So much going on. Existential crises. Fundamental needs. Short and long term agendas. Sounds heard all around the world. Much to think about. Much to do. But does the following also deserve some notice? I think maybe it does.

Truth is under accelerating assault. Trust is dying. Trump lies at every opportunity. Familiar generalized market duplicity persists. Mainstream media pervasively manipulates. But something related somehow simultaneously smaller and larger now grows steadily stronger to also pervert our lives. Something ridiculously trivial yet also savagely scary threatens to turn us all into liars or into people who deem lies by others inevitable. Something that makes us assume fraud is everywhere until we become people who inexorably logically and defensively distrust and reflexively dismiss all other people. We become people who hate people.

Here is a personal example. A few weeks ago I had a new book appear on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Within a few hours of its appearance, I received a solicitation about it. The fancy email displayed knowledge of the substance of my book and of my own history. It offered help. In two days I got ten more such solicitations. What did it mean? 

In my case such solicitations were elaborate emails that admired and praised the targeted book and author and that offered to help the book reach its audience for the social good it could do. Eleven such email solicitations in two days. Each with a signature I didn’t know but by people who were seemingly from well known institutions.This was new for me. Well, it was almost new. Such solicitations had actually started to arrive in my email a few weeks earlier, not for the new book—it was not yet out—but for earlier books. 

Some solicitations were pretty ridiculous…one early one was signed by Oprah Winfrey who wrote me to say she was choosing No Bosses for her book club selection because of its brilliant and profound message about what to seek beyond capitalism. An early overshoot. But before long more sophisticated solicitations with more accurate information about the new book, more believable writing, and plausible promotion ideas began to arrive.

Amazingly, in subsequent weeks solicitations kept coming and also got steadily harder to easily brand as the scams they were. They had steadily more detailed, accurate, and “professionally” presented information about the book and about me as its author, and their careful, personalized and elaborate promotional plans got steadily more astute.

At first I would read the emails and consider some of the proposals plausible—but not being a total dupe, I would also test them. But it got steadily harder to easily tell or even to discover that they were scams and before long the effort to test and expose each new solicitation, really any such solicitation, took so much time and effort that the best policy became to simply assume every such invitation was a lie that would eventually seek payment or access. So I went from trusting all emails I got, which had been my default stance since email first surfaced, to now routinely not trusting emails. 

So what caused this cottage industry of fraudsters to suddenly appear and grow? AI did. AI is used to incredibly quickly find target books and authors, to research both, to write letters and in some cases to field replies and write again and again.

My concern about this trend escalates when I extrapolate from book scams to all kinds of scams that I can’t even dream of. Selling stuff. Offering stuff. Needing stuff. I got an email earlier today, still book related, but offering to translate the new one. Was it real or AI scamming? Then somehow another approach was tried, and I started to receive letters from radio stations and station-related clubs offering visibility. No fee required, I just had to donate. Maybe one or another solicitation/invitation among dozens was real, but maybe not, and molded to now reflexively distrust, I will never know. 

The book scams seek payments to deliver promotional aid that then doesn’t get done. Phishing scams look for information to access accounts. What’s new is proliferation and verisimilitude. I received an email two days ago wanting me to enter information to prevent expiration of an actual subscription I have. Two more the next day. Scam inflation. 

All of this, again, is fueled by AI which the scammer uses to find targets, to research the target’s needs, to figure out plausible audience for the chosen books or whatever else the scammer proposes, to write solicitation letters with elaborate promotional proposals, to answer replies from the scamee, and so on. Give this cottage industry some more time and it will be making phone call entreaties. Then FaceTime calls. Whooops. Wait. It already does that. 

Estimates now claim there are upwards of 2,500 identified scam operations just regarding books and their authors. I suspect there are more or else how could I get so many invites. And that’s just books.

Sometimes the scammer seeks hundreds or maybe a few thousand dollars to be paid upfront for some service or product. Other times they seek critical information so as to clean out bank accounts. I got one about an hour ago saying my Amazon Prime account was being cancelled unless I clicked a provided link to enter new information. Shortly later I got essentially the same approach, but for another account. I was urged to go in and fix the information and of course the email provided a link for the purpose. 

