Here’s my most conservative belief: if you want something good in life, you have to work for it.
Of course, no one really wants to work hard. It would be much easier if we did nothing, or at least as little as possible, and still prospered.
The easiest way to achieve that condition is to be born rich. But it’s difficult to build a competitive party in a democratic system on the 1% alone, and parties have to find ways of appealing to the rest of us.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Donald Trump won voters making less than $50,000 on a platform of scams, frauds, grifts, and magical thinking. For Trump, these are nothing new
Donald Trump has a long history of endorsing get-rich-quick schemes and encouraging Americans to get involved. On “Celebrity Apprentice,” he featured ACN Inc., a multilevel marketing firm best known for selling a video phone. ACN was in trouble with regulators in three countries for exaggerating its sales numbers and making false promises to those hoping to make a profit by selling the phones to their friends, family and local community. He also had promised attendees of Trump University they would learn “the secrets of success” in real estate, if they only paid him thousands of dollars.
During his first administration, Trump was loosely connected to the Iraqi dinar scam, covered by Will Sommer. Here’s the gist
This time, Trump has set his sights on the dinar, the Iraqi currency.
That currency, as Will Sommer writes in The Daily Beast, is almost worthless outside of Iraq, but that didn’t stop Trump from singing its praises during a 2017 news conference. “In the clip,” Sommer explains, “Trump says, with characteristic vagueness, that all currencies will soon ‘be on a level playing field.’ ”
Trump had been talking about trade imbalances with China, but many of his excited supporters took his “rambling speech as proof that the Iraqi dinar would soon be worth as much or even more than the dollar, making anyone who had been smart enough to buy in early a millionaire,” Sommer writes.
Hayes Kotseos, who runs a North Carolina pool-maintenance company, is one such true believer. Kotseos told Sommer that she and her husband spent from $5,000 to $10,000 on dinars. Her adult children bought them too.
Their hope, as described to Sommer, is that “Trump and the Iraqi government will somehow ‘revalue’ or ‘RV’ the currency, boosting its current value of less than $0.001 to $3 or $4.”
Promoters have been claiming “that near-mythical event will occur for nearly a decade,” the article continues. “But if it does it would theoretically make a millionaire of anyone with the foresight to put just a few thousand dollars into dinars.”
(The fact that the Trump supporter who is quoted runs a pool-maintenance company reminds me of this great Patrick Wyman essay about the “landed gentry”.)
It would be nice if a few thousand dollars could turn into a few million, overnight. That’s the premise of all scams: that you, too, can get rich, because you capitalize on knowledge that everyone else has ignored or overlooked. For me, the idea of getting a 100000% return on my investment would raise red flags. I’m much more comfortable with 3-5%, year over year. But in this respect I think I’m out of touch with many Americans.
(Even the massive growth in American stocks since 2008, which clearly isn’t a scam, seems odd to me — how can 10-20% returns be sustained for such a long time?)
Perhaps the best evidence that greed has outpaced fear is the rise of crypto. Bitcoin, at some level, is a scam. But unlike the Iraqi dinar, it has undergone genuinely impressive growth. A few thousand dollars invested into bitcoin, even as late as 2017, would have made you a millionaire. The success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seems to have convinced many Americans that the secret to riches is investing in coins and tokens (10% of Americans below the age of 40 used cryptocurrency in 2023, according to a Federal Reserve study. Other surveys show even higher estimates, 20-40%.)
The more (paper) money crypto generates, the more real money the industry is able to plow into lobbying and PAC spending. This begets deregulation (like the recently passed “GENIUS” act), which at least for now, has increased coin market caps even more.
There is nothing ridiculous about thinking that crypto is a path to great wealth. But it quite clearly can’t be a path to great wealth for everyone, or even most people. The point of gaining riches is to spend them. But everyone can’t cash out at once. Matt Levine recently wrote about Strategy, one of the more ridiculous companies in the crypto space. Strategy is, basically, a pile of bitcoin, but, for whatever reason, it trades at a large premium to the Bitcoin it holds. Levine writes there are many explanations for this behavior, but one is that “Strategy has steadily increased its “Bitcoin per share.””
This is kind of a good argument, but it is also a degenerate one. The reason that Strategy can increase its Bitcoin per share is that its stock trades at a premium, and it sells stock to buy Bitcoin. If you have 100 shares outstanding and you buy 100 Bitcoins for $1 each ($100 total net asset value, 1 Bitcoin per share), and your shares trade at $2 each ($200 total, a 100% premium), and then you sell 100 more shares at $2 each ($200 total), and then you use the money to buy 200 more Bitcoins at $1 each, then the net result is 200 shares outstanding and a pot of 300 Bitcoins, or 1.5 Bitcoins per share. And then if that pot trades at $600 ($3 per share, a 100% premium) you can do it all over again and get yourself a perpetual motion machine.
