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# e-con-omics: why everyone is lying to you and each other
- URL: https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/scam-powered-economics/
- Published: 2026-10-07T17:00:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-07T17:00:18.000Z
- Description: The reason why today's economy feels like an ongoing scam is because, well, it kind of, sort of is. But don't worry, it's perfectly legal. And very lucrative.
- Author: Greg Fish
- Tags: polics, economy, wealth, scams

If YouTube and a hundred political newsletters are to be trusted, we currently live in the age of the con, with grand promises and visions of the future that will never quite come true, or are quickly abandoned once it turns out that yes, they were in fact impossible, if not outright scams. Of course, wild claims are not exactly a brand new development in human history, but with social media and real time global connectivity, it seems worse than ever because we're so actively aware of every new snake oil salesman on a weird podcast clipped across every platform promising to cure every ill on Earth.

The biggest question in all this, however, is why is no one stopping them? If you want to have a proper market economy, you need some mechanism to make sure that fraud is caught and punished, and making one false promise after another seems like a pattern of fraud. Sure, you might try one, or two, or maybe even three big ideas and run out of steam, or money, or hit a massive snag and come up short. That'll happen if you want to try something brand new. But when this becomes a habit, well, that sure sounds like you're just lying investors and the public as a business plan.

Except one of the flaws of hyper-capitalism is that you can use imaginary money, those massive market valuations that we're told cannot be taxed because they're not realized gains and can vanish in the blink of an eye – and to be fair, they can and do evaporate in cases like Theranos and FTX – to take out very real loans to then turn into real money, then just rolling over the loan into a new one. As long as the valuation on which the loan is based exceeds the interest rate, you can just keep going.

It's not exactly an infinite free money glitch, you still need to have a real idea and a real business to justify it, but it's certainly a shortcut to vast wealth and influence. To keep it going, all you need to do is keep growing at a rapid clip, and after double digit growth during the dot com boom of the 1990s followed by the social media and e-commerce 2.0 explosion of the late 2000s into the 2010s, the market is spoiled.

More people than ever had internet access and could now participate in our high speed, low friction economy, so much so that there [was literally a race to bring more and more people online](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/low-earth-orbit-stalink-china-kessler-syndrome/) to keep the pace of growth going. Massive bets kept on paying off as new and ever bigger markets were brought online. The system was working, lowest interest rates in modern history and pent up demand fueling it with unholy zeal. It was a once in a century revolution that created a new commercial infrastructure, and it broke an awful lot of brains in the process.

Stratospheric, meteoric growth was no longer seen as an aberration. It was now both expected and outlandishly rewarded. Profitability and margins were no longer all that critical to the market. Sure, you're losing money now, but your user or customer base grew 23% last quarter. Certainly, you'll be able to figure it out as you keep shooting to the Moon. If you suddenly stop growing, well, then your business is valuable, don't get the analysts wrong. It just can't be valued like all those companies that look poised to conquer the solar system.

![greed lined streets](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cf/67/cf67f109-8ed9-4b7e-8931-f24e9ccaf69c/content/images/2026/10/greed_lined_streets_1200.webp)

This is why Musk keeps promising [that he's going to conquer Mars](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/musk-abandons-mars-fearing-woke-ai/) and make every car a taxi that earns you passive income and can be steered with your thoughts. This is why Bezos says [we'll have cloud servers in orbit](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/jeff-bezos-aws-space-data-centers/). This is why Zuck insists we don't want real life friends, and want to spend our every waking hour [in his VR universe of AI bots](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/what-is-the-metaverse-and-why-youre-going-to-hate-it/) that constantly try to sell us something, [Snow Crash style](https://www.tiktok.com/@neutronfish/video/7544114773483441422). This is why Marc Andreessen [pens manifestos about infinite markets](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/techno-optimist-manifesto-criticism/) and [pushes crypto](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/why-crypto-enthusiasts-are-not-all-bros/). As long as they promise another once in a century revolution, they can get their 100x valuations, then use them to fund a low tax, lavish lifestyle.

For the rest of us plebs though? We end up in an economy built on smoke and mirrors, pushed forward like an arthritic circus elephant by carnival barkers so they can just roll over another loan. Which is why everything feels like a scam. Because at the root of it, it sort of, kind of is. People with a very poor track record of actually making good on their grandiose ideas keep telling us they'll change the world in ten or twenty years and the venture will surely be worth trillions of dollars, abandon it when it gets too hard, then feign amnesia when asked about it while pitching their next grand vision.

The solution is simple, popular, but very opposed by the people who buy most of our politicians today: if you want to turn your unrealized gains into loans, you have to sell the stock first. Your wealth cannot be too unstable and ephemeral to tax, but at the same time stable and real enough for banks to write you a check. The next phase of fixes would include a focus on the fundamentals and action against the chronic over-promisers and under-deliverers manipulating the market. And the final phase would see us ending the practice of stock buybacks once again.

At the root of this K-shaped trust-me-bro economy is the fact that those who benefit the most from it simply [do not understand the very concept of enough](https://youtu.be/MOQEiEJk2%5F0) of literally anything, much less money, [at a basic psychological level](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/the-scientific-reason-why-greed-makes-literally-everything-worse/). Over the past 50 years, they've shown us that they will resort to any trick, lie as easily as they breathe, and are [quite happy to sacrifice us in a literal pandemic just to make a few extra dollars](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/covid-broke-the-world/) even as people kept on dying left and right.

Instead of realizing that our economic order is being ran by greedy sociopaths and act accordingly, we insisted on praising them, fawning over them, and acting as if they are going to rain down wealth and prosperity on us despite the fact that the only thing our catering to them did was to make them wealthier, without doing much for the economy, [as shown by research by the London School of Economics](https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-only-benefit-the-rich-debunking-trickle-down-economics). If we didn't lavish them with tax cuts and lax regulations, we would have either seen very similar performance, if not better outcomes, as far less capital would be hoarded or used to parasitize businesses through private equity.

At this point, we have a choice to make. We can either step in and say that we've had enough of wild but empty promises, and if the people running the market can't grasp the idea of restraint and patience, we will have to do it for them, much like patients who cannot be trusted make their own decisions need someone who can. Or, we could just keep pretending that everything will be fine eventually and let them lie, scam, and fraud onwards and see what happens. And right now, we certainly seem to be fuming about doing the former while actually doing the latter...