The United States of Scamerica

Lex

Lex

— 7 min read
The United States of Scamerica

I found my first therapist on PsychologyToday.com. He checked all my boxes, took my insurance, and seemed affordable. His profile photo was strangely alluring; a friend commented that he appeared to be "looksmaxxing."

When I showed up to our first session, he seemed more anxious than I was. His room was cluttered with various disconcerting gadgets: a massive massage gun, a full-emersion VR headset, and an adjustable overhead infrared tanning device. I was informed that these gadgets, among others, served the purpose of "biohacking."

About thirty minutes in, he asked me if I knew who Andrew Huberman was. I did not.

Now I do. In fact, Mr. Hubs has been on my radar ever since. On Monday, Kerry Howley of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer recounted — in monotonous, credulous detail — the known intricacies of Hubbyman’s tumultuous long-term affairs with six different women at once.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

Girlfriendmaxxing!

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict.

Lovemaxxing, even! I had been craving an old-fashioned slow-burn Dunhamesque takedown, and this one hit the spot. Reading it gave me #MeToo nostalgia. It also affirmed my instinctual presupposition that podcasters who sell supplements are not reliable mental health advisors.

I quit that therapist after our second session, when he asked me if I knew who Jordan Peterson was. I did.

Scammaxxing

Generally, I’m against harshly judging people who fall for scams — especially seemingly benign or kindhearted ones, like mental health podcasts or Discord pump-and-dumps or true crime GoFundMe pages. Let’s be honest: any of us could get our dumps pumped on Discord someday, under the right circumstances. It’s only a matter of time before you’re next.

Welcome to the United States of Scamerica, where The Great Scamdemic is escalating. The Age of Scamquarius is upon us. Solemnly, we bear witness to "the spiraling of society at the hands of sigma grindset solopreneurs." As prophesied, humanity begins to ritually worship neo-surrealist idols and implement rigid sexual purity regimes. In desperation, we plead for salvation to our last bastions of hope, the only ones who can save us from the impending Scampocalypse: bitcoin miners.

I didn’t blog last week because I decided to go outside for social activities after work instead.

So let's catch up

While we were outside, Scamerica’s highest-paid lawyers were online.

The DOJ is suing Apple for, among other things, literally discriminating against green iMessage bubble phone numbers. Those problematic android user jokes you made in 2017 did not age well, and we have screenshots. The Intercept and friends are suing OpenAI for appropriating copyrighted material and then allowing their employee named Steve¹ to sell plagiarized copies of it on a daily basis. It worked in Europe, I guess. And the Scampreme Court seems to think the feds have not, in fact, jawboned big tech into unwillingly facilitating its woke censorship regime.²

… the case before the Supreme Court is best understood not as an academic exercise in identifying where persuasion ends and coercion begins, but as part of "a political campaign to end content moderation," spearheaded by right-wing groups that claim they are being censored by the government, Big Tech, and the nexus of the two. Such observers argue that, to some extent, this campaign has already succeeded whatever the Supreme Court may decide, by exacerbating a chilling effect on discussions between government and the platforms, as well as on research into disinformation.

Also, the survivors of Buffalo, New York’s 2022 mass shooting are suing YouTube and Reddit for negligently permitting their "incendiary algorithmic recommendation systems" to "furnish the Shooter with the motivation, knowledge, and guidance" necessary to become a white supremacist and then murder ten Black people in a grocery store. Jesus Christ.

Sue away, gentlemen. You already know what I’m going to say: the internet is for porn. And increasingly, it is for computer-generated porn of children. You might want to check on that one too while you’re at it. We’re still trying to figure out if this is legal or not, apparently. My non-comprehensive running tally goes something like:

Shoutout to Texas (and Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah, and probably Kansas) for innovating a brand new porn-prohibition-to-sex-pest pipeline. First: ban mainstream porn sites for minors. Then: funnel teenage boys onto sketchier, more dangerous websites. Finally: embed them in the deepfake adtech ecosystem along the way. Credit where credit is due. Good work everyone.

And we would be remiss if we failed to mention Florida, where it is now illegal for anyone under the age of 14 to access any social media platform whatsoever. Back in my day, we just gave 12-year-olds an iPod Touch with a Snapchat account and told them to man up. We used to be a real country.

And now look at us

Reddit, the other place where teenage boys will look for porn in a post-PornHub reality, just went public. It’s currently running 49 bucks a pop. So we can safely assume that the Tumblrization of Reddit is imminent. Millions won’t goon. And somehow, Condé Nast is the big winner of all this.

It was somewhat difficult for me to find a good article on the death of Tumblr porn, and I used to be paid to Google things by a major research university. There’s a loud and growing posse of journalists who have proclaimed the cataclysmic death of search engines. And there’s a faction of contrarian data nerds who say no, actually, the internet’s always been this bad. Let's put a couple of them in a little jar together and watch them fight.

New York Magazine’s Choire Sicha:

We have been saying this for years now, but the ability to learn reliable information online is actually nearly destroyed, simply because of how it’s prioritized by Google. We are burning information like we were actually lighting a library on fire and then all of us are scavenging atop this smoldering garbage pile, sifting through the topmost retranscribed layer of second- and fourthhand information. Google is serving Mad Max levels of literacy. We’re now all like that one dude who had the only existing copy of Beowulf.

The Verge’s Mia Sato:

The habit of prioritizing Google is hard to break — it’s quite impossible to ignore the biggest search company in the world. And though 25 years of living in Google’s world feels eternal, it’s also a drop in the bucket … no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding "reddit" to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

Close call. If you ask me, Sicha’s embittered snark is kinda ******* ******* ****** Sato’s smarmy platitudes. I use DuckDuckGo, so I’m sitting this one out.

Your attention span is waning

Half the point of this blog is to serve up your links custom-curated, à la mode, so you don’t have to do any Googling in the first place.

Beautiful women shouldn’t have to Google things themselves. If you’re one of those, here’s a chance to click your way out. If you’re a man, get off that damn phone and start Googling again. It seems like nobody wants to Google anymore.

Can I get a yas queen from all the beautiful bisexual women reading this? Also, breaking news: SBF has been sentenced to 25 years of stimulant addiction rehab. So much for bitcoin mining.

We're doomed

There really is a link for everyone these days, and I think that’s beautiful. Pro-tip: 1ft.io. Not a scam.

It was nice catching up. Blog got rebranded and the newsletters don’t suck anymore. Anything else? Mmk. Scam you later.

¹ As noted in previous posts, this blog ascribes to the Guy Named Steve model of AI ethics, which posits that all ethical dilemmas arising from AI output can be resolved by replacing the word "AI" with the name "Steve." In any given instance, if it is not okay for some guy named Steve to do that, then it is also not okay for AI to do that.

² She jaw on my bone till I woke.

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