This is not the usual story of hoodlums preying on the gullible. It's a whole other level from, say, Nigerian email scams. Those are primitive smash-and-grabs compared with the artistry of Pig Butchering, which hoodwinks sophisticated, highly educated people because its procedures have been honed to perfection, powerfully supported, and constantly improved via AI.
The scam itself isn't the interesting part. At its heart, it's the age-old con, though masterfully executed. What's amazing is the infrastructure. Whole cities have been built in the Burmese jungle (and are spreading worldwide) to support the effort. They employ - or traffic - workers for security, crypto, AI, medical, logistics, and so forth. It all operates on the same model as huge corporations, but the business plans are a bit more shamefully/illegally deceptive.
"A bit more...." sounds like understatement, but consider that every business is a contrivance to separate you from your money, and not all of them even purport to return tangible value. Casinos and insurance companies, for example, intrinsically avoid returning value. So it's a finer line than you might imagine.
To illustrate the sophistication of these operations, the front-line operators don't front behind photos from the Internet. The "hot" guys and gals in the photos actually exist in-house, and stand by, if needed, for corroborative photos or video chats. They're on payroll. Everyone's on payroll. This is nth level scamming at the scale, and culture, of multinational corporations.
The lowest level employees, who painstakingly engage the victims, are more victimized than their marks. They're human-trafficked under false pretense, work for slave wages and can't leave without reimbursing exorbitant "expenses". Above them in the heirarchy are myriad employees simply doing their jobs. They're not gangsters missing fingers, kicking ass in alleyways. They're clerks, database jockeys, payroll accountants, middle managers, etc., all behaving as they would in any corporation. Normal!
So who are the super villains? The top guys?
No, the top guys are chortling "bros" indistinguishable from investment bankers, hedgies, crypto moguls or real estate developers. The others in that circle enjoy a patina of propriety despite widespread acknowledgement of their shameless and remorseless practices, and the scam moguls exist in the same world of ROI, liquidity, and other frosty biz concepts. It's built on a scam, but "scam" is a fungible concept.
No one needs to crack heads because the industry is so large (high billions, and well on-track for trillions) that wholesale use of violence is unnecessary. Workers do try to escape, but are mostly not maimed to be made examples of. They're written off as shrinkage. And even straight mega corps can be oppressive to work for. It's not so easy to escape from Walmart, either! The line to slavery - like "scamming" - has blurred.
This is nothing terribly new. Traditional gangsters became more businesss-like generations ago. MBAs capable of violence, ala Michael Corleone. But hard violence becomes largely unnecessary with limitless scale, power, and assets. And to see how lines of propriety can blur, consider the gangster state of Russia, where billionaire oligarch/mobsters are perfectly business-like, their minions educated and competent, and only at the lowest level lie the hoodlums.
The industry of Pig Butchering has, with a deft snip, removed the hoodlums. It's run like a business by businessmen indistinguishable from other sorts of business, operating, naturally, on crypto currency, and risk is managed to the point where arrests and fines - like escaped slave/workers - are chalked up to what shop owners would call "shrinkage". Many industries pay fines in lieu of compliance. Again: blurred lines.
We've arrived at a future that was easy to anticipate. Capitalism has grown immeasurably more brutal, shameless, and tunnel-visioned in my lifetime. Studying urban buildings from the 1940s, it's impossible to imagine a time when architects and builders fussed over fine details simply for purpose of aesthetics and pride. To contemporary eyes, this seems like insane inefficiency. A daft misuse of time and resources. Where's the return on investment???
Capitalism is a game with two simple rules: maximize revenue and minimize expense. The accelerative nature of the gameplay - goosed by competition and stoked with tech and marketing advances - made it inevitable for reasonable considerations to be abandoned in the end sprint. And we're clearly in a late stage when terms like "scam" and "slavery" get blurry and unrenumerative fine touches become unthinkable.
Denouement concerns aside, humanity has devised no better system for coaxing innovation (we're blessed with indoor plumbing, antibiotics, artificial lighting, etc.) and generating wealth (despite our whining, we live like kings compared to our great-grandparents, and like gods compared to their great-grandparents). But, like every other system, capitalism always fails in the long term, and this one fails via runaway process. A competitive system built upon the alluring simplicity of two blunt imperatives ensures a final scramble impervious to nuance, moderation, or moral reflection. It all goes beserk. Inhuman.
This is the closest I'll get to empathizing with the global movement toward authoritarianism. While I grant that capitalism is past its sell-by date, tyranny isn't a worthy alternative.If you were to seek maximal profit from paperclip production, disregarding all other considerations (e.g. prudence, rationality, humanism), and went about it with maximal intensity, you'd eventually convert the entire mass of the Universe into paperclips. As with compound interest, the daunting outcome sneaks up on you in defiance of all intuition.
Try it for yourself, via the classic game Universal Paperclips.
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