each with their own stars and losers, processes
| and histories. So what? It still all needs compressing and
| caching and firing across the internet in a similar way, hence
| content.
|
| And yes, there are hangers-on to the latest fad, just as there
| always were. That long-predates anything we know as capitalism.
| It's the iron laws of fashion and ideology that are at play. Once
| we told young men that the best thing ever is to go and die in a
| field somewhere for a king they'd never met, and a lot of them
| did that. Once we told people that other classes are all that
| stands between them and a wonderful life, and they slaughtered
| those other classes, and then they starved because the other
| classes thing was a lie. Now we tell people that AI is worth
| working on. I'll take the capitalism version of that over the
| others any day.
| passwordoops wrote:
| 100%. We do have a problem with the current setup but
| unfortunately the argument gets co-opted by left-right
| superficial complainers, and "late stage capitalism" is a good
| proxy to know which side of the divide the author lies. The
| issue with the current system parallels what was wrong in the
| 1920s-1930s, i.e. too much concentrated private power, and the
| solution then was Antitrust, not redistribution of wealth, not
| regulation directing how the robber barons should operate, and
| definitely not communism. Just straight-up trust-busting to
| strike a delicate balance between just enough government and
| corporate power to keep each other in check
| paganel wrote:
| At this point the "center" has also become an extreme wing, I
| mean, failing to see the obvious societal problems brought by
| the current economic system (however one might want to call
| it) is purely based on ideology, there's no moderate common
| sense that used to be the domain of the centrists in past
| times.
|
| As such, calling out left- or right-wing extremists from a
| position that has become itself ideologically extremist is
| bringing nothing new to the political discourse.
| danaris wrote:
| I think that what's _actually_ happening is that "the
| center" in the US (and some other Western countries) is now
| so far to the right due to the moving Overton window that
| to maintain a "centrist" position requires, as you say,
| willful blindness to various societal and economic
| problems. This doesn't make it "more extreme centrism"; it
| just means that "the center" is already flirting with what
| would by any other measures be the far right.
|
| ...Actually, I think there _is_ another force at work here:
| many of the people who consider themselves "centrists" in
| the US are the same who considered themselves such 20, 30,
| even 40 years ago. But
|
| a) with the aforementioned moving of the Overton window,
| they are having to suppress increasing amounts of cognitive
| dissonance to continue to self-identify as centrists
| without recognizing that they are now well to the right of
| where they would have been previously, and
|
| b) with the (slightly paradoxical, only possible due to the
| increased _polarization_ ) simultaneous increase in
| awareness of the marginalization of various groups, and
| acknowledgment that it is neither good nor neutral to
| continue that marginalization, anyone advocating for either
| maintaining the status quo or returning to some prior state
| has to either openly state that they want to continue the
| oppression of these groups, or, again, suppress the
| cognitive dissonance in any of various ways.
|
| In the end, I think it's really just a long-winded way of
| restating the Desmond Tutu quote: "If you are neutral in
| situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the
| oppressor."
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > "the center" in the US (and some other Western
| countries) is now so far to the right
|
| Can you give an example? I can think of plenty of thing
| where things have moved very far to the left in the US.
| danaris wrote:
| Well, it's not really any one thing. It's more the
| general sets of policies & ideologies that the various
| parts of our political spectrum hold, looked at from an
| objective (or at least more global) point of view.
|
| Additionally, I did specifically mention that, _at the
| same time_ as this has been going on, a second movement
| has been underway that counterbalances it to some extent,
| and that this is resulting in unprecedented(?) levels of
| political _polarization_.
| h2odragon wrote:
| In your view, are there any non-extremists?
|
| Perhaps the only purity to be found is in the ignorant, the
| innocent, the children?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade
| [deleted]
| pseg134 wrote:
| I think he would be okay with mentally retarded people as
| well.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > So what? It still all needs compressing and caching and
| firing across the internet in a similar way, hence content.
|
| But it's not DBA and network engineers calling it that, it's
| "everyone".
|
| It rubs me the wrong way the same way gamers suddenly using the
| word "franchise" did. "oh yeah, this obviously sucks and makes
| it a worse game, but I can understand why they would want that
| for their franchise".
