Tag Archives: suckers

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY OF FRAUDULENT SCHEMES

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY OF FRAUDULENT SCHEMES
A Ponzi scheme increases in fragility over time; it requires more and more new funds to keep it going, so it collapses when one eventually runs out of suckers.*
Now it looks like it is a universal property of fraudulent schemes: you need more and more PR, lobbyists, shills, and repetitions of the narratives to keep the story going, particularly in the age of the internet. This is what I am observing with my current fraud-busting projects, with the Saudi-Wahabi government funded intolerant version of the religion, GMOs maquerade of “science” and “evidence”, the economics/macrobullshit establishment, the “education” bubble student loans helping real-estate developers, etc. You can see it particularly with GMOs as all the lobbying efforts can evaporate in the face of a single probabilistic argument; tens of thousands of comments do not measure up to a single derivation.

*A Ponzi scheme is one by which one finds new investors to pay off old investors: think Madoff or many heavily endebted governments.

via SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.