Age of the Grift?
A grifter is a person who enriches themselves by tricking other people. I will describe some human activities as grift that maybe we don’t usually think of in these terms, but we should, because the definition fits. In referring to the present as the “age of the grift,” I mean exactly that—we live in an era where cheating, in a wide variety of ways and venues—but ultimately for financial gain, as that is how we generally measure success in this era—is easier to do, harder to catch, and more incentivized than ever before. It comes down to how we believe, learn, think, and structure knowledge.
When I say this, I am not expressing a belief (seemingly widely held by people who reach middle age like me) that individual people or “younger generations” are less moral than they (we?) used to be; or that morality as such is in decline. Humans are social critters; we were social critters before, and we still are now. Adopting certain attitudes and behaviors that allow us to cooperate effectively with others to solve problems; and avoiding mistreating others who are members of our social group are matters of survival, past and present. My point here is sociological, not psychological, or ethical—and is not a variation of the “kids these days” dogma. My point is that there are features of the modern world that make cheating more appealing than ever before. This has happened alongside other features that have made it easier to do the right thing—higher average standards of living, less extreme scarcity, more division of labor, and more contact with different kinds of people allow more of us to (at least potentially) live in relative harmony with one another. As I have written elsewhere, if I were to pick a time to live, not knowing who I would be, what group I would belong to, my sex or race or creed or sexual orientation, picking now is the most rational choice. Hence the question mark—to what extent are the incentives to cheat overriding the incentives to do the right thing, why, and what might that mean?
Rewind to prehistory. All the humans on earth lived in bands of about 150 or so individuals, who were loosely connected to each other through family ties or sexual bonds. In a society like that, what we know is passed on orally, through art, storytelling, myths, rituals. These are passed along across generations, becoming traditions, culture, ways of life. In this kind of society, we feel a stronger connection to others, solidarity, and they, to us. Partly this is because we spend more time together. Partly because we are not the fastest or strongest critters in our habitat, and the world can be a dangerous and unforgiving place, so we must depend on one another to survive.
I imagine what living in this kind of society would be like, even though I grew up in big cities and have never had such an experience. Such societies still exist today, in the form of hunting, fishing, and gathering cultures and many of the world’s Indigenous peoples, though they have often been disrupted and fragmented by colonialism. There is an admirable richness in memory that arises here. I remember those who help me, and I help them in return. I remember the stories I am told and how they define who we are, where we come from, what is and is not acceptable. They become a part of me.
Of course there were still grifters in this kind of society, but only so many as would be sustainable in raw evolutionary terms. Richard Dawkins describes this phenomenon in his book The Selfish Gene: a society like this needs a lot of continuity and mutual trust to survive, but genes are not people—they are what is propagated through mating across generations. Genes that would lead people to be manipulative, self-centered, or lacking in empathy would survive but only in small numbers because the long-term costs of behaving like that would outstrip the short-term gains. A grifter or a bully or any other number of anti-social traits may be passed on from time to time, but a society like this would tend to ruthlessly punish (through death, or perhaps exile, which would have been the same thing) those who too often or too readily took advantage of others for their own gain. The costs of grifting were high relative to the rewards, and being caught was much more likely because “everyone knows everyone” and it's harder to hide what you do to someone when everyone else can find out about it (incidentally, this is one survival value of gossip, as I have written about elsewhere).
A major shift occurred in the context of “civilization.” If I don’t know all the others in my society, I cannot know whether or not to trust them, but I still have to rely on them to accomplish things I cannot do myself. I need ways to trade, to exchange. People develop money, which allows for some kind of apples-to-apples comparison when we’re exchanging goods and services with people we don’t know and can’t trust as members of our clan or band. Written laws determine what is and isn’t acceptable. In short, developing writing, especially writing that is easy to learn phonetic letter systems, becomes extremely advantageous. I can’t always remember everything I should or shouldn’t do; where I came from or what I should believe, what I bought or sold, and with reading and writing I don’t have to. Phonetic alphabets are amazing things; the fact that I am currently writing this rather than talking through it in video form should show my own preference for them. But we lost something when we gained this technology (yes, writing is a technology): who can any longer recite an epic poem or the chronicles of their ancestors from memory? These gifts now belong only to those cultures that did not take the turn toward bigness and complexity, that preserved oral storytelling traditions.