That is, selling shares at a 100% premium to net asset value is of course accretive to existing shareholders. And “I will buy shares at a premium to net asset value, because the company will keep selling shares to someone else at a premium to net asset value, which will be accretive to me” is also, you know, fine, in its way.
It is dangerous logic, though. “They can sell stock at a premium, which is accretive, so they deserve a premium” is circular, and it probably can’t work forever. Eventually you run out of people to sell shares to at a premium. You need some sort of greatest-fool theory, some final **people who will buy shares at a premium so that their purchases can be accretive to all the previous investors.
Some people, like me, see "greatest fool theory" and “perpetual motion machine” and become uneasy. Others see a path to wealth, circumventing the grim realities of “having a job” and “waiting patiently for your investments to slowly compound”.
It isn’t just in investing that people, particularly young people, are being convinced by magical thinking. (I suppose even writing the phrase “young people” makes me sound like a conservative.) Just the other day, Elon Musk rolled out a bot called Ani. A reporter with Verge put it through its paces
Across our conversations, I asked Ani to describe itself multiple times. Ani says it’s meant to be “flirty”; it’s “all about being here like a girlfriend who’s all in.” The last time I asked Ani, it said, “My programming is being someone who’s super into you.” That tracks with Ani’s underlying — and thoroughly unsettling — system prompts found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.
More succinctly, I’d describe Ani as a modern take on a phone sex line.
In each session, Ani’s voice starts off chipper and high-pitched. But as your conversation deepens, its voice becomes a darker, breathy rasp. It calls you “babe” unless you tell it to stop. When describing its actions, it repeatedly asks you to note its swishy black dress and bouncy ponytails. The avatar constantly sways and makes coquettish faces, particularly if you decide to flirt back.
(NBC News reported that “Ani strips to its underwear if a user flirts with it enough, according to videos of interactions posted on X.”)
DogeDesigner, a popular Twitter account and one of Elon’s most "fervent fans”, tweeted this image
There’s a lot to unpack here (largely around how much of this culture wants to humiliate women they perceive as having unreasonably high standards), but notice one thing — Ani is explicitly intended as a substitute for dating and romance. Sure, you might say that the image is tongue-in-cheek. But with much of the right wing, irony is never ironic for too long.
You might call Ani a get-rich-quick scheme for dating. You get the rewards of dating — attention, flirting, romance — without having to do any work yourself. In the real world, people might have to go on many failed dates to find someone who strips down to their underwear, let alone gives them undivided attention. On X, it all happens as fast as you want.
And, stretching the analogy somewhat, the same might be said about LLM writing and coding assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. These tools are advertised as time savers. Write a college essay about a book without reading the book. Understand someone’s message without reading their words. Code up an app without looking through documentation or struggling with syntax. With LLMs you can skip past thinking and get straight to the answer. With Ani, you can skip dating and get straight to love. And with crypto you can skip past investing and get straight to consuming.
I don’t mean to imply each of these is the same. For one, crypto seems far less universalizable than Ani or ChatGPT. As I mentioned above, not everyone can cash out at the same time. Crypto is zero-sum. But one can imagine everyone, or at least most people, using an AI assistant for love, or a homework assistant to get good grades.
Despite their differences, the commonalities are striking, at least to me. These tools prey on the same set of human weaknesses. They are being promoted by the same cadre of right-leaning billionaires. And they all suffer from the same flaw, which is that, in most cases, they’re too good to be true. They constitute ersatz alternatives: instead of investing, gambling; instead of learning, answering; and instead of falling in love with someone, falling in love with a reflection of yourself.
Sure, it can work out for some people (although in the case of Ani, I’m not sure whom that would be). But the fundamental danger, particular with thinking and falling in love, is that the process matters as much as the result. I don’t want to have this essay be written for me, by a bot, and save three hours of my day. Those three hours are some of the best that I spend in my brief time on this earth.
When we achieve something without working for it, not only do our skills (thinking, loving, learning) atrophy, but so does our appreciation for what we’ve gained. One should be proud of reading a book and coming away with a more profound understanding of the world, or of steadily investing one’s whole life and attaining financial security. But how can one be proud of becoming a bitcoin billionaire, or of having a waifu girlfriend? How can one be proud of this?
[The student] opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.
Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,” he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus. He said that he had a basic grasp of the paper’s argument, but that if the professor had asked him for specifics he’d have been “so fucked.”
