🔒 Oops! The Internet is All Scams Now

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Good morning, today I’m going to explain what these two people have in common:

With the advent of any new technology comes the unified chorus of a hundred million souls yearning for the answer to the most important question: “How can I use this to make money such that I do not need to have a job or expend any kind of effort?”

 Because that really is everyone’s dream, isn’t it? With all the talk slandering Humanities majors as being lazy and entitled social parasites, reactionary tech bozos have got to be the not-wanting-to-workiest guys on the planet. Every new tech development seems to quickly have its potential for utility overshadowed by its more immediate potential for scams.

 On that note, have you noticed that the timeline between a technology being mostly useful and being almost entirely scams is shrinking? It took over a hundred years for the telephone to be mostly useless, but in modern times it can be relatively assured that, if your phone rings and you’re not expecting a call, it’s some kind of scam. Email had a shorter run, but it was the definitive way to communicate over the first 20 or so years of the internet before 99 out of 100 things landing in your inbox were Nigerian princes or grammatically suspicious emergency letters from “your bank.”

Now in the 2020s, particularly after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, it should be common practice, any time anything happens, to begin by asking the question “How is this a scam?” Because, unfortunately, it almost certainly will be.

 It’s not just tech bozos, either, or even necessarily reactionaries. We are all fish, now, but except for water there is scams. Some people fall for scams, some people make the most of scams, some people take scams for granted, some people embrace scams, and some people just try to ignore scams altogether, but the one thing we all have in common is scams.

 Distressingly, we’re all more vulnerable to scams now because we’re more desperate, and because the newest tech advances almost seem designed with scams in mind. Quite often a chain of events will occur that you don’t even know has a scam at the end of it because you just don’t see it coming.

So for a brief, exciting couple of weeks in 2026, it looked to many lost and hopeful liberals that Hunter Biden was emerging as the new energy the Democratic Party needed. Hunter, a former drug addict and playboy, had long been the specter haunting his father’s presidential term given that they couldn’t really find any major scandals to nail on Joe. After years of the Republicans trying desperately to find a way to impeach President Biden over leaked images of his son’s penis, Hunter suddenly emerged from the shadows in the growing storm of the midterms, created a bunch of social media accounts, and started cooking.

 Amidst a messy factional war between Matt Yglesias style moderates, democratic socialist populists, and the snark-flinging so-called “dirtbag” left, Biden Jr seemed like the kind of normie liberal that the party might tentatively be able to rally around despite his family baggage—he’s not a young man, but he still brought relative youthful energy to a gerontocratic establishment, and he displayed a sense of humor much more raw, humble, and genuine than the obviously manufactured and overengineered Trump-mimicry that egomaniac cringelords like Gavin Newsom dealt. Hunter was actually hitting some home runs.

But what was his long game? Why this sudden explosive entry into public life, after timidly trying to stay out of his father’s party and administration despite the best efforts of his enemies? Was he going to try to wrangle the Democrats back into a formidable political opponent? Was he, god help us all, eyeing a run for office?

 No, no. Woe be unto all of us. After a string of media appearances, that included a bizarre hotel room debate with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Hunter Biden debuted a Substack account that he used to pump out a ceaseless chain of nearly identical and conspicuously AI-generated platitudes.

Then, on September 9, he dropped his memecoin, because of course he did. The huh-lariously named $LAPTOP coin proved to be the exact type of scammy crypto trash that the Trump crime family keeps pushing. No particular interest in using his particular clout and plight to help the US of A out of the fascist quagmire in which it has found itself, just more self-dealing blockchain garbage that preys particularly on recovering addicts and the desperate victims of his own political enemies. Man, I really wanted to like this guy. Into the bin with him!

 So, what does that all have to do with this:

I’m glad sad you asked!

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