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not everyone. People who are Youtube creators say
| "content", sure. Wordpress says it because it manages a
| superset of these various things, and the users using it need
| the terminology to understand it. But that's not everyone.
| Most people watch movies or read books.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > People who are Youtube creators
|
| People who upload videos to youtube. That is what they do.
| And no, they don't need it. They could say "video". Easily.
|
| Also, I did put "everyone" in quotes for reason. Slice it
| how you want, a lot more people than those actually
| managing a "container" something else could be "content" in
| use that word. That was a shift that happened. And it's one
| thing when HR thinks of humans as resources, quite another
| when humans start referring to themselves that way.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > That was a shift that happened.
|
| You could say this about anything. When did loads of
| people start saying "shift" instead of "change"? Or
| "space" instead of "garden" or "room" or "atrium"? Saying
| something changed doesn't give it much significance.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| It contradicts the claim that "content" is what people
| say because that's what they _have_ to say, to understand
| what they 're posting or reading/viewing. It's no more
| significant than is warranted by what we're talking about
| here. It's fine.
|
| > When did loads of people start saying "shift" instead
| of "change"?
|
| I'd say "shift" is a subset of "change" and slightly more
| specific (every shift is a change, not every change is a
| shift). People didn't change how they speak, some adopted
| the language of website operators, and then even more
| people started to parrot that unthinkingly.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It contradicts the claim that "content" is what people
| say because that's what they have to say
|
| No one's saying it's because they have to say it (who has
| to say anything?). There was a criticism of Wordpress
| being a CMS, and I was referring to that.
|
| > People didn't change how they speak, some adopted the
| language of website operators, and then even more people
| started to parrot that unthinkingly.
|
| I don't understand how people didn't change how they
| spoke if they adopted some language. What's the
| difference?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Investors, i.e., capital, are quite literally pushing things in
| order to increase returns of their investments. People talking
| their book is nothing new or unusual.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > "People who effortlessly shift from "web3 is the future" to "I
| will explain to you why 'AI' will replace you""
|
| to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and
| something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every
| business works.
|
| social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following
| and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and
| act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they
| want
|
| > "It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not
| about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one
| made was just content."
|
| and the grift part came from the idea that the substance of the
| product itself doesn't matter as much as just getting yourself in
| the middle. getting a monopoly on eyeballs that are interested in
| the thing
|
| a good example is those youtube farms that churn out history and
| economics videos where the presenter doesn't even know what he's
| saying, just reading words all day. content
|
| at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some
| happiness or entertainment
| gumby wrote:
| > to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and
| something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every
| business works.
|
| Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of
| grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that _" this is
| how pretty much every business works"_.
|
| If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between
| something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a
| restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter.
|
| There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does
| more than just insert itself and charge a toll!
| mouzogu wrote:
| > it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much
| every business works".
|
| i don't mean it in a totally negative sense. maybe it came
| across that way in the context.
|
| a business is still a facilitator between you and something
| you need. they have an advantage be it money, resources,
| technology, connections...something that allows them to act
| as that middle man and in many case monopolise it.
|
| on social media its much easier for anyone to do that. you
| dont really need any resource aside from "hustle" as they
| call it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves
| between something you could have without them._
|
| They start to, though. What was that about BMW and having
| telemetry on _car radio_ I heard about the other day? Or
| attempts by manufacturers to turn pieces of car into
| services, which has an effect of them inserting themselves
| into car resales?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Of course they do. Toyota inserts itself between me and my
| need to go places.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In this case transportation grift is a trillion dollar
| problem in the US, but maybe slightly different than you're
| saying. A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the
| idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. Our
| shops are box islands in multi acre oceans of black
| asphalt. Vast arteries of concrete separate people from
| where they live to where they buy. So, yea I would say
| there is plenty of grift at different levels.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think we have a different interpretation of "between".
|
| I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do,
| and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically
| is what all companies do.
|
| I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently
| everyone else interpreted it differently.
| ta8645 wrote:
| People went places before cars were invented, you can too.
| Toyota offers you a better way, if you can afford to avail
| yourself of their offer -- that's all.
| drekk wrote:
| People went places before cars were invented, and then
| General Motors put itself between people and the desire
| to move around by buying up public transit only to
| dismantle it. Now car companies are offering not "a
| better way" but "the only real way" unless you want to
| get hit by a suburbanite driving a Ford F-150 while
| sitting in an unprotected bike lane.
|
| I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free
| market where everyone is an equal, rational actor. There
| was a concerted effort to redesign Americana around cars
| that was not replicated globally, and you see the
| consequences of it play out in real time.
