VallinFeb 27
JA Westenberg
The entire internet grifter economy is just a guy who read one book telling you to buy his course about the book he read
Feb 26 at 5:59amTypefully
Show threadJKBFeb 26

@Daojoan I live in a bubble of naivety and discovered only today the whole "high ticket sales" world, that is apparently totally-not-a-pyramid-scheme because "there is a product".

Of course the "product" that is being sold at 4- or 5-figures prices is: courses on how to do high ticket sales.

I don't understand how all this still works, it's been the exact same grift for decades now, with just slight alterations in wording from time to time. When will people understand?

Show threadPassengerFeb 26

@jkb

The one truly inexhaustible commodity, at least under capitalism, is people who want to be grifters. As such, I'm not surprised that the ideal grift is to grift wannabe-grifters.

On the one hand, I want to feel sorry for them. On the other hand they make it very difficult.

Show threadJKBFeb 26

@passenger I don't think I fully agree with your assessment. I don't think these grifts live off would-be grifters, but instead they run on end-of-the-chain victims you genuinely thought they found the cheat code to life.

At least that's the impression I get from reading the experiences of those who finally realised they'd been scammed. Of course many of these victims won't even understand it was a scam, they will just say they've failed (I have a couple of offline friends who reached that exact conclusion after losing money on the false promises of MLM).

Show threadPassengerFeb 26

@jkb

That's a fair point but I think the distinction between "grifter" and "person who thought they found the cheat code to life" is not an either-or. I have, alas, known a few people who had the grifter mindset, and I think "person who thought they found the cheat code to life" is the superset that includes those grifters.

This is of course not to say that every cheatcode-seeker is a wannabe grifter. A lot of people buy lottery tickets because it's nice to have hope, for example, without any malicious intent. I do feel sorry for these people.

Rather, I think there is a category of people who want to be grifters but just aren't very good at it because they don't want to put the work in, and so they go looking for the cheat code to being a good grifter, and thus are easy prey for other grifters. For example the "done-for-you-ebook" scam, or yesterday's grift of pickup-artist-coaching.