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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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sabakos · 5 months

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In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto). It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate.

Cory Doctorow - Sympathy for the Spammer

#enshittification

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boinin · 1 year

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Blue Lock Manga

After two weeks of creeping hysteria and stir-craziness redditors know what I mean, the scanlation for Chapter 222 (“Design”) has dropped. My usual new chapter rambling under the cut.

No mention of a break next week 🎉

Previous chapter analyses

1. Hiori finds his mojo (isagi. it's been isagi all along)

I had hoped best boi's ego would be linked to combating Ubers more so than Isagi, but alas, the harem of simps/rivals proved too compelling to pass on. This seems to be set-up for Noa to substitute Hiori on in place of Kurona once the three-minute star change is over. But until then...

It's been pointed out on the subreddit that Isagi looks particularly good in that first panel. I would like to raise that Hiori is going doki-doki for Himsagi-kun in the second.

Guys, they know who they're appealing to with this manga. On that point...

2. Soccer Dad Star Showdown

Blue Lock!! Where one half of the fandom are here for the world-class ball keeping techniques and the other half of the fandom are here for... the world-class ball keeping techniques 😏 Guess what camp I'm in?

The effect normal panels of Snuffy and Noa have on me. Guess I have a kink for competent football dads 🤷 /s Chris Prince and Lavinho could never.

Anyway, Snuffy hits the pitch hot and doesn't let BM catch a break. I really enjoyed his and Noa's face off. As much chaos as Lavinho and Prince caused during the two previous matches, Snuffy strikes me as a far bigger threat in terms of dismantling BM's defence (and showing up Noa). It takes BM's two most talented forwards to see off the shot Snuffy sets up for Barou. At the end of the chapter, as Ubers regroup to take on BM's defence again, I have a sinking feeling Snuffy's going to win this confrontation. And perhaps he should. What's rational exactly about a team at war?

Unashamed thirst screenshot of Snuff. This one is really cool, didn't have time to clean it, but it looks bomb ✨ He's so threatening yet friendly? Realest of the bunch.

3. Ness tries

...

That's it.

Like for real. He runs in, doesn't touch the ball, gets read to filth by a fifteen year old, and isn't seen again in this chapter.

When are we going to see some magic from the magician?

It's high time for Ness (as a professional player) to get his head in the game. This is the guy that outperformed everybody but Kaiser in the original BM stamina and technique test. He's subservient to his emperor, but even then, how is he this lacklustre?

Since Noa only cares about numbers, it seems like Ness is here to stay... but it sure is frustrating.

4. Superbowl: Kaiser V Barou V Isagi

This is my favourite panel this week. Clock the auras: puzzles, thorned vines and lightning collide at last. Dope. I'm still new to colouring, so I'm not touching this one, but I can't WAIT to see what someone with serious skill does with it 🔥🔥🔥

It's refreshing to see Kaiser get worked up over someone other than Isagi. Got to spread the frustration, right?

Prediction tracker

(alternatively: how wrong can one nerd be week to week?)

Last time, I predicted: I think Snuffy's MO will be to set up a goal for Barou, while knocking Kaiser and Isagi down a peg. I hope he synergises with Lorenzo! Noa will be man marking Snuffy, but might get time to do some Isagi coaching while he's out there, who knows?

So far so good, right? I think this prediction will carry over into the next chapter. I'll caveat one thing: Isagi and Kaiser's backs must ache from carrying both the offence and defence of Bastard Munchen. They're the only BM players that aren't part of the circus as of the end of this chapter. Raichi, Yukimiya, Mensah and Birkenstock found dead in a ditch /s

I predict Barou will score the next goal, with Lorenzo providing an assist. Then Noa will make a substitution with the aim of countering Lorenzo and Ubers in the final play of the game...

Four chapters ago (chp 218), I predicted: As for who’ll be the true game changer? Said it already, but if Hiori’s not getting subbed on for our newly christened royal trash!Ness in the next five chapters, I’ll eat my hat. 🐑

Have a funny feeling he'll get subbed in the chapter after next. If I'm decided a clown by chp 223, watch the egg on my face get cooked by chp 224. I don't think Ness is getting subbed out at this point.

Until next time! 😋👒

#blue lock #bllk #bllk manga spoilers #bllk manga analysis #bllk chp 222 #mine #hiori yo #isagi yoichi #marc snuffy #noel noa #alexis ness #baro shoei #boinin talks bllk

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contentment-of-cats · 4 months

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Almost two years.