| gumby wrote:
| > General Motors put itself between people and the desire
| to move around by buying up public transit only to
| dismantle it
|
| I know this story and for a long time believed it. But it
| appears that developers building new towns (urban
| expansion) in the mid 20th century put in streetcars to
| get people to move in (connected to city networks etc)
| and ran them at a loss. As the new town filled up and the
| developers went on to the next one, the streetcars became
| the uneconomic responsibility of the town.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free
| market where everyone is an equal, rational actor.
|
| It's never been a free market. There was no golden age
| where everybody had access to public transit. There were
| zero public services at all, you were on your own. And
| often had to contend with bandits and worse.
|
| I'm really tired of people acting like the only thing
| standing in the way of utopia, is capitalism.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's what I meant by "between" in this case. Apparently
| other people interpreted it differently.
| javawizard wrote:
| > If you buy a car
|
| That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering
| that dealers are the dominant distribution channel from which
| to acquire a car, at least in the U.S.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| That's how it was done pre-Internet, but now Tesla is one
| of the most valuable auto manufacturers and it sells
| directly to end users, no middlemen dealers.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Toyota-5x
|
| Ford, Honda, Chevrolet-4x
|
| Jeep, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Ram, Subaru-3x
|
| These are many more multiples of Tesla's sales.
|
| Teslas sales make up a minuscule portion of the market.
| Tesla cannot sell directly to users in any of the
| continental US, they must sell through a website and ship
| the vehicle.
|
| Federal Dealership laws preclude direct to customer
| sales.
|
| Tesla may be valuable but its effects on the market are
| negligible.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| The point stands even if the example was bad.
|
| The other day I purchased some particle board and had them
| cut it to size. I do not believe that hardware store is on
| the same level of grift as the companies being described in
| this article.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The grifters are car dealers in this case, increasingly.
| Mfgs create value.
|
| Not unlike how writers/artists created a bunch of value and
| ClosedAI and similar are grifts built on top of them.
| except unlike car mfgs authors don't have much pull to stop
| it
| sleepybrett wrote:
| ... and there isn't a person in the US that doesn't hate
| car dealers (including other car dealers).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| We had a Toyota dealer in our town that both customers
| and former employees speak reverently of.
|
| Some of those employees jumped ship to the Honda dealer
| after the Toyota dealer was bought by the guy who owned
| all the other car dealerships in town. For a long time
| the Honda dealer was the only competitor to Maguire, but
| then Maguire bought the Honda dealer.
|
| Those employees don't speak ill of Maguire but they
| certainly don't speak about in him in glowing terms.
| jasode wrote:
| _> > If you buy a car_
|
| _> That's a particularly amusing example to pick
| considering that _dealers__
|
| Fyi... The gp you replied to specifically wrote about
| _manufacturer_ as the example and not dealers when he
| wrote: _" If you buy a car the _mfr_ is hardly inserting
| themselves"_
| mock-possum wrote:
| Ohhhhh I thought 'mfr' was 'motherfucker,' but
| 'manufacturer' makes more sense
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Yeah, since gumby wrote that, I assumed it was
| motherfucker, too! Maybe he was referring to Tesla.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift.
| There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.
| envsubst wrote:
| I am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting,
| but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil. Are
| concepts like proof of work not even interesting?
|
| I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a
| chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer
| service.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| > fast and cheap online payments
|
| but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it
| particularly cheap.
|
| If we are talking fast and cheap online payments,
| micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much
| of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding
| ones that don't fit).
| notsurenymore wrote:
| > am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting,
| but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil
|
| I mean.. it's a site associated with a notable VC
| organization.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting?
|
| PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this
| stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it).
| It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting?
|
| Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then
| Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with
| their work rather than just finding which random numbers
| hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary
| economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a
| useful thing in economics.
|
| We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still
| regularly use it: it's called "git".
|
| And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my
| case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my
| banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005,
| and now more countries in the region, there's a thing
| called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-
| feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-P
| esa_on_Nokia_1100...
