A detourned Calivn and Hobbes cartoon going viral
When I was a kid we received a chain letter. It was sent to our house. It promised untold riches and bountiful luck if we sent money, I am a little unclear on the details, and warned of misfortune and calamity if we did not. I remember that it was adorned with all kinds of images from the world magic, strange symbols, evil eyes, and the like. It was absolutely fascinating. I also remember, a few years later, a friend of my father's bought a VCR from a shady looking fellow on the street. It seemed like a great deal, which reminds me of one of the first rules of cons, make the mark feel like he is in on it. When he got it home he opened the box to find a brick wrapped in a newspaper inside (VCRs used to be heavy). This were both scams, cons, and they seemed to be incredibly exotic and isolated incidents. My father must have told that VCR story at countless parties. Cons and scams were few and far between.
Gradually this changed, first with the internet, which made it incredibly cheap, (cheaper than even mass mail postage, which I assume our chain letter used) to contact thousands, even millions of people, you only need a handful to believe your story of a Nigerian prince to make money. (You remember the one). To have an email address, or a social media account, is to be exposed to all sorts of scams. AI has only accelerated this, reducing the costs of composition to match those of circulation. I receive emails like the following on a regular basis:
Dear Professor Read,
I hope you’re doing well.
My name is Sam Koehler, and I organize Bookworms of New England, a reader community based in Warwick, USA.
I’m reaching out because your book, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, came up in one of our more engaged discussions. What stayed with the group was how it reinterprets Marx through the lens of everyday life and subjectivity, particularly how micro-level practices and experiences shape broader structures of capitalism.
It sparked a thoughtful conversation about how power operates not only at institutional levels but also through habits, affects, and social relations, and how these dynamics influence contemporary forms of labor and identity.
That perspective led to a broader reflection on how revisiting Marxist thought can offer new ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to precarity, agency, and the conditions of modern life.
We’re currently putting together a small, curated showcase that brings in authors whose work is already generating this kind of engagement within the group. It’s early stage and intentionally selective, which has made it feel closer to an extension of the discussion than a typical event.
I’d be glad to share more about what we’re building, including timing and how authors are being featured. Since your work is already part of an ongoing conversation here, I wanted to reach out while that engagement is still active.
If you’re open to hearing more, I think you’d find the level of discussion both thoughtful and worthwhile to see firsthand.
Best regards,
Sam Koehler
Bookworms of New England
I assume that this is AI generated, written by no one to appeal to no one. I have never responded to these, but I have heard that people who do usually get some kind of request for money. Beyond the crude attempts at praise it is easy to see the appeal here. To write a book is to want recognition, to want readers, who understand and appreciate it. These emails promise just that. While the infamous Nigerian prince only focused on greed, on money, the proliferation of scams work on other desires, on fame, on loneliness, on lust. To have a social media account is to receive friendship requests from young women who, by their profile picture and syntax, are probably as real as the "Bookworms of New England." I am reminded of this passage from Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in which every need becomes something to exploit. As Marx writes,
"Each person speculates on creating a new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him to make a new sacrifice, placing him in a new dependence and seducing him into a new kind of enjoyment and hence into economic ruin. Each attempts to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his own selfish needs. With the mass of objects grows the realm of alien powers to which man is subjected, and each new product is a new potentiality of mutual fraud and mutual pillage....Every product is a bait with which to entice the essence of the other, his money. Every real or potential need is a weakness which will tempt the fly onto the lime-twig. Universal exploitation of communal human nature. Just as each one of man's inadequacies is a bond with heaven, a way into his heart for the priest, so every need is an opportunity for stepping up to one's neighbor in sham friendship and saying to him: “Dear friend, I can give you want you need, but you know the terms. You know which ink you must use in signing yourself over to me. I shall cheat you while I provide your pleasure.” He places himself at the disposal of his neighbor's most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then demand the money for his labor of love."
The proliferation of online scams is only a more intense version of capitalism's general tendency of the "universal exploitation of communal human nature." Often what the scams offer is a more immediate and more direct version of what capitalism sells. The lottery can only offer you the chance to get rich, an email from a Nigerian prince can make it a reality. Capitalism markets all kinds of pornography, but a bot can pretend to be an actual girlfriend or boyfriend. Scams offer what the market can often only simulate. Moreover, scams are often more in keeping with this logic of universal exploitation the more they hide behind the facade of communal human nature. Presenting themselves not as transactions but of relations. Think for example of the wrong number scams, the sort that begins with a text that seems harmless but misdirected, someone asking if you still want to meet up, or tells you that they are running late. These random, unsolicited communications are trawling for marks, for anyone who would respond. I never really understand how these get to part where they get money, but I once got a text that I thought was from my department chair until she asked me to get her some Amazon gift cards.
While one generally does not read Marx for his understanding of affects, however the focus on needs, on desires, and on our transindividual existence, circumvents the tendency to frame the questions "of how can people fall for this," in terms of intelligence. It offers a different way of asking, how can people fall for this? People can fall for this because they have needs, and desires. Only a society suffering from loneliness and isolation can make sending someone a random text from a stