It was late afternoon at the New Age fair. I’d done enough research that day for my mock New Age magazine, Mantra-preneur, and was on my way out. A horn player I’d met asked if I was staying for the presentation by the guy with photos of the Elvis face aliens had built on Mars.
“You’ve got to stay and see this, Tom,” he said. “You’re going to see pictures not even the government has seen.”
He paused and reframed, “Well, they’ve seen them. But they don’t want us to see them. Who do they think we are, children?”
At a booth around the corner, a woman sat wearing a pyramid of copper wire on her head. I relented.
In the meeting room, the horn player sat to my left and an ultra-attractive couple sat on my right. They knew each other. Talking across me, the ultras began pitching a wonderful new spiritual opportunity they had come across.
The Friends Gifting Network, they said, was a list of people to whom you would gift x amount of dollars. You’d recruit new people to join the network and a flood of cash gifts would come to you in weeks. The “energy” was wonderful. And perfectly legal, they felt a need to add.
A pyramid scheme. Perfect.
A woman they knew had received $10,000 and used it to finance her pilgrimage to Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu.
The presenter never showed. The next week cops started busting people in the local network.
Scams have been around forever. Left, right or center, it doesn’t matter. People get taken in by hucksters who see them as sheep to be sheared.
Donald Trump, Trump University, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, QAnon, Alex Jones, Dr. Oz, nutritional supplements with claims that “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.” The problem today is, says Tressie McMillan Cottom, scams have trickled down and become accepted as part of our culture (New York Times):
We would benefit from making the stakes clear. Scams are opportunistic interactions that prey on people’s greed or compassion, replacing cooperation with competition. Scams weaken our trust in social institutions, but their going mainstream — divorced from empathy for the victims or stigma for the perpetrators — means that we have accepted scams as institutions themselves.
That is disastrous for public life. What, for example, happens when the Supreme Court becomes just another scam, a scheme to subject women to conditional personhood for the purpose of political gain? So our discussion of scams is timely. They’re not just about annoying Facebook invites from your college roommate, the one with the bouncy bangs and questionable ethics. Scams are also about the foundation of pluralistic democratic life.
Failing charter schools, tax credit scholarships, celebrity or athlete charities, every illegal robocall warning that the feds will come for you if you don’t press 1 now to be connected to an agent, every call from an unknown number you know by now not to answer, plants another “small seed of social distrust.” And that distrust is as endemic as credulity.
So much of everyday life seems rigged against us. That is reflected in studies, like a 2018 Pew Research survey of Americans and social trust, that support the claim that we just do not trust our institutions or one another. There are the big things, like the outsize role that money and influence play in electoral politics. When I do fieldwork at public political events, I hear over and over again from people across the ideological spectrum just how unheard they feel. How is it possible that an elected representative can get away with meeting with lobbyists but rarely, if ever, talking to his or her constituents?
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Corporations, platforms, politicians, friends and relations have sown so many tiny seeds of distrust that of course we do not trust our social institutions or one another. That is more than a bad investment deal or a shady business practice. That is an indictment of a culture. And that is what we will start talking about in the new year: scam culture. A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as “hustle,” or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the “legitimate” economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.
It becomes easy in this environment for some to believe Hillary Clinton has Satanic sex with and/or eats children, or horse dewormer prevents Covid, or that a presidential election administered by low-level election workers was rigged. Isn’t everything?
Cottom promises in her 2022 dispatches to explore “the nooks and crannies of scam culture” that are eroding our democracy and faith in community itself.
A friend I had not spoken to in years called on Thursday.
“You’re not calling to warn me the warranty on my 20 year-old car is about to expire, are you?”