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| I know this is the prevailing narrative (and I am guilty of
| it as well), I have just one question then: why are
| reasonable and intelligent academics/engineers working on
| things like MetaGov, https://metagov.org? These people are
| not grifting, as far as I can tell.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Whatever system you're in, you have to do a little grift
| from time to time, and the promise of crypto is a _huge_
| reward for very little work. That 's how SBF's parents,
| respected academics _one of whom is an ethics professor_ ,
| got caught up in a multibillion dollar fraud. It's simply
| too hard to turn down.
| https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/sam-bankman-fried-
| paren...
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > It's simply too hard to turn down.
|
| It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision
| to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.
| BoxFour wrote:
| I can't comment on these specific individuals, but it's
| worth noting that both academics and engineers are fully
| capable, and at times even driven, to engage in grifting.
|
| Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous
| instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for
| falsifying data.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the
| Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason
| why communities, organizations, and institutions are
| still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable
| intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in
| certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of
| COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in
| good faith and harbor good will because they believe that
| others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust
| ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a
| target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your
| values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to
| abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of
| academics/engineers and looking at the way people in
| groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large
| proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but
| it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception
| in the upper echelons of such a community/organization
| that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the
| hierarchy.
|
| I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or
| deception unless you establish people like the academics
| who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of
| that?
| BoxFour wrote:
| There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics
| uphold more stringent standards than any other group of
| professionals.
|
| If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate
| the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent
| attorneys, would that possess the same level of
| persuasiveness for you?
|
| It's similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you
| use in your original statement (attorneys or academics).
| Which is to say - not very.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| > If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate
| the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent
| attorneys, would that possess the same level of
| persuasiveness for you?
|
| It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical,
| natural or societal constraints are likely to bound
| behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any
| number of agents acting purely on self-interest,
| regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to
| believe you created improved semiconductor node
| technology because of the physical constraints of the
| universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun
| ownership will inherently lead to violence because of
| decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift
| someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it
| doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the
| body.
|
| My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable
| self-interested agents understand they operate under the
| constraints of those limits regardless of their group
| membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what
| is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by
| associating with a particular grift after they've made a
| quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as
| someone said the nature of the grift has to keep
| changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of
| people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as
| possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe
| have sunk costs.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Your interpretation of 'grifting' seems rather narrow and
| may not align with its applicability to either the
| article or the broader understanding. Grifting extends
| beyond merely making quick profits or even publishing
| fabricated findings--though these are extreme and evident
| instances.
|
| Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain
| despite having limited expertise can be considered a form
| of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's
| opening paragraph.
|
| To draw a more specific connection to the present
| example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely
| for whatever reason, these academics now have the
| opportunity to assert their involvement in a
| 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently,
| they are likely to generate a substantial volume of
| academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key
| metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly
| motive for academic grifters to be involved.
|
| Particularly considering the historical context of web3,
| there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain
| individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in
| such a project.
| envsubst wrote:
| Engineers especially are some of the most persuadable
| people I know, they just respond to different kinds of
| marketing than most people.
|
| I think academics have a weird susceptibly to grifting
| because they feel morally reassured that other people
| should listen to them.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| I don't think "moral reassurance" has anything to do with
| it, at least in the hard sciences. The universe will
| smack you hard with reality if you're grifting, there are
| limits to lying in this space (at least). For example,
| you can't lie about creating full self-driving because it
| simply won't work in all the conditions/scenarios under
| which we expect human-like performance.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > The universe will smack you hard with reality if you're
| grifting
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medic
| ine
|
| Choice quotes:
|
| > a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found
| that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had
| replications that could confirm conclusions from the
| original studies
|
| > A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them
| had been unable to reproduce a published result
|
| > A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a
| brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that
| more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to
| reproduce another scientist's experiment results
| (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of
| physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64%
| of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all
| others
|
| How many of those papers were retracted, you think?
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| Aren't you making my point though by pointing out the
| replication crisis? I wasn't saying that academics grift
| less than others.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The vast majority of "failed replication" has nothing to
| do with fraud or false findings, and everything to do
| with "You have to write what you did to get this result
| that other people can follow, but you aren't really
| incentivized to be comprehensive and clear and note down
| every possible contributor so nobody can recreate the
| reaction you had in your paper because you didn't write
| down that you did it in an especially cold lab"
| nmd1 wrote:
| Was Nature able to reproduce these results? On another
| set of ~1,500 papers after 2016?
| meiraleal wrote:
| > But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift.
| There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and
| mirror.
