The Big Con
Making the pile of shit bigger won’t increase the number of ponies underneath it.
I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TOMORROW (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. After that, it’s Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Partway through Bridget Read’s unmissable chronicle of pyramid (“multi-level marketing”) schemes, Little Bosses Everywhere, there comes a dual revelation: no one is selling any product to end-users and no one knows it:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
That is to say, all the hustlers who have spent thousands of dollars on Mary Kay, Herbalife and Amway have failed to move any of their product (beyond a statistically insignificant number of sales to friends and family who quickly tire of being hustled and stop buying this substandard, overpriced junk). But none of these “entrepreneurs” knows it, or admits it to anyone — not their “downlines” (friends they’ve lured into the swindle), nor their “uplines” (friends who recruited them into the con).
Each pyramid scheme victim thinks that they’re the only failure in the whole bunch. They go to massive “sales conferences” where people boast about all the sales they’re making, and they’re all lying about it. Incredibly, the pyramid schemers who run these criminal enterprises have figured out how to make a virtue out of this situation: they offer “sales coaching” courses to help people make the sales that “everyone else is making.” In other words, once you’ve gone bust failing to sell Amway, they’ll get you to go further into debt to learn how to correct the (nonexistent) issues with your sales strategy so that you can join the (imaginary) legion of people who sell Amway by the bushel.
Con artists have a name for this kind of swindle: it’s called a “big con,” which is when everyone a mark comes into contact with is in on the scam. Here’s how the big con worked: after a “roper” snared a victim (usually on an intercity train), they would telegraph ahead and let the home team know they had a live one. From that point forward, every single person the victim came into contact with was in on it — from the porter who collected his bags at the train station to the cab driver to the Western Union clerk he uses to cable his banker and ask for a cashier’s check for his life’s savings.
In the big con, dozens of skilled actors are putting on a play for an audience of one: you. It’s a real-world, non-hallucinatory version of “gang stalking delusion,” which is when someone going through a mental health crisis believes that everyone they meet is in on a conspiracy to drive them crazy:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd
The situation that people suffering from GSD hallucinate is actually happening to people ensnared in a big con…and pyramid schemes are a big con. What’s more — as Read’s book makes clear — you can’t understand modern American politics without understanding pyramid schemes.
One of the most destructive pyramid schemes in American history is Amway. The FTC was about to shut Amway down in the mid-1970s, but then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. Ford had been the Congressman to Amway’s founders Jay Van Andel (then the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is to say, America’s most powerful business lobbyist) and Dick DeVos (yes, that DeVos). Ford and the Amway swindlers were thick as thieves, and so Ford called off the FTC. Rather than going to jail, DeVos and Van Andel became morbidly wealthy, and they used some of their stolen money to found and fund the Heritage Foundation (yes, that Heritage Foundation).
The political class running America are pyramid scheme swindlers, funded by pyramid scheme money. They’re running a big con on all of us. That’s true of the Trumps, who’ve excreted a diarrhoeic slurry of shitcoins that have made them billions — and lost billions for their “investors”:
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-106/
Trump insists that he is a self-made man who made his money with successful real estate deals. In reality, he lied all the time about his real estate, committing a string of felonies in order to defraud the banks, even as he went bankrupt, time and again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in_New_York
Another “self made man” is Elon Musk (who is a “trillionaire,” in a highly technical sense meaning “not a trillionaire at all”). Musk would have been broke several times over but for a string of massive government bailouts and subsidies, which continue to this day:
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/HMKP-119-JU00-20250226-SD003.pdf
Trump, Musk, and the rest of the schemers in the pyramid routinely claim that they are wealthy because they are running good businesses, a “fact” that many of us accept at face value. It’s bad enough that we are deceived about reality, but many of their most addled cult-members try to follow in their footsteps. When they fail, they are in the same situation as one of those busted Amway sellers: thinking they are the only ones who can’t make this “sure thing” work. Conservativism is a movement of bitter rubes, led by pyramid scheme swindlers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
The “wait, is everyone else also failing?” awakening is an experience that many of America’s CEOs are sharing at this moment, as they wonder whether they are the only ones who’ve fired as many workers as possible and replaced them with AI, only to see their company’s fortunes fall:
Like an Amway victim, these boardroom rubes simply can’t believe that all these people could be in on the con. How could the world spend trillions on AI if it’s not on a path to profitability? It’s not that these guys spent 2008 in a cave — rather, they just lack the object permanence to remember the last time a “Federal Wallet Inspector” approached them at a board meeting and took them for everything:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/#willing-marks
The thesis that “it can’t be nonsense if there’s a lot of money at stake” is the core of so many of these swindles. It’s the investment theory that holds that once a pile of shit gets big enough, there must be a pony under it somewhere.
There’s a Bugs Bunny bit that I find myself returning to in this era of the big con: it’s a gag from 1954’s “Bugs and Thugs”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_and_Thugs
Bugs has been kidnapped by gangsters, who have come to trust him. He tricks them into thinking that the police are coming and he urges them to hide in the oven while he sends the cops away. Then, Bugs performs a one-rabbit show in which he plays both the cop (with a broad Irish accent) and himself:
Bugs (cop voice): All right, open up! This is the police! [banging] All right, where’s Rocky, where’s he hiding?
Bugs (normal voice): He’s not in this stove.
Bugs (cop): Oh-ho, he’s hidin’ in that stove, eh?
Bugs (normal): Now look, would I turn on this gas if my friend Rocky was in there?
Bugs (cop): You might, rabbit, you might.
Bugs (normal) Would I throw a lighted match in there if my friend was in there? [Massive explosion]
Bugs (cop): Well, all right, rabbit, you’ve convinced me. I’ll look for Rocky in the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSNTjX_g9a4
We keep living through real world versions of this:
“Would I, Mark Zuckerberg, change my company’s name to ‘Meta’ if I wasn’t serious about this?”
“Oh, you might, Zuck, you might.”
“OK, but would I spend $61b on the metaverse if I wasn’t serious about this?”
“All right, Zuck, you’ve convinced me. I won’t sell my Facebook (oops, I mean ‘Meta’!) shares.”
But neither Zuck nor Musk nor Trump has the charm of Bugs Bunny. At a certain point we’re all going to look at each other and say, “It was all bullshit, wasn’t it?”
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/19/too-big-to-fact-check/#amwaynomics
