The Scam

Have you ever been scammed? Or have you been suspicious and prudent enough to avoid all the scams you've encountered your whole life? If you fancy yourself being part of the latter group, I've got some bad news for you...

Scams are everywhere. A scam is described as "a dishonest scheme; a fraud", and as a verb, to scam someone, it means to swindle someone. Most of us here are active participants in the crypto-revolution and as such, I'm sorry to say, we've seen more scams, some up close and personal, than the average "normie". In recent months there's been much to do about Andrew Tate, who's yet another scammer who made millions of his unsuspecting followers and victims. But all these scams are child's play.

The millions of victims in the 2008 housing and mortgage crisis, for example, have been scammed, and in turn all the citizens of all the countries impacted by this global fraud were scammed as well, as they've been presented with the bill that should have gone to the perpetrators of the scam, the investment banks and rating agencies who were in cahoots. But even that scam doesn't come close to the scam, the mother of all scams, which is capitalism.

It's a scam because it's literally a dishonest scheme. If I sell you a car, and I tell you that it has no mechanical defects or problems, I've scammed you if the car has defects and problems that I've known about. Well, capitalism has been sold to us as this wonderful system in which anyone can "make it", the free market as an equal playing field for all, competition as the way to propel innovation forward and as the perfect companion to a free democracy. All these promises are lies, and the ones selling us these promises know they are lies. They've known from the start, and we've been scammed from the start.

All the small and large scams I've pointed out at the start of this post are just smaller versions, smaller repetitions, in the overarching fractal of the capitalist scam. They're "trickle-down scams", much like the trickle-down economy was a scam in and of itself. Capitalism, my friends, is the concentration of power and wealth by means of selling freedom and opportunity. "Don't look here at my mansion with golden toilets and a bunch of super-cars in the garage, concentrate on improving yourself to get your own!" Of course 99.99 percent of those who believe in that sales-pitch never get the mansion, let alone the super-cars, because the salesmen don't tell you about the inherent mechanical defects of this shoddy car.

But, after more than two centuries, we've come to believe that capitalism is the best we can do. Maybe it's not perfect, but it most closely resembles a system that aligns with human nature. Or so we're told. We're told that we would all scam our fellow human beings to get to the mansion with golden toilets if given the chance. Andrew Tate, for example, was struck as a young man with the unbelievable disparity between the rich, their lifestyle, and the shitty life he had growing up in a poor neighborhood. So he decided that he would become rich himself and started a scam called "Hustler University" in which he sold, for only $50 per month, a course teaching young men how to get rich themselves.

That's a microcosm of the story we've been told all our lifes. And we believe it so much that we've given everything to the system of capitalism, free markets and competition. If you wonder why we've lost faith in the democracy, why we feel like it doesn't matter who we vote for, because nothing ever changes, it's because we've given everything that was once managed by the government, things like electricity, water, gas, playgrounds, childcare, healthcare, education and so on, to for profit private companies. And that's because of the scam, because we've been 'sold, and we bought the lie that private businesses were better, more efficient at managing these things, and that competition would improve their quality while also lower their cost.

We've made it so that by now literally everything is a commodity to be sold and harvested for profits. That's everything, even your personal data, and even your attention. It's nothing to take lightly. I remember the days when "privacy" still meant something. When people thought it was important, if nothing else for their mental well being, to have a space where you can retreat and be by yourself, away from the constant noise, eyes and ears of others in the 24-hour economy. No more. As a parent I was given an app in which I could monitor my son's attendance at school. As a kid I was still able to skip a class or two. No more. Kids nowadays grow up without any notion of privacy, they grow up in a world where "Big Brother" is watching their every move.

I think the "attention economy" is one of the best, obvious and scariest signs of how deeply we've been duped by the scam. Online companies now compete over your attention. This is a disaster! "Attention" is your ability to focus, and it's being pulled on from all sides, eating away at that ability. It's no wonder that children and young adults nowadays seem to have the attention-span of a goldfish. Psychologists in service of big corporations have calculated the optimal length of a television advertisement at some 20 or 30 seconds, because that's the length of the average attention-span. It's a disaster.

Anyhow, that's enough for this old man's rant. I'll leave you with an important video about the attention economy, aptly titled "How Your Attention is Stolen". Because it is, it's stolen.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!