The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now

The modern internet is an industrial system for manufacturing human weakness at scale. This predatory cesspit began when scams, viruses, Nazis, pornography, and chain emails from deposed Nigerian princes became the norm, rather than aberrations. The platform now finds victims, profiles their weaknesses, optimises pitches, processes payments, and recommends more scams.

Anything that can create vulnerability has become a commercial niche, from the desire to escape commercial life to the need for validation. The consumer, salesman, and product have all collapsed into one exhausted person. People spend their lives promoting investments they barely understand, products that don't work, and political claims they've never examined.

Many earn nothing, becoming unpaid distributors for someone higher up the pyramid. The feed uses alternating doses of outrage, fear, envy, lust, and hope, each accompanied by something to buy. Doomscrolling becomes a means of acquiring anxiety that will be monetised by the next influencer. As addicts, people compulsively seek out the next feeling to buy.

Consumption turns into distribution, with the mark becoming the salesman. This system relies on keeping customers fearful, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy. Many people are not succeeding in this grift economy, but the maths simply cannot work out. Influencers with few followers are free labour for the platform and cheap distribution for the person selling them the dream.

The pyramid is social before it is financial, with everyone standing on someone else while pretending to escape. Many online grifters are themselves marks, believing in the rubbish they sell because belief makes selling easier. The fraud sustains the faith, and the faith sustains the fraud. Platforms industrialised human weakness extraction, using recommendation systems to continuously experiment on vulnerabilities.

They exploit fear, greed, loneliness, and status anxiety, creating a brutal selection environment where honesty and success are overshadowed by the pursuit of recurring revenue and attention.