The harm that scammers do to their victims is real, very serious, and accelerating, but it is not the harm I am mainly worrying about in this short piece. The personal damage every time a scam succeeds is bad enough, but I have in mind a wider social effect. As scams proliferate so do the domains of life where it becomes wise to distrust communications. So not only lying but also distrust spreads. 

The former aspect, to fraudulently steal, is rational for the person who wants to make a buck and sometimes a really big buck—supposing the person has the moral attributes of a weasel. Such scammers have elaborate web sites. They may have phone numbers that when the victim calls connect the victim elsewhere than what the number implies. Such scams are already hard to discern. Imagine a year or two from now. 

The latter aspect, to reflexively distrust, is rational to avoid being ripped off. We dismiss all requests, offers, and entreaties. If this continues to proliferate and accelerate the social effects will grow as well. We aren’t what we eat but we do tend to become what we do. And so we slip slide into a world in which truth and trust are each assassinated. But who benefits if we each believe everyone else is a liar? You may think no one does, but no, the best liars benefit, and also all elites benefit because solidarity requires trust which takes a killing blow.

So I think that alongside war, repression, escalating misogyny, racism, and political obfuscation and manipulation, as if all that wasn’t enough, we now have a slowly but steadily growing epidemic of deception that causes good, caring people to assume that everyone else is an exploitative deceiver.

At exactly the moment when we need to grow solidarity we instead turn inward. It turns out that there may be a method to lots of what looks like madness. The state prosecutes immigrants, the poor, and dissenters with great vigor. It searches, labels, and rounds up “its enemies.” Meanwhile fraud-fueled corruption runs free. The state ignores our enemies or even abets them. Regarding scams, don’t punish the perps, but instead protect them all the way from Trump down. Make mistrust “sensible” at every level. 

I hate to write anything pointing out ills without suggesting possible paths to win better, but I have to admit I am unsure how to positively react to the observations offered above. To tell people to be smart, to not get fooled, okay—but when that takes the form of don’t believe anyone who seems nice, anyone who seems supportive, anyone who offers you something positive, because fraud is everywhere—then the advice seems likely to aggravate our social trajectory of distrust and atomization. It seems to build in us an inclination to suspect and dismiss at precisely the moment when we most need caring solidarity. 

So I am unsure what to suggest. How can we warn people about the growing “quality” of scammers and yet urge people to collectively care about one another and work together? It is clear how a movement can constructively oppose proliferating AI data centers. How does a movement constructively address proliferating AI truth and trust assassins? Soon, of course, some scammers will offer to protect us against other scammers. 

Maybe how to deal with truth and trust decay needs a little thought along with what tactics, what organizational choices, and what strategies we should use to stop Trump, stop fascism, stop ecological collapse, stop impoverishment, stop misogyny, stop racism and then to replace the oppressive institutions that give rise to all that?

And P.S. it really is all one fight. Fascism thrives on lies and mistrust. Indeed, fascism can’t live without them. And our American brand of Trumpian Fascism seems to not even believe or have its adherents believe that there is any actual truth at all. How else can we explain that Trump says the things he does despite that so much of what he says is so transparently false? 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work. Vaccines cause autism, but hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. 

Prescription drug prices are down by 2,000 percent.

Foreign countries pay our tariffs.

Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. 

Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. 

Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. 

I invaded Los Angeles and now California’s water is flowing.

Portland is on fire, it needs my help.

Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’

Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files.

Smoke blanketed North America because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of forest. 

Climate change is a Chinese hoax.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. 

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. 

I, Trump have a 59 percent approval rating.

I won the 2020 election. 

The US is ‘the only country in the world’ with mail-in voting.  

I, Trump am a stable genius.

And lately, “my dad was born in Germany” which would be fine except that Trump’s dad was actually born in New York City.

And so on.

Truth becomes whatever Trump or whoever proclaims it to be. Does Trump believe his dad was born in Germany when he says so, and that he was born in NYC when he says that? Truth is apparently whatever the biggest boss says it is. 

Duck and cover. Alone. Dismiss everyone. Or what?

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