This is 💯 the best thing I've read online this week. I added the author to my RSS feed instantly, although I did think about it twice, since it's on Substack (I can't believe people are still putting up with Substack these days). Anyway, it was good enough to overcome that revulsion, since I could use RSS to follow and didn't have to actually subscribe to a newsletter. (I can't believe people block RSS for some of these things.)
Last week, I wrote about 2025 as the year the grift economy went mainstream — surveillance pricing, prediction markets, AI slop, fraud at industrial scale. All of that is real. But it’s downstream of something deeper: we live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds.
Nobody trusts anybody anymore
Late-stage capitalism built a low-trust society, and it's an economic disaster