A society with writing, impartial laws, money, divisions of labor, and other hallmarks of “civilization” is a society that ironically can contain more people who are “less civilized” in the stereotypical sense. There are more niches in such a society to fill, more things we can do that take advantage of more different skill sets; but also more people who might not be well incorporated into the society, who then actually do have more incentive than disincentive to become grifters. Pickpockets, thieves, confidence tricksters occupy the market alongside honest merchants and customers (both of whom are trying to “get the best deal” or gain advantage over one another). Legal codes invite bribery and strongarm tactics to convince authorities to look the other way—largely without the knowledge of the broader public. Politics as an art form and separate line of work attracts power-seekers and demagogues skilled at manipulating fears and prejudices to solidify their own wealth and power. Then there’s the ultimate grift—convincing most of the population that an elite few are “born better” than the rest and therefore deserve whatever special treatment and favors and surplus they amass.
It’s still costly in this kind of society to get caught, but there are more ways to run, to hide, to scam; and no tightly knit social setting that will catch grifters through the marvels of gossip as often or as effectively. There are also a lot more incentives to be a grifter, whether you’re on the fringes and struggling; or seeking to amass wealth and power at others’ expense through “official” channels. Gossip can be used just as often to persecute people who are seen as lower social status or “strange.” These tools that kept us safe in small groups become the weapons of the moral panic and the lynch mob as we become “civilized.” Exaggerated or make-believe stories (themselves often weaponized by grifters) spread, which target members of a community already suspect and blame them for social woes. Legal systems work imperfectly to elevate the justice of process over the justice of the mob but are still sometimes compromised in specific instances.
A third era dawns in some parts of the world roughly with the development of the printing press and the popularization of reading. Now more and more people can read and write; but there is far more information than can be curated by some kind of group of scribes or scholars who can serve as a powerful (if also imperfect) filter for sifting truth from falsity before information spreads. Propaganda can be detected as early as the 18th century in the United States; partisan newspapers spreading anti-Catholic sentiment using false or unverifiable accusations resulted in waves of violence and persecution against Catholics—a pattern of activity that recurs regularly into the present against a variety of “others” in societies where reading and writing become cheap and easy.
I am a teacher; I would never suggest that we are worse off in a world where more people can read. But with this spread of information, what historian Ronald Numbers called the “Vulgar Enlightenment,” came new moral issues. Yes, some are outraged by the reams of smut and pornography that were produced by this era (and which continue to proliferate). Maybe a topic for another day. More significantly here, the ways in which spreading knowledge cheaply and easily created new avenues—and bigger rewards—for grifting, as well as greater difficulties in preventing it. It is far easier for me to sell my quack remedies with a little bit of money spent on marketing in these new sources; easier to find out-of-work writers and fringe scholars and other desperate, unscrupulous, or gullible people who will help me peddle my ineffective or dangerous product for their own gain. It’s in a book or a newspaper, so it must be true—right? Someone will believe it, even if you can’t spread it as widely as you hoped, there are so many more avenues for peddling the grift, and more potential rewards for being a willing participant. It’s also harder to get caught; a state that tries to regulate communication in an era of cheap print will quickly find itself unable to do so; even the totalitarian Soviet Union had great difficulty regulating what printed information got into and out of its borders in the twentieth century. Calls for state-enforced censorship or banning words, books, phrases, ideas deemed “harmful” are typically ineffective and cause more problems than they solve.
There is a mixed blessing here; more knowledge and the attendant benefits coexists alongside many more chances to get in on the grift. This pattern of activity accelerates further with radio and then television—the “massification” of society. There would not be fascism without an outpouring televised and radio propaganda, spreading of outright lies to motivate anger, hatred, and fear. Strongmen are fundamentally grifters; though they secure their own power, and the wealth and power of loyalists, for a short time, fascist and other totalitarian regimes typically lead their societies to unmitigated ruin. Mass communication allowed grifters to gain more influence over more people than ever before through inexpensive means. The incentives to grift were much greater, and the costs to make the attempt were comparably small. It’s not hard to see why some radicals like Herbert Marcuse noticed in the twentieth century the disturbing parallels between “free” and “unfree” societies in terms of the passive absorption of propaganda and consumer-culture that settled in, which too rewarded the grift in the form of mass manufacturing and mass marketing ever new “needs” to be pursued.
