I'm a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies. It was also stubbornly alive and human. People built websites about Babylon 5, model rockets, train timetables, shareware, and whatever else had colonised their minds. Most of it had no business model. That was the literal point. The web felt like a public square assembled by obsessive amateurs.

None of this was entirely innocent. There were scams, viruses, Nazis, pornography, and chain emails from deposed Nigerian princes. But then predation moved from the periphery to the centre. It used to be an abuse of the network. Now it is the network's organising principle. The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam.

The modern internet is now a highly optimised machine for detecting human vulnerability, amplifying it, and placing a payment link beside it. Any insecurity can become a commercial niche, including the desire to escape commercial life itself. The bleak part is not that grifters exist. It is that much of the population has been conscripted into the downline. People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.

When I started writing about cryptocurrency in 2020, I thought the grifter class was a small pool of degenerates. I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice. The smartphone is a shop counter that sleeps beside their head.