Superbowl Sunday of 2022, I was in the ER. That was the start of this whole journey. 19 days later, I'd be on my way to Cedars, four vicodin barely holding back the pain, and a few hours later I'd been in a hospital bed, doped to the gills for the pain, knowing only that I was being cared for.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

youtube

#wow #Youtube

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tha1troy · 9 months

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Good Morning,

Today is Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 9:25am. Here I am, just another day starting off at work, I have now been at work 7 days straight, 1 more to go.. I am feeling kinda tired and drained from working so much the past week, it’s not a bad thing, I love to work and you know I love money lol, but I would kinda like a little break. It gets more tiring just coming here every single day more than the work I have to do here.. The traffic in Las Vegas has been so bad lately, as they prepare for F1, MSG Sphere Opening, and the SuperBowl. Growing up in Vegas there was nothing as a kid, literally nothing. No sports, not many shows or anything for kids. But now it has changed so much, there is definitely a lot more to do.. It’s pretty cool to watch the world and the city grow and evolve but what it takes to get it all done like all this repaving and construction is annoying. It’s been taking me forever to get to and from work lately because of it.. Normally a 20 min drive has turned into a 40-45 min drive and having to take different routes.. But whatever. It is what it is. At least if I had a better car that I enjoyed and loved more I probably wouldn’t even care about sitting in traffic or driving a lot, but since that’s not the case anymore I hate driving and definitely hate sitting in traffic lol.. Anyways, yesterday at work I wrote another dope song, my lyrics are getting better & better.. I really love doing this music, it’s always been my love & passion ever since I was a kid. I’m definitely ready to start taking it to the next level & way more serious! I know I got this, it just sucks when you feel you don’t have any support or a team around you & like your doing everything on your own.. But these battles & struggles only are making me stronger, wiser, and believe me I’m going to get this done! I AM A STAR. IT IS MY TIME! 💫 Have an amazing day everybody. Let’s get this money, stay positive, and focus on the goals. LØVE

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goboymusic · 1 year

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#TheLastofUs was moved to tonight because of the #SuperBowl on Sunday. #tlou

Released the final version of “#Rebecca (Song 122).” That song had a disastrous production process, but it turned out pretty dope.

After the production chaos of GoBoy 5, I took a well needed break from mixing natural vocals for the 1st track on GoBoy 6 and made a simple vocoder song called “Booty on Ice.” For the 2nd track of GoBoy 6, I felt rested enough to jump back into natural vocals and started working on “#Muffin Your Brains Out,” a song about fucking someone’s brains out.

Like most, the melodies for “Muffin Your Brains Out” arose while going about my daily life, with the chorus melody arising only a couple days before recording vocals. As soon as the idea of using the word “muffin” instead of “fucking” came to mind, the song was a go. That stupid gimmick would be memorable enough to warrant recording and mixing.

While mixing vocals for “Muffin Your Brains Out,” I was smoking cigarettes on a rainy weekend in Metro Detroit while peripherally watching @jacksepticeye play #ResidentEvil Village in the background (I’ll smoke cigarettes every six or so months for the hell of it). It’s a very fond memory.

The original plan was to jump straight into the chorus without an intro, but that wasn’t working. Not only did the song need an intro to establish the key and tempo, the chorus instruments needed to be established before the vocals began. Without such an intro, it was difficult to fully comprehend what you were hearing the first time you listened to the song.

While working on the intro, the idea arose of having computer voices repeat the words “muffin your brains out.” They were placed during the section of the song where the chorus instruments are being established before the melodic vocals kick in, because that’s where it made the most sense to put them.

After the chorus, the original plan was to jump straight into the verse vocals, but that wasn’t working either. The verse melody needed some sort of introduction before the verse vocals kicked in, which was ultimately accomplished by playing the melody on a synthesizer before the vocals began. The same synthesizer would be used for “Dean Corll (Song 105)” a few months later.

After mixing was complete, 30 seconds of the song were cut out to make the song more concise, thus (hopefully) increasing replay value.

After this song was complete, I took a week-long break from music production, during which I had the idea of rebranding from “River Elder” to “#GoBoy,” and synchronizing the visual branding of the cover arts with a color theme (red), logo, and song count at the bottom right corner. I also decided to go with a clean shaven appearance in all of GoBoy’s cover arts after discovering that females (generally speaking) were not huge fans of the long beard in the cover arts of River Elder. Seeing as 50% of River Elder’s audience was female, the beard had to go.

A bass boost was added to songs 37-101 in Nov, 2021, while I was stuck at home with covid. As a result, this song feels more powerful. The bass boost isn’t a simple plugin nonchalantly added to each song. It’s a process that took about 3.5 hours per song, or one whole month to complete all songs. Admittedly, I pushed the bass boost a little too far for some of them. The bass in some songs sounds like a freaking earthquake (unnecessarily pronounced low frequencies 20 - 50 Hz). Might dial that back someday. The bass boost was also applied to every song on GoBoy 6 and beyond (excerpt from post 37).

#GoBoy #Muffin #101

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