The age of the grift shift

&gt; &quot;People who effortlessly shift from “web3 is the future” to “I will explain to you why ‘AI’ will replace you”&quot;<p>to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works.<p>social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want<p>&gt; &quot;It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one made was just content.&quot;<p>and the grift part came from the idea that the substance of the product itself doesn&#x27;t matter as much as just getting yourself in the middle. getting a monopoly on eyeballs that are interested in the thing<p>a good example is those youtube farms that churn out history and economics videos where the presenter doesn&#x27;t even know what he&#x27;s saying, just reading words all day. content<p>at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment

It&#x27;s certainly nothing new. I suspect that this was going on, hundreds of years ago, as well. It&#x27;s your basic con man stuff.<p>People who can explain complicated stuff, in a digestible manner, are valuable (when they have decent motives). Think most of Asimov&#x27;s writing. He was famous for his fiction, but his &quot;Science for the Layman&quot; stuff was wonderful.<p>That said, the same exact skills, can be used to polish turds, and the money is easier.

It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I see a fundamental difference between useless tech like crypto and hyper useless tech like web3&#x2F;blockchain and AI. The fact that I’ve never found a single use for any of the crypto suite tech vs the dozens or more uses I’ve found for LLM, image, multimodal, and time series generative AI tells me that the comparisons aren’t remotely fair. I’m not even a particularly creative person in the realm of such things - but I’ve significantly changed several aspects of my life based on the pretty nascent kit available.<p>I’m not saying the grifters haven’t latched on, but I don’t think it’s fair to equate the shift in conversation with a massive grift that everyone’s involved in. The assumption seems to be that “because X was a grift and Y was a grift all things must be a grift.” That’s not a generalizable statement, and grifts only work because they appear in all ways to be like the real thing, but the real thing is actually fairly rare.<p>In my prior megacorp jobs we were asked to sit down and figure out what to do with crypto, blockchain, web3, etc. We couldn’t come up with a single thing. Our board was convinced we were missing something, but we worked with the other megacorps and no one had a good idea. That’s the sign of a grift. They don’t hold up under scrutiny.<p>In this latest wave with generative AI we literally can’t keep up with the good ideas, and they actually work. That’s not the sign of a grift. It holds up under scrutiny.<p>The “anything anyone is excited about is a grift” meme is the song of jaded souls that build their worth on poopooing anything people are interested in. It’s the sullen teens smoking and making fun of the glee club kids. (I was the sullen teen, I know).<p>This isn’t to say people don’t get carried away, and the grifters <i>really</i> do well on the real thing because reality supports their grift. It doesn’t mean be unmoored and credulous. But it means look a bit closer and don’t do the lazy thing and assume everything is a grift, even if the grifters follow, people are hyperbolic, etc, and all the signs of the prior grifts are manifest.

I think that framing this as a &quot;grift&quot; misses a potentially larger underlying story: we might be reaching a slowdown in tech growth. But nobody wants to admit this, so VC&#x27;s are increasingly pressured to seek out the next world-changing technology in order to maintain &quot;line go up&quot;.

The market will ratchet on towards this, everything fake, a information garbage dump, demanding fees every step into the digsite. Recursive, fractal, parasitics all the way down.<p>And then the people will rebel. They will put us with our laptops together with the other instigators en mass in train wagons and send us into ovens and burn pits like cattle. &quot;The market wills it&quot; will be written as a welcoming slogan above the end-station.<p>There will be adds everywhere, colorful and shrill, until the place were it all ends- which will be dark and quiet. And maybe, just maybe we had it coming, but also no way to avoid it.<p>So i call shotgun on the last wagon.<p>I know Hyperbole, ludicrous, yadayadaya, but maybe talk to someone not in tech. Behind the service smile, they really hate our guts for the dependencies and shit we forced upon them.

Breathless futurism is not especially new - it&#x27;s always been the content of WIRED magazine and of VC presentations. What I think <i>is</i> new, or at least characteristic of post-2010s, is the shallow omnipresence of the grift ecosystem.

