#MLMs
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
Sympathy for the spammer
Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.
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. 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
#pluralistic#late-stage capitalism#end-stage capitalism#feudalism#rentierism#blueprint for wealth#predation#clarkesworld#kindle#kindle unlimited program#kup#pyramid schemes#mlms#multilevel marketing#amway#spam#form spam#enshittification#ai#llms#large language models#chatbots#ucm#seo#search engine optimization#dark seo#passive income#passive income brainworms
825 notes
·
View notes
Text
Eddie: and now sir Stefan you will face the most dangerous sceme of all… AN MLM
Steve: oh you mean like gays? I have to be gay?
Eddie: wait a minu-
Steve: is this like a support group thing? Or like gsa? Do I just have to date a guy? Can I do that?
Eddie: Stevie hold on-
Steve: omg can I be dating that hot rocker elf with curly hair? Actually can we be secretly married? Omg with a dog that I named after my hot rocker elf husband.
Eddie: no-
Steve: wait I can’t? why not?
Robin: yeah Eddie why can’t sir Stefan have a happy life with his husband? That’s seems kinda homophobic of you ngl
Steve: yeah Eddie! stop being homophobic and let me and my hot rocker elf husband live in peace!
#steddie incorrect quotes#steddie#incorrect qoutes#incorrect stranger things qoutes#stranger things incorrect qoutes#stranger things#steve x eddie#the not gay mlms#mlms
6K notes
·
View notes
Text
Investing in Cryptocurrency is Bad and Stupid
I know what you’re thinking: How could we say something so controversial, yet so brave?
Did we just help you out? Tip us!
34 notes
·
View notes
Text
have y'all seen all the drama with the MLMs scrambling to restructure in some way so they won't be considered MLMs anymore 👀👀👀👀 and cutting pay and jobs in the process
all i know is that the MLM girlies are kinda losing it right now and that there's a few companies doing it
20 notes
·
View notes
Text
youtube
I can't believe I haven't posted this before, because this video is everything. Such a good examination of MLMs! It goes into what makes them cults, the magical thinking, the survivorship bias, all the manipulation, etc.
#it immediately sucks you in lol#there's a two-part video on the secret too and i loved it#mlm#mlms#antimlm#anti mlm#cults#cult#thought control#scentsy#amway#avon#mary kay#herbalife#younique#arbonne#isagenix#primerica#doterra#tupperware#capitalism#manipulation#brainwashing#magical thinking#survivorship bias#youtube#james jani#Youtube
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
MLM the sexual orientation vs MLM the pyramid scheme
The most annoying girl you know from high school is OBSESSED with them
Way more bottom people than top people and the bottom ones get FUCKED
Use 'hun' and 'girl' in a way that feels nice but you know isn't
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Another girl I vaguely remember from school got sucked into an MLM. She is now posting several videos (10+?) a day on Facebook and TikTok where she is sitting at home or in her car or walking through fields, rambling with at best mid enthusiasm, very clearly only repeating what she has been told to say. She hits all the MLM buzz words all over again. "Supplement your income". "Stop living in fear". "Quit your 9 to 5." "Financial independence." "Take action". Etc.
It's like I'm watching her have a mental breakdown in real time. I can literally see the light draining from her eyes.
#mlm#mlms#:(#multi level marketing#the best way to help is to ignore her and let it run its course right?
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
youtube
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
I fucking love MLMs, they're so interesting in how they just invade the mind of the people who fall for them.
28K notes
·
View notes
Text
If I had a tail I'd wrap it around yours when we sit together. If u even care
#this isnt even a furry or therian thing either#i just hate using words all the time#mlm#mlm yearning
56K notes
·
View notes
Text
pure love
#mini comic#comic#art#digital art#ibis paint x#artist#mlm#gay men#gay love#objectum#agree#intersex#age regression#afab transfem#transgender#trans#transfem#polyamory#polyamourous#therian#queer#lgbtq#gay#lgbt
31K notes
·
View notes
Text
Matching your freak is beautiful and all but what you really need is a boy who's infatuated with your freak. Down bad for your freak. Deeply intrigued by your freak. Eager to see more of your freak. Supportive of your freak. Gets bricked up witnessing your freak, even.
#mlm#mlm things#lgbt#lgbtqia#t4t mlm#bi mlm#mlm and nblm only#mlm thoughts#mlm yearning#mlm post#mlm textpost
29K notes
·
View notes
Text
Why Are Influencers Using MLM To Sell Shady Financial Products on Instagram?
If you liked this article, join our Patreon!
10 notes
·
View notes
Note
Is it hard for someone to switch teams on an MLM? With all of Jills beef with Ellen, I wonder why Ellen continues to be on her plexus team.
I think because everyone's income is tied up in everyone else's, it's probably complicated, but according to the Plexus website it's possible. I don't know if any women on the team were recruited by Ellen, but if they were, she is earning income on their sales, so leaving the group entirely would either mean that income would transfer to the person immediately above her (which I believe is Jill) or the downlines would get to keep it, there's no way she could continue earning it if she disconnected from her downlines.
She could just replace Jill entirely as her upline or "sponsor", but that would also complicate things since they have this group structure where Jill and I think one other lady are the heads; I don't know if the group would allow her to be earning money for another upline while still earning money herself from her downlines in the group, if that makes sense. The whole basis of the group is mutual benefit of all the members, money for the higher ups and advice/mentoring for the others. So Ellen working for someone else would defeat the purpose.
Essentially, there doesn't seem to be an easy way she could disassociate with Jill and keep making that money that she's currently making. I don't know if that's why Plexus encourages people to make these groups, or if it's just a side effect that benefits them, but the group structures definitely make it more complex to leave. So if Ellen is like, paying major bills with Plexus money, I guess I would understand why she doesn't wanna rock that boat.
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
uhm.. yeah..
#ftm nsft#tboy nsft#ftm bottom#ftm sub#ftm top#queer nsft#trans nsft#ftm puppy#ftm ns/fw#t4t puppy#t4t ns/fw#nsft t4t#t4t nsft#t4t mlm#lgbt nsft#gay nsft#lgbt n/s/f/t#lgbt ns/fw#queer ns/ft#praise k!nk#free use kink#degredation kink#humiliation kink#degradation k1nk#degrading k1nk#breeding k1nk
30K notes
·
View notes