#mlm market

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I can't believe Ronaldo is in an MLM

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

[hunxi-guilai]

I just got my friend to watch cql with me, and internally I’m just dancing around in excitement waiting for them to finish so I can show them this blog! We’ve got another 20 episodes before I can unleash lwj and linguistic register upon them

aha! I see that the multi-level marketing scheme of getting people into CQL is alive and well! also good god another 20 episodes I sometimes forget how long this show is

[dykeofmisfortune]

house md fandom feels like a pyramid scheme to me because i started watching bc many of my mutuals were posting abt it and now after i started watching it i feel like many other of my mutuals started watching it including my internet bff who is now balls deep obsessed with it. why do i feel like i'm recruiting the house md hyperfixation mlm

[harlequinoccult]

happy lesbian day to black dahlia (in denial) f!host (toxic) and overdose (sometimes)

[pinkyjulien]

▶ Wilding

One of the most common "rituals" in the nomad community is called (by the anti-nomad media) "wilding". Wilding is when a group of nomads, usually all youths, venture into static society to "see what it's all about." It is a fairly new occurence in the nomad community, but has gained an increasing interest among the youth. Despite the name and media portrayal, most wildings are peaceful and boring. ━ NeoTribes, page 21

Valentin & Mitch | 670/??

[cyellolemon]

Market

[b-a-pigeon]

✨Taker of the Third Path is now on Kickstarter! ✨

A bittersweet love story. Directed by the voice on the wind he calls god, Linmiru awaits an encounter prophesied to change the world.

Fell A. Marsh (@fellamarsh) is raising funds to publish their upcoming queer fantasy romance novel! Check it out on Kickstarter to download a free four-chapter preview, learn more about the book, and read about the fun exclusive rewards you can get for supporting it 🖤

[balkanradfem]

I've been watching so many anti-MLM videos lately and listening to the horror stories related to it. The basics of why it's a scam is that the 80-90% of the company is constantly losing time and money endlessly labouring, while it's all trickling to the top, making the 1% rich. And it's pointed out over and over how this is a scam, unsustainable, exploitative, and often the community around it resembles a cult and convinces the majority it's their fault that they're always losing and becoming more poor.

But isn't this exactly how capitalism works as well? Around 90% of people labouring endlessly for the bare minimum, while the money trickles to the top making the 1% rich? Only you are allowed to leave an MLM, if you're able to tear yourself out from the cult-like environment, but you can't leave capitalism without risking your survival. And this is a scheme that's made for us to live in, and even if we question it, we can only tear ourselves out if we discover wild new ways of surviving that does not include money. In a world where you need to pay money just to keep being alive.

[adibkhorram]

I have a book out today!! I'll Have What He's Having is my debut adult romance about queer love, Kansas City, best friends, wine, Persian food, diaspora, that feeling of being a Millennial and your life not being where you thought it was supposed to be, the Muppets, and, of course, butts. You can buy it now wherever books are sold. It would be cool if you did tbh.

[dynamic-power]

Gallavich discover farmers markets when they move to the Westside.

Ian has been trying to make sure they're eating healthy, and how can it get healthier than fresh fruits and veg? So when he sees a few stands teeming with produce and people, he drags Mickey with him.

The first time, they only purchase fruits and vegetables and bypass most of the other stands. They go back the next week. And then they go back again.

By the fourth time, they have added fresh local flowers to their weekly purchases. Mickey refuses to admit he likes having them on their dinner table, but eventually he's the one picking out the bouquet.

On their sixth trip, Ian gets distracted by a local soap maker. He spends nearly 20 minutes picking out a scent that he likes. Or rather, that he thinks he'll like on Mickey. When he finds Mickey again, his husband is munching on a bag of homemade jerky.

Ian loses count after that.

They try honeycomb for the first time and buy honey from the local beekeeper. They sample artisan cheese and jams and jellies, and they listen politely to a candle maker as she excitedly explains her process for the fourth week in a row. Ian aquires a taste for tea thanks to the blends made by a middle-aged man who pays far too much attention to his daily horoscopes. They make sure to stop by a bakery stand every time to buy fresh pastries and bread.

Mickey often lingers at a stall run by a man who does leather and woodwork, and Ian places a special order with him for Mickey's birthday; a matching belt and wallet.

By far, their favorite vendors are an old woman and her grandson who sell beanies, scarves, and the like. The old woman is nice enough, if a little forgetful, but it's the grandson, who is their age, that they become friends with. He did time for armed robbery and learned to knit while he was locked up. "I did it 'cause I remembered Nan doing it when I was a kid." Now, it's his business. And his grandma enjoys the excuse to spend time with her grandson.

By the time winter comes around, they've each got a matching hat, scarf, and glove set, there are four varieties of tea besides Mickey's favorite coffee, and they've even purchased a couple candles.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Kakashi from Naruto got caught in a multi level marketing scam selling makeup and chocolate.

[wigglybug]

some new characters from our campaign....leatherworking minotaur and girlbug who works in a taco truck....

[thatswhatsushesaid]

happy international "take out your adoptive mom's inner palace rivals while advancing your own political agenda" day!! 🥳 treat mom to something SPECIAL this year with this 15% off coupon at [ponzi scheme product of your choice]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The 4 Horsemen of MLM:

Marxist Leninist Maoist

Machine Learning Model

Multi Level Marketing

Men Loving Men

[tai-janai]

While we’re drowning Opportunist in attention- love how poofy his feathers are. Was that a conscious decision? Like, thinking he wants to appear all soft and sweet so others will lower their guard and he can stab you in the back?

yep !

theres actually a lot that goes into all of the voices' designs, and oppys whole dynamic is just approachable but deadly, a lot of emphasis on not getting too close.