The idea of &quot;content&quot; predates YouTube and the internet.<p>When we&#x27;re talking about algorithmic ranking of content the term content probably arose from the SEO era of the 2000&#x27;s when the mantra &quot;content is king&quot; took off (it was coined by Bill Gates in the 90&#x27;s).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@HeathEvans&#x2F;content-is-king-essay-by-bill-gates-1996-df74552f80d9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@HeathEvans&#x2F;content-is-king-essay-by-bill...</a>

I actually feel strangely better about this now, given the developments of 2023.<p>I think the scale of it was what concerned me before, because formerly we all had a small handful of MLM-adjacent people in our acquaintances, but then social media and later the various manias and bubbles seemed to crank that up to 11 and suddenly it seemed like they were everywhere.<p>I know it&#x27;s not true, and those people&#x2F;accounts just seem more prevalent because it&#x27;s by their nature they need to be highly visible, but that wasn&#x27;t quite enough.<p>Now though? Now I can dismiss large numbers as potentially being bots.<p>It&#x27;s not particularly healthy to commit too hard to this as a coping mechanism, as of course some small number of people with what seem at first like shallow, self-interested opinions are going to be onto something genuinely interesting and I might be missing that.<p>But 100 crypto influencers now becomes a handful, leveraging technology, and that becomes easier to swallow.<p>It works for other things too. The cluster of comments on every show hacker news post for open source (but somehow commercially restricted) software claiming it&#x27;s not open if it&#x27;s not MIT? Automated cloud provider community sentiment management accounts.<p>The linkedin blogspam PR houses communicating exclusively with other linkedin blogspam PR houses? All automatic now, no suffering humans in that loop.<p>It&#x27;s a nicer picture overall. Can more easily justify skipping over well-structured bad ideas as if they were spam comments on blogs back in the early 2010s.

Content is a concept that I&#x27;ve come to dislike, as it seems geared at taking advantage of the consumer maximally. Advice is given on YouTube, padded with unnecessary talking and fluff to maximise the watch time, or the video ends up making you no-wiser at the end. Getting to the core of things, the actual insights and knowledge is harder. I find myself searching Reddit and HackerNews to get actual opinions, which are more valuable than content. I understand the incentives for creating content in this way, but it harms the consumer and steals time.<p>Edit: Some content is pure entertainment and this doesn&#x27;t fit this view.

It&#x27;s just the latest iteration of corporate gobbledygook. In the past the behemoths were companies like GE speaking of things like synergies in their PowerPoint presentations. Now it&#x27;s FAANG&#x27;s turn.<p>At the end of the day the company continues to make money off it&#x27;s core activities. Whilst the Rats talk-the-talk in an attempt to climb the ladder and win the Rat Race.

If you want to see how this works in realtime on a more digestible scale, watch how Hollywood works. One day it’ll be “We need our own John Wick” and then it’ll be “we need a Top Gun!”<p>Humans are fickle and will do whatever to chase a buck. Nothing new there. You can day-trade the latest trend and sure you might make a buck - but typically the social, repetitional, and personal cost isn’t worth it.<p>I think what is new is that people are now realizing that it is so widespread across many institutions thanks to the internet. The trick is to not let yourself get caught up in brutally short hypecycles and to not get used by people who are – including the VCs.<p>Slow is smooth is fast. Chase the multiplier, not the moment.

I don&#x27;t mean to be unkind to the writer, but after reading that entire post, I still have no idea what a &quot;grift shift&quot; is supposed to be, other than the writer doesn&#x27;t like flavor of the month tech fads, whether it be web#, blockchain, AI, etc.<p>The points made about LTT, YouTube, etc. seemed to be wholly unrelated to the premise of the subject, and basically just padded out what <i>could have been</i> a few sentences talking about the ridiculous nature of tech fads, into many paragraphs chiding a &quot;shift&quot; in language, while reenforcing its proliferation by adopting it. The legitimacy we give YouTube for example, is only as much as we are willing to give it; I don&#x27;t care what YouTube calls Poetry, Music, and Documentaries - YouTube is <i>not</i> the arbiter of language and my contempt and disgust for their attempt at homogonous phrasing is something I actively avoid. I agree with the writer entirely that the terms YouTube uses are gross. The answer then, is to not use them, and entirely discount the premise of smushing together thousands of years worth of various mediums and art forms into one heaving blob of mediocrity - I hate that idea, and I despise YouTube for attempting to do precisely that. It&#x27;s illegitimate, so I don&#x27;t use the terms they insist upon.<p>It seems like myself and the author agree more than not, I guess I just don&#x27;t understand what he was attempting to convey <i>in</i> that agreement. That it&#x27;s annoying to hear people who shilled NFTs talk about AI now? I suppose that it&#x27;s kind of annoying, I guess? I usually refer to those people as either: Early Adopters, or Trend Chasers. The former being a bit more forgiving, the latter a bit more cynical. I think that referring to such people as &quot;grifters&quot; is a poor choice because it carries a weight of <i>intended maliciousness for profit</i>, where one <i>might</i> not be. People like trends. People like talking about trendy things. People like interacting with other people who also like trendy things. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair or reasonable to presume them to be nefarious by default. They&#x27;re just living their lives, doing their thing. When people talk about things I don&#x27;t like, I either keep on moving, or mute&#x2F;block&#x2F;silence their posts. It need not be any deeper than that.