|
| Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling
| blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure
| of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like
| Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and
| P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
| ahamm wrote:
| Evidence?
| meiraleal wrote:
| "Harnessing the power of blockchain and Distributed
| Ledger Technology (DLT), DREX will facilitate peer-to-
| peer transactions without the need for an intermediary,
| leveraging smart contracts for the automatic execution of
| transactions."
|
| https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-
| in-2024-s...
| otp209 wrote:
| Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually
| _wants_ to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs
| the headache?
|
| It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the
| rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that
| it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their
| idealized version.
|
| Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting
| stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it
| ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being
| centralized, just around the management of a handful of
| resource collectives.
| meiraleal wrote:
| At some point it becomes so easy that people start to
| wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.
|
| > Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting
| stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it
| ""decentralized"".
|
| Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing
| isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to
| create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is
| real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
| ben_w wrote:
| > At some point it becomes so easy that people start to
| wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.
|
| "I am good at numbers, money is just numbers"
| https://xkcd.com/1570/
|
| I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people
| reading a financial thing very badly wrong.
|
| Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you
| read PS2.49 becoming PS4.29.
|
| Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not
| understanding compound interest.
|
| Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an
| example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan
| they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction
| assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings
| will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.
|
| Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of
| people who ought to know better all reading the paper
| that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not
| realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks
| are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-
| pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a
| major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in
| at the same time.
|
| If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the
| return of my money -- up to a certain threshold, but that
| guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY
| "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people
| reading a financial thing very badly wrong.
|
| well done, you just did it again.
|
| > Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort
| of people who ought to know better all reading the paper
| that just won the Nobel prize for economics
|
| What a great way to defend the status quo as if every
| possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail.
| The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too
| big to fail or impossible to go against.
| ben_w wrote:
| > What a great way to defend the status quo as if every
| possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail.
| The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too
| big to fail or impossible to go against.
|
| That's not even close to what I was saying and I have no
| idea how you've misapprehended me so badly.
|
| I will however offer this aphorism:
|
| Who is the bigger fool, the one who messes up, or the one
| who upon seeing the first one fail says "what an idiot,
| this is easy, I will do it myself"?
| pixl97 wrote:
| > libertarians are constantly surprised
|
| I call this "Knocking down Chesterton's fence to be gored
| by a bull moments later"
| seanw444 wrote:
| Not everyone that finds cryptocurrency useful and
| actually understands it is a "cryptobro".
| Decentralization and financial liberty is extra work. It
| will never be easier than the centralized solution. In
| fact, that goes for everything under the umbrella of
| liberty. You want more, prepare to do more work. Liberty
| and convenience almost never overlap, by their very
| nature.
| jdiff wrote:
| They're not though. Just ledgers have existed forever. So
| have distributed ones. A P2P ledger is what's new, and it's
| not being adopted by anyone.
| [deleted]
| book1976 wrote:
| > to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and
| something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every
| business works.
|
| Sure this might be true. Also true that changing topic every
| three months is a sure way to ruin your reputation
| morelisp wrote:
| At least one SV luminary founded his empire on the idea you
| could "become an expert" on any topic in four weeks and shift
| between them constantly. Even after explaining the grift his
| star is still fairly bright.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But, in all fairness, SV loves and celebrates grifters.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and
| something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every
| business works.
|
| I disagree. They're not the same thing. Most businesses will
| provide solutions to a need, or at least facilitate getting you
| to the solution for a fee.
|
| The social media grifters are doing something else. They're
| finding people with a need (or tricking people into thinking
| they have a need) and then trying to capture that person as a
| follower and, eventually, a revenue stream while delivering
| little real value in exchange.
|
| The prototypical social media grifter like this has a lot to
| say and a lot of strongly worded opinions, but the end game
| usually involves something like hiding the "real" answers
| inside of a paid course or paid community. They spend years
| building a following on social media and then suddenly they're
| selling a course for $1000 per seat. They only need a few
| hundred of their million followers to convert to make a decent
| amount of money. The content is usually so-so or recycled from
| other books and courses. Often purchasers are so embarrassed
| about having paid $1000 for it that they won't complain online.
| If they do complain, they get dunked on by other social media
| users who were smart enough to see the grift, so they delete
| their complaints.
|
| I've followed many people on Twitter who started out doing good
| work on indie projects or small startups, built up a following,
| and then pivoted into selling courses and educational material
| to their followers.
