#mlms

[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

#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

[idoquitelikebread]

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

[spurgie-cousin]

bro I am THIS close to reporting Elizabeth Bontrager for misinformation I stg. She's on instagram telling her followers that rubbing essential oils on their skin will fix their thyroid, joints, hormones, etc etc etc......

these are just a few random clips but she literally has the audacity to say "I just really want oils to be a blessing to y'all" right before telling people to buy the Young Living starter pack because it's such a good deal right now!!! (20% off 😒) "I just want to bless you guys!" = buy my shit

I also giggled when she said multiple times that make you feel good but "not in a weird way" lol. But damn it should be some kind of crime to just make baseless medical claims on social media like this it is so predatory and gross.

I think if leaving herbs in olive oil for a long time was a cure all for every condition in the book, every middle class evangelical mom would be in perfect health by now Elizabeth.

#can we please come up with a better idea for entry level women to make money at home goddamn #mlms #Elizabeth Bontrager

[bitchesgetriches]

Why Are Influencers Using MLM To Sell Shady Financial Products on Instagram?

If you liked this article, join our Patreon!

#influencers #investing #mlms #personal finance #personal finance community #scams #social media

[the-dictionary-verified]

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

#gay #gay memes #lgbt memes #mlm #mlms

[sophielovesbooks]

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?

[zyrafowe-sny]

I think I am going to override my better judgment and attempt to write while loopy because somehow that seems easier than consuming most media (holding thoughts inside my head is hard but writing lets them out). Not going to submit anything today (though for want of a glove didn’t turn out too badly despite being a product of insomnia), but maybe I can turn the loopiness into crackfic progress (as much as I want to finally wrap up my Hunter & Vee fic). And maybe I can channel Lilith for the first time - wish me luck!

#feel free to share any thoughts around Lilith joining an MLM or MLMs in general #or headcanons about concealment stones and why they don't get used more #no this was not my idea #my writing #the owl house #my fanfic #why can't I ignore worldbuilding for crackfics #lilith clawthorne #concealment stones #mlms

[coulsonlives]

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

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Shout out to everyone who has to keep a straight face while that one relative who cycles through pyramid schemes tries to convince you to try the products while you're stuck at a table with them.

If you want to cause a bit of chaos, ask to see an income disclosure statement.

MLMs are just pyramid schemes under a cover name. Not a one of them will make you money. It's all horseshit. If you happen to have a relative who swears they're making a living off of it, just assume they have a maxed out credit card somewhere.

#mlms #pyramid schemes #multi level marketing

[whoa-its-dani]

PSA - Don’t Give Money to “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights”, it’s a cult.

Don’t give money to “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights”.

It’s a front run by a cult group called “RevCom”. RevCom / The RevComs is an anti-trans, anti-sex work, racist, MLM / pyramid scheme cult run by a creepy dude called Bob Avakian.

Here’s part of a statement by NYC for Abortion Rights discussing it: [x]

We, a coalition of grassroots pro-abortion organizers, publicly denounce RiseUp for Abortion Rights.

Our movement needs to be strong and united. Most repro groups have turned their backs on RiseUp privately since their inception. It is vital for all repro groups to now unite in discrediting RiseUp publicly.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of our concerns about RiseUp, and why we strongly urge pro-abortion activists to join us in rejecting its leadership and demanding the group step back from pro-abortion spaces:

RiseUp is a cult and pyramid scheme.

RiseUp is an offshoot of the RevCom (Revolutionary Communist Party) group. Over the past few decades, RevCom has emerged as a personality cult revolving around its white male leader Bob Avakian. While RevCom fervently denies accusations of it being a cult, RevCom’s own website claims the only effective way to achieve social change is to follow Avakian’s leadership and teachings. Similar to its parent group RevCom, RiseUp’s only goal appears to be gaining more followers in order to raise more and more money. Both essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.

RiseUp diverts money from social and racial justice movements.

RevCom and its fronts — RiseUp and Refuse Fascism — are notorious for raising tens of thousands of dollars and using those funds to pay RevCom leadership, and to purchase marketing materials (to raise even more money). Refuse Fascism exploits civil unrest to recruit followers (as it did during the 2014 and 2020 uprisings), and RiseUp is now repeating the same scheme. The RiseUp website, for instance, features urgent prompts to donate with no information about where this money goes. What we do know is that this money never goes to abortion funds (which they argue are not a strategy to defend abortion access), providers, practical support groups, or anyone actually working to increase abortion access.

RiseUp stigmatizes abortion and perpetuates harmful myths.

RiseUp is currently focused on its ‘Save Roe’ campaign, which involves the wearing of white pants painted with fake blood, die-ins, and coat-hanger imagery. These theatrical tactics further the extremely harmful idea that abortion is a violent procedure and safe self-managed abortion is not possible. In fact, RiseUp has not once raised awareness about medication abortion as a post-Roe tool, and its only aim is “saving Roe”, despite this never having been enough historically.