Everything changed with the creation and rise of pay per click. Everything else, social media, &quot;grift shift&quot;, you name it, its all because of pay per click and the need to claim and monetize human attention. Its responsible for so much of the negativity in this world, social media addiction, people looking at their phones all the time, the massive political divide. In my humble opinion its creation was amongst the most negative non violent things humanity has inflicted on itself in the last century

The irony of the article ending with a patreon link.<p>(Their other posts are about Bitcoin, web3, meta verse etc.)

It&#x27;s a symmetrical but reductionist view of the early adopters model.<p>Because you work in tech and are thus surrounded by many people of which the very personality is to seek and appreciate novelty.<p>I don&#x27;t see drift, which implies greed and manufactured sincerity. I see curiosity, enthusiasm and creativity.

A good companion piece to this is Patrick H Willems&#x27; youtube essay &quot;Everything Is Content Now&quot;. That section of the blog post brings up points in such a similar manner to the video that I&#x27;m surprised it doesn&#x27;t cite it.

&quot;A few years ago YouTube (of course others joined in and followed but I think YouTube was a leading force here) established the term &quot;content&quot;.&quot;<p>Much longer than &quot;a few years ago&quot; I recall that, when Google was still allowing &quot;ads for domains&quot;, it was common to see &quot;websites&quot; that had no content, only ads disguised as &quot;search results&quot;. This led to discussions around the value of &quot;content&quot;.<p>According to a recent interview with one of its founders YouTube, the idea for it, actually began as a &quot;HotOrNot&quot; clone that would use video. It soon pivoted to amateur entertainment.

It’s the vacuum. That empty space between the promise of a new technology and the ‘killer app’ that applies that tech to society in a productive way.<p>Innovation will happen in that gap in the absence of progress in the actual tech space.<p>The innovation that has to happen with AI is in UX. We have to have interfaces that will for example, allow a lay person to declaratively build software in natural language. Think VB6 powered by GPT-4.<p>Until every new AI product stops linking to Google Collab or a discord bot, the tech won’t break out. It will remain a nerdtoy and the grifters will own the day.

This seems like an exceedingly negative framing of “people talk about cool new technologies which they think might change the world”. Some of them get excited about technologies I think are dumb, or switch topics more than is perhaps healthy, but I don’t see why either one is a big deal. I’m just not their target audience! It’s not as though it’s impossible to find people who talk deeply and soberly about AI, VR, or any particular hyped topic I might be interested in.

There’s nothing new with content needed every day. The evening news isn’t an hour long everyday because there’s an hour’s worth of important happenings everyday. The networks will create news to fill the airtime or drop relatively important stuff to match the time.<p>Newspapers are a little but better in that in times of big news, they will expand. But on the slowest of news days the NYT will still publish enough articles to space out their advertising.

I&#x27;m not so sure that it&#x27;s a real trend or an accident of how things played out with &quot;Web3&quot; and &quot;AI&quot;. Crypto was socially rejected quite dramatically and quickly (more so than you&#x27;d see on a price chart) and then ChatGPT burst into existence with the seductive possibility that it could now write your pitch deck (which, if you are that guy&#x2F;gal&#x2F;whatever, is more likely to get funded.)<p>Both of these things had a special appeal to the indolent and ignorant for reasons that were overlapping but also different, the &quot;grinds&quot; are going to take over in AI and if Web3 ever makes a resurgence (there&#x27;s something appealing to me about distributed authentication though we&#x27;ve had Client SSL certificates for years and <i>nobody</i> cares) it will be because the grifters are gone and the grinds have ground on it. I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s going to be another thing in that series.