|
| An alternative grift is to build up a following and then
| carefully walk the line on "offering the opportunity" to invest
| in their newest business. A handful of their star-struck
| followers will be knocking down their door to hand over their
| cash. You see it a lot with real estate and self storage
| business influencers.
| Zenquin wrote:
| "that churn out history and economics videos"
|
| Can you provide some examples?
| delfinom wrote:
| >at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of
| some happiness or entertainment
|
| They aren't selling anything. They are simply feeding idle
| brains with content in exchange for shotgunning topics for ad
| revenue.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I used to believe that TV channels were there to offer
| entertainment, news, education, and to fund this they had
| advertisements.
|
| Today it is clear that these are businesses that are there to
| make profit, and the "content" is only there to spread the
| advertisements apart.
|
| I was catching-up to the Coffeezilla's videos, and it looks
| like the scammers-be-scamming. And some people will try their
| 'luck' with anything fringe-y (forex, NFTs, crypto, AI, etc.)
| bandrami wrote:
| A tv station's product is its audience, except for the
| "prestige" no-ads cable stations. Having worked in TV, i
| promise you they are very clear about this. The programming
| exists to attract the product.
| SergeAx wrote:
| No. Pretty much every business works like this: you BUILD
| something people (will) want and sell it to them. Even if you
| are a retailer, you still build a shop from shelves, showcases,
| cashier desks and so on and you build a logistic system to
| supply it with goods.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I feel like this isn't a new phenomenon, it's just been
| democratized.
|
| As with Jeff Kramer and other business talking heads who will
| gladly tell you how _you_ can make money by just following
| their advice, if somebody really had the secrets to "get rich
| quick" they wouldn't go around selling that to _you_.
|
| In the age of "web3" (and now AI) hype, there's no longer _one_
| Jeff Kramer - there are thousands, millions of them, inserting
| themselves in peoples ' feeds instead of into their TVs. Now
| countless grifters are out there, selling themselves as arcane
| wizards who can lead the gullible masses to financial success.
|
| Unlike Kramer (who is bound by a legal framework that at least
| _tries_ to protect public from outright grifts in traditional
| media), though, this new generation is basically free to
| outright lie with complete impunity.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and
| something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every
| business works.
|
| That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a
| solution to a real problem, instead.
| fnovd wrote:
| I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at.
| Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then
| "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how
| they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and
| charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create
| the solution.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't think I was nitpicking at all. "inserting
| themselves between" two things is very, very different than
| providing a solution to a problem.
|
| > Good businesses create a solution to your problem and
| then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.
|
| I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all.
| Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting
| themselves between anything. They're offering a solution
| directly.
| fnovd wrote:
| Think about any software company with a large sales team.
| The people writing the software are not the people
| selling the software. Writing software and offering it to
| people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then
| finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The
| sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem
| and the solution the product team has created is a core
| part of the business, a sine qua non.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your
| problem and the solution
|
| That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things.
| The solution is developed by people who specialize in
| developing solutions. The communication of the existence
| of the solution to people who need it is handled by
| people who specialize in communication and customer
| outreach, i.e. sales.
|
| You may think that without a sales team the solution
| would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales
| team the solution would either not exist or be
| substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the
| customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's
| taking them away from working on the product.
| fnovd wrote:
| I don't think it's jaded at all. I don't disagree that a
| sales team is necessary, either. I'm just describing how
| a business works: it creates a solution and then finds a
| way to extract value by selling the solution to those for
| whom value would be created. Creating something and
| extracting value from it require different skillsets;
| that's all fine and good.
|
| We view a business as problematic when it's _only_
| inserting itself between you and the solution, without
| actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it
| 's the relationship between the business and the solution
| that causes an issue, not the action of putting the
| business between the solution and the problem. The latter
| is a given, always.
| neontomo wrote:
| Content is a concept that I've come to dislike, as it seems
| geared at taking advantage of the consumer maximally. Advice is
| given on YouTube, padded with unnecessary talking and fluff to
| maximise the watch time, or the video ends up making you no-wiser
| at the end. Getting to the core of things, the actual insights
| and knowledge is harder. I find myself searching Reddit and
| HackerNews to get actual opinions, which are more valuable than
| content. I understand the incentives for creating content in this
| way, but it harms the consumer and steals time.
