Stephen Diehl — the anti-crypto tech critic — on the modern internet as a predatory grift economy. His frame: predation used to be an abuse of the network; now it is the network’s organizing principle. The scammer once had to find a victim — the platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimizes the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam.

The grift economy is participatory

  • Ordinary people are conscripted into the downline: promoting investments they barely understand, products that don’t work, and political claims they’ve never examined — often earning nothing, as unpaid distributors for someone further up the pyramid.
  • The pyramid is social before financial: the affiliate marketer buys a course about affiliate marketing and recovers the cost by selling it to the next marketer; the life coach coaches new life coaches.
  • Grifters are often marks themselves — belief makes the selling bearable, and admitting the product is worthless would mean admitting years of life were worthless. “The fraud sustains the faith, and the faith sustains the fraud.”

The business model

  • Satisfaction is churn; misery is recurring revenue. A normal trade ends when a need is satiated; an online grift must preserve the need that feeds it.
  • Recommendation systems are “vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness” — calm accuracy loses; threat, transgression, and impossible promises win.
  • The honest financial adviser explains diversification and gets twelve views; the crypto lunatic predicts a thousandfold return and gets twelve million.

Crypto as the apotheosis

  • Crypto synthesizes alienation, precarity, gambling addiction, and “a thick slurry of libertarian derp” into the ultimate predatory investment product — a pyramid scheme with a podcast department.
  • Its recursive structure: promotion creates price movement, price movement is presented as proof of adoption, proof recruits new buyers. The asset comes with its own volunteer propaganda network.

AI makes it cheaper

  • LLMs drive the cost of producing plausible lies to zero: one person can generate a landfill of articles, videos, testimonials, and synthetic experts before breakfast. The grift no longer needs conviction or charisma — just a model, an affiliate account, and a population whose critical faculties have been sandblasted by twenty years of algorithmic media.

The closing argument

  • Contempt isn’t analysis: precarity supplies the recruits, alienation supplies the audience. The grift offers agency where ordinary life offers delay, community where society offers isolation.
  • Reality supplies friction — a conversation ends, a pub closes, a book runs out of pages — and friction is one of the few remaining defenses against appetite without limit.
  • “The final grift is letting the loop decide what your life should be.”