&gt; Because basically nobody doing anything interesting is “creating content”.<p>I think this is dead-wrong. If there are people watching this content, then it IS interesting to them. Most people out there who create content - replace this word with any other you prefer - want to monetize it, so they can make a living out of it. There is no difference between old and new media in this sense, even though the author implies there was some golden age in the past where this was not the case.<p>Having the possibility of more people making a living out of it through technology has actually enabled us to enjoy more content we care about, not less, although certainly there is a lot of noise out there (scam artists, etc.).

People would always engage in collective story telling that bordered on insanity.<p>The difference that makes the current circumstamces rather special is that we have both the powerful tools and the acute need to do better. But we dont

Of course. We now have a new grift in AI where almost every startup is immediately begging for VC money and presenting how their LLM is the solution to all your problems.<p>Explaining the increase of grifters descending on AI all of a sudden when the majority of them are ChatGPT wrappers and calling themselves AI companies.<p>More like a new griftopia has been created.

I think it&#x27;s more of a &quot;grift drift&quot;: flashy cheap cars performing ridiculous tricks for the cameras.

Hasn’t this been a constant in human history? People will try to take shortcuts. For example, there is the age old profession of quack doctors. In the short term, these people will sometimes do relatively well, but often not in the long term.<p>Time will tell who is swimming naked.

This page is almost completely blank for me as I have the `wp.com` CDN blocked (I&#x27;ve seen more malware served from that domain than any other), this is the first time I&#x27;ve seen my blocking remove all the text though!

Always disappointed to see this kind of tech noir voted to the front page of HN. Sure, there are phonies and grift shift is a cute term, but anybody who uses the term &quot;terminal&quot; to refer to our economy (similar to &quot;late-stage&quot; capitalism) has no idea what he&#x27;s talking about. They&#x27;re a quack doctor offering the sole prognosis of death. The capitalism we are living is complex and adaptive, and that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s still running and morphing along. There&#x27;s nothing terminal about it except in the mind of socialists, nihilists and people who should get outside more.<p>One of his main beefs is that people who don&#x27;t know or care much about technology suck a lot of oxygen out of the room. Well, sure. Very little to do with capitalism and certainly not specific to tech. Loud people with dumb opinions have opined about important subject in every age. Today, they do the same about politics and finance, too.<p>And this has nothing to do with the abstraction of content, which he invests with too much power. This has been going on since before the printing press, and the daily grind of content has been very real for well over a century at most newspapers, I can assure new. YouTube did not create it.<p>His weird take on VCs is typical of people outside tech who don&#x27;t understand that many investors have long careers as builders, and have contributed more to the industry than their critics. PG and Andreessen come to mind. They don&#x27;t need consultants to tell them what to think.<p>Everyone is signaling, because we are a social species, and some things get talked into existence. So what! So-called influencers signal. Tante himself signals his virtues in this bio &quot;De-Evangelist, writer and speaker. Comm(u|o)nist. Feminist. Antifascist. Luddite. He&#x2F;him.&quot; Which, frankly, contains terms that attract a lot of grifters, too.

The thing with this is AI is not a fad, it&#x27;s an unavoidable future, however it&#x27;s easy to speculate and talk about (since it&#x27;s been a primary subject of sci Fi for the last 100 years).

Crypto was a great bubble for GPU companies. Now “A.I.” is pushing hardware. Both products also sell themselves as a way to free users from centralized government and private monopolies.

Was there a frame of thinking about all forms of media content as elements of a single category prior to Web 2.0?<p>It seems like an easy way to test the hypothesis this article alludes to.