|
| Edit: Some content is pure entertainment and this doesn't fit
| this view.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Content is a concept that I've come to dislike
|
| I think that when people started unironically calling it
| "content", that was the writing on the wall that we're going
| down a bad path.
| choppaface wrote:
| But for many consumers it's the raw sentiment (and perhaps its
| expression) that matters most, and for that the "fluff" and
| "doom scrolling" content can be worthwhile. A grand part of the
| internet is fueling discovery. There will always be some ads
| that steal time, though, and perhaps the OP is pointing out
| that advertising has evolved a bit (the "grift shift") from
| display ads to "thought leaders." Or rather that, as the
| internet grows, the gross revenue of "thought leadership" grows
| too.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think a lot of OPs complaints seem to come about because
| what we are missing is lively debate. Back when tv was the
| main medium it was almost a panel or a debate which was
| pushing ideas. Lone writers could still write but wouldn't
| get the distribution required without being challenged by
| critics. Now, technology has given distribution without the
| counter opinion and that is causing all of this nonsense to
| grow unchecked.
| drcongo wrote:
| This page is almost completely blank for me as I have the
| `wp.com` CDN blocked (I've seen more malware served from that
| domain than any other), this is the first time I've seen my
| blocking remove all the text though!
| picadores wrote:
| The market will ratchet on towards this, everything fake, a
| information garbage dump, demanding fees every step into the
| digsite. Recursive, fractal, parasitics all the way down.
|
| And then the people will rebel. They will put us with our laptops
| together with the other instigators en mass in train wagons and
| send us into ovens and burn pits like cattle. "The market wills
| it" will be written as a welcoming slogan above the end-station.
|
| There will be adds everywhere, colorful and shrill, until the
| place were it all ends- which will be dark and quiet. And maybe,
| just maybe we had it coming, but also no way to avoid it.
|
| So i call shotgun on the last wagon.
|
| I know Hyperbole, ludicrous, yadayadaya, but maybe talk to
| someone not in tech. Behind the service smile, they really hate
| our guts for the dependencies and shit we forced upon them.
| rjbwork wrote:
| >maybe talk to someone not in tech. Behind the service smile,
| they really hate our guts for the dependencies and shit we
| forced upon them.
|
| Absolutely. It's just sheer luck I stumbled into this career
| because I found like programming and designing systems, and I
| happen to be pretty good at it, and it just so happens to pay
| damn well, especially to a guy from a lower middle class
| background. The unavoidable complexity foisted upon the masses
| by the techno-aristocracy that they are ill-equipped to
| navigate is staggering. I don't blame them for hating us.
| focusedone wrote:
| >There will be adds everywhere, colorful and shrill, until the
| place were it all ends
|
| Is this a book quote that I can't google?
| manicennui wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
| blueyes wrote:
| Always disappointed to see this kind of tech noir voted to the
| front page of HN. Sure, there are phonies and grift shift is a
| cute term, but anybody who uses the term "terminal" to refer to
| our economy (similar to "late-stage" capitalism) has no idea what
| he's talking about. They're a quack doctor offering the sole
| prognosis of death. The capitalism we are living is complex and
| adaptive, and that's why it's still running and morphing along.
| There's nothing terminal about it except in the mind of
| socialists, nihilists and people who should get outside more.
|
| One of his main beefs is that people who don't know or care much
| about technology suck a lot of oxygen out of the room. Well,
| sure. Very little to do with capitalism and certainly not
| specific to tech. Loud people with dumb opinions have opined
| about important subject in every age. Today, they do the same
| about politics and finance, too.
|
| And this has nothing to do with the abstraction of content, which
| he invests with too much power. This has been going on since
| before the printing press, and the daily grind of content has
| been very real for well over a century at most newspapers, I can
| assure new. YouTube did not create it.
|
| His weird take on VCs is typical of people outside tech who don't
| understand that many investors have long careers as builders, and
| have contributed more to the industry than their critics. PG and
| Andreessen come to mind. They don't need consultants to tell them
| what to think.
|
| Everyone is signaling, because we are a social species, and some
| things get talked into existence. So what! So-called influencers
| signal. Tante himself signals his virtues in this bio "De-
| Evangelist, writer and speaker. Comm(u|o)nist. Feminist.
| Antifascist. Luddite. He/him." Which, frankly, contains terms
| that attract a lot of grifters, too.
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