RiseUp perpetuates anti-Blackness and does not center intersectionality.

RiseUp’s leader, Sunsara Taylor, has been a controversial figure in pro-abortion spaces. She and her followers are known for swooping into town and leeching off of existing BIPOC-led grassroots efforts across the country. Additionally, RiseUp frequently likens abortion bans to “female enslavement,” which is profoundly disrespectful to Black, Indigenous, and POC comrades.

RiseUp has a homophobic past, and remains transphobic.

RiseUp leadership frequently others trans and non-binary folks and excludes them from its speeches, writing, and conversations. In responding to feedback in Instagram comments, RiseUp admitted they focused on “women and girls” and referred to trans and non-binary folks getting abortions as “others” (we have screenshots).

RevCom also has a homophobic past. Up until 2002, the group’s official position was that homosexuality contributed to women’s oppression, amongst other nonsense. While RevCom and its fronts have since begun to include platitudes for the rights of LGBTQ+ peoples, they have yet to apologize for this past or issue a statement or position in defense LGBTQ+ rights.

RiseUp continues to intentionally exclude sex workers.

Sunsara Taylor, the brain behind RiseUp’s grift, is explicitly against sex work and the porn industry (see her prior activism with Stop Patriarchy). Sunsara Taylor’s stance is harmful to the fight for abortion, which we believe must be intersectional.

More sources are included in the full statement.

This has been your PSA. I’d appreciate if you could spread this around.

#PSA #Abortion #Roe V. Wade #RiseUp #RiseUp4AbortionRights #Rise Up 4 Abortion #Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights #Cults #MLMs #Pyramid Scheme #Bob Avakian #RevCom #Transphobia #Racism #Revolutionary Communist Party #Please Reblog #Ask to Tag

[positively--speculative]

#Third space #MLMs #Schemes #Pyramid schemes #Critical thinking #Cults #Manipulation #Abuse #Youtube

[spurgie-cousin]

Hi! Was just thinking about girl defined and all those fundie trad wives/moms who are selling courses and things like that. It bothers me soo much that they bash women who decide to work in the normal world, say staying home is the best etc but they actually work, preparing podcasts, ebooks etc takes time and they sometimes have to ask someone to watch their kids. The contradiction kills me:( Ps: love your blog, have foloowed you for years and wish you the best:)

Oh my gosh, thanks for putting up with my bullshit for years LOL, glad to have you and I wish you the best as well!!💕💕

Yea I know exactly what you mean, the mlm/course thing is an interesting phenomenon in the conservative xtian universe lol. The trad/conservative/fundie women got themselves in this pickle where most can't afford to live the only kind of lifestyle they deem as acceptable, so they have to find these creative loopholes to technically have a 2 income household but also be able to plausibly deny that the wives work. bc they work from home and call their jobs "side hustles" (even though some like Jill Rodrigues can become the main breadwinners).

it is hypocritical like you said because when all is said and done, the mlm girlies are basically just employees of their uplines but with less income, benefits, security, etc than a normal employee, if they can even break even on their initial investments (which most can't). And don't even get me started on those courses and the time, money, marketing and networking abilities you would need to even make a dime off them, regardless of what Bethany Beal tries to sell desperate moms. her $2k+ "course on how to make courses" bullshit is up there on the list of worst things I've ever seen a Christian influencer do I swear.

It's sad too when you think about it, these struggling moms of often multiple kids are sold all these blatant lies by their friends and people they look up to, not even strangers. when many are just trying to survive in this lifestyle that makes them feel like bad parents for prioritizing financial stability over like, homeschooling or having more babies thru can't afford. And it's just like girl, if you need a job just GET a job...... work from home jobs are more available than every these days, and yea they can be harder to get but at least you don't have to put yourself in more financial ruin just to try.

Idk I could go on about it forever and I'll stop myself before I do, but I do want to add that none of that sympathy I mentioned extends to Bethany, she can choke.

#mlms

[jyndor]

a client of mine invited me to dinner tonight so she can try to sell me arbonne lmfao my intention is to deprogram her but it's a no for me

#mlms

[mlm-blues]

“lmao imagine liking men” OK!!! ON IT BOSS 🫡🫡🫡 it’s beautiful here

#i’m doing my part! #i love men. so fucking much #mlm #nblm #achillean #gay #gay pride #gay yearning #gay mlm #mlm concept #mlm thoughts #mlm yearning #mlm love #why did this get so many notes. ok!!!! hi

[rookdaw]

#bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #astarion #karlach #this was a secret santa! #my target asked for mlm/wlw hostility with astarion and an oblivious karlach

[cl0wnc0ll3ge]

#ftm hypno #trans man #transgender #binary trans #forcemasc #ftm mlm #ftm t4t #trans men #trans memes #transblr