Jessa Crispin

Truly we are living in the golden age of the grifter. From Fyre Fest to the WeWork empire to Theranos to the personal development cult NXIVM, we see a charismatic person promising us endless growth, pleasure or wealth and we give them all our money. The con-man economy doesn’t just stop at the men and women leading these frauds and profiting wildly from them. (Some of them go to jail, yes, but WeWork leader/charlatan Adam Neumann was paid many millions of dollars just to go away.) There is also now a podcast, usually sponsored by a security system, for every con.

The promise of the internet was supposed to be thus: you could be your own bizarre, inappropriate self, and you would find a community of the likewise bizarre and inappropriate. You put yourself out there, and you will find what you consider unique or intolerable to be mundane and perfectly within the bounds of acceptable behaviour. But look, some of us went online, we said our things, and the internet responded: what the hell is your problem, truly why would you say something like that? There are a lot of reasons online projects fail, from lack of funds to real life intruding on your time to realising you just don’t care that much any more. But let’s not forget the power of realising you actually are a total weirdo in tracking the demise of creative endeavours.

Everything is too long these days, isn’t it? Every series is at least two episodes too long, podcasts go on for hours, you have to scroll through pages of someone’s barely disguised eating disorder mania to get to the recipe on their blog, and every documentary on Netflix is four hours long, forcing me to go to Wikipedia halfway through just to finally find out what happened — and I cannot even slightly deal with Adam Curtis any more. Podcasts also now have these excruciating intros before they start talking about actual things.