This is what happens in capitalism. There&#x27;s profit to be made educating the masses, and setting yourself up for <i>social capital</i> and <i>intellectual capital</i> by being a <i>thought leader</i>. In fact, these centrally controlled Big Tech platforms share this profit with <i>influencers</i> who help get <i>eyeballs</i> and <i>engagement</i>.<p>On the startup side, venture <i>capitalists</i> encourage startups to <i>fail fast</i> and <i>remove friction</i> aka propping up money-losing economics, so they can have an IPO to wall street stockholders. After which the company must <i>extract rents</i> from its ecosystem and report every quarter to its shareholder class how well it&#x27;s doing that.<p>At every level, the system is designed to extract money from the masses of people. Whether it&#x27;s &quot;I will teach you how to flip a house&quot; in the real estate bubble, to &quot;I will teach you how to do AI stuff&quot;. The entire system optimizes for that.<p>People might say &quot;what, are you advocating communism&quot;? Well, the alternative doesn&#x27;t have to be that. It can be a universal basic income providing a floor to people, financed by pigovian taxes on fossil fuels (already done in Alaska for decades), plastic pollution, tolls for congestion of roads, etc. While at the same time subsidizing open source software. If the government did these two things, it would massively improve society. As the UBI would grow, we would not have so much need for labor unions, minimum wage laws, etc. to protect workers. People would spend time with their own families, learn new things, practice their religion, hobbies, etc. And stop having perverse incentives e.g. to avoid reporting some recovery just to keep receiving disability payments. Both sexes would &quot;lean out&quot; instead of &quot;leaning in&quot; to corporate life. They&#x27;d stop sticking their elderly parents in nursing homes and their kids in government schools for long hours a day just so they can work long hours without vacation.<p>Instead we have this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8</a>

The cause of the problem might be people unknowingly running in circles. Is stopping the advertising machine the solution?

&gt; “I need to say something every day, but I don’t have something to say every day”<p>Hello talk radio and 24-hour news networks.

Makes me unbelievably happy when I see clueless people and haters write things like “crypto was…”, “crypto is useless…”, “crypto is just scams…”, “no use case”, etc…<p>The future is so obvious, bright, and crystal clear with that tech, no one can bottle that genie. As intended.<p>All you have to do is to look a tad further than your primeval need to belong to a group (of haters).<p>Anyways, thank you for a huge foot ahead in that race.

It&#x27;s really hard to engage with articles that talk about late stage capitalism, and &quot;things capital wants to push&quot;. It&#x27;s so divisive that it belies a worldview that is either too simplistic or too biased to say anything useful.<p>And the article bears that out. It&#x27;s not saying anything new. Yes, &quot;content&quot; is a category, of which there are many subcategories, each with their own stars and losers, processes and histories. So what? It still all needs compressing and caching and firing across the internet in a similar way, hence content.<p>And yes, there are hangers-on to the latest fad, just as there always were. That long-predates anything we know as capitalism. It&#x27;s the iron laws of fashion and ideology that are at play. Once we told young men that the best thing ever is to go and die in a field somewhere for a king they&#x27;d never met, and a lot of them did that. Once we told people that other classes are all that stands between them and a wonderful life, and they slaughtered those other classes, and then they starved because the other classes thing was a lie. Now we tell people that AI is worth working on. I&#x27;ll take the capitalism version of that over the others any day.

The Age of Calling Everything a Grift. Who is getting defrauded exactly? And as a side note, crypto did not &quot;implode&quot;. Prices are a bit down from their all time peak but that&#x27;s not unusual in crypto land. It&#x27;s still a trillion dollar market.

I’ve seen way too many founders succeed by pivoting to something completely unrelated once they have funding and a big team to hate on people who do this.

There is no such thing as &quot;late stage capitalism&quot;. If you have personal property and the ability to make money from your labor then you have capitalism. Like other human systems such as fire and vehicles usage is governed by myths, traditions, customs, and all manner of rules that enable the system to be used with relative safety. You can use fire without getting burned, and you can drive without flying off into the weeds. Back in the 1930s we found that out of control capitalism can be managed with high taxes on the rich, strong regulations on industry, and legalized labor unions and then in the 1980s we abandoned all of that. There is no &quot;late stage capitalism&quot; there, only human beings using systems irresponsibly by abandoning well known and long practiced rules for avoiding serious social harm.

The term “late stage capitalism” drives me nuts and anyone using it immediately gets flagged as not neutral to me, injecting their own hopes into what should be a dispassionate analysis.<p>Some form of capitalism may continue for another millennium. It may not. As we can’t predict the future, we can’t call contemporary capitalism a late stage of anything.<p>I should also add that basically nothing called “capitalism” today has much to do with capital, and in fact is better labeled corporatism, financialization, and consumerism, but that’s another discussion.

Also known as pundits?

And Obamacare created an entire industry of grifting Health tech companies that were creating the future of high tech information exchange and modernization