Fast-forward to the Information Age, beginning around the late 1990s with the Internet. Yes, thinking and memory grew more and more shallow as we spent less and less time engaging with more and more information long before this new communication technology. And yes, you’re reading this on the Internet; I appreciate the irony as one who grew into the Internet Age and frequented websites and chatrooms as a teenager. I can chat with a friend on the other side of the world, stream a brand-new song from Sweden, buy an old book from New York, and post a blog entry that can be read globally in an instant. I have access to the sum total of human knowledge in a device that fits in my pocket. I am convinced that this development is among the greatest human achievements of all time, belonging up there with the wheel, writing, inoculation, and systematic statistical hypothesis testing (maybe a topic for another day).
I also receive numerous direct messages and social media comments which invite me or other innocents to share confidential information for the purpose of hacking or stealing from them. I can see the popularity of an “influencer” or “brand” or “content creator” (never mind “artists” and “writers,” words that slowly slip from the vernacular) artificially inflated by gaming algorithms or buying fake engagement from a host of services ready to sell it. I can watch “reality TV” which is scripted but designed to appear real, creating people who are self-referential “brands” whose value is stored in a name rather than any need to actually produce anything of value. They are famous for being famous, and they are increasingly our writers, artists, cultural heroes, and political leaders. Algorithms owned by a handful of powerful tech companies determine their success or failure. Closer to home as a writer and teacher, I can watch students—and publics—try to pass off chatbot-generated word salad as thoughtful reflections on important topics: writing as “content creation.”
By my reckoning, the age of the grift began in 2015 and has accelerated. The costs are lower than ever—anyone can do it, with no startup cost, and they don’t even have to look their unfortunate “mark” in the eye anymore. The risks of getting caught are lower—if more and more people are doing it, it’s harder and harder to catch everyone without severely curtailing people’s ability to work and live in this kind of society. The risks in getting caught are also lower—I can block, ban, report scammers to social media platforms again and again, only to watch others simply take their place (literally) tomorrow. No one on the other end loses anything if the scammers continue to plague me, because I have nowhere else to go. I take the risk, the platform gains the rewards, and the scammers go largely unpunished.
With AI, I could pursue student use of chatbots as cheating (they are, of course, if they try to pass off computer-generated writing as their thoughts) but there are so many ways to cheat, and our society has so quickly warmed up to AI-generated “content” that maybe I’ll soon be permanently out of a job. I can create an image of a place I will never visit or write a song without ever learning a note and pass these off as original creations—in a world of “content,” curated by algorithms and gaining rewards by fake engagement, who cares?
Again, I am not a Luddite. I think we have gained more than we have lost with these technological developments and see this world as the best one for the most people so far, but stopping there would be to ignore some real risks that come with new technology—and to pass over in silence what has been lost. I quit social media for almost a year recently (wrote about why here) and though I found the experience to be eerily similar to addiction withdrawals; and to come with real cognitive benefits, I gradually found its Siren song irresistible. I could ban AI in my classes, but I would rather teach students to use it responsibly, like other new technologies—a tool to help express oneself but not a replacement for thinking about difficult subject or mastering concrete skill sets. I can’t avoid “the media” so I try to make sure “the media” isn’t just a stand-in for “people who have partisan opinions I don’t like”; like in my academic work I try to read many perspectives, “burst my bubble,” consistently challenge and re-evaluate my beliefs and try to encourage others to do the same.
I resist the temptation to catastrophize, to imagine this age of the grift could spell the decline and fall of the human species. It well could; if working together using reason and compassion to solve our problems is our greatest advantage, it is possible we are stepping into a world which fatally undermines, sooner or later, those very capacities. But I would rather think there are ways to apply wisdom to the problem of the grift, not just technical mastery, to train ourselves and one another to fall for it less often, to recognize the symptoms of the grift without having to learn “the hard way.” It is very clearly a matter of survival, for us as persons as well as for our species.
I do not know a way forward that does not involve developing global governance, law, and policy—not global govern-ment but global govern-ance of the sort that ended the manufacture of CFCs or created a universal declaration of human rights or reduced the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. But that would mean a willingness to “come to the party,” not to let short-term partisan bickering or monied special interests prevent important conversations about how privacy and community and creativity and pursuit of knowledge risk being hijacked in this age of the grift. I do not have an easy answer—only a set of questions. But I am increasingly convinced that we have entered a new era, both a departure from and a continuation of trends that have empowered the grift.
Sources:
Carr, Nicholas. 2011. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The Selfish Gene.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Advanced Industrial Society.
Numbers, Ronald L. 2007. Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew.
Smith, Adam. 1809. Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Photo credit: Lost Futures, Images of the year 2000 from the year 1900, Christopher Hyde (public domain, U.S.): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-19th-century-vision-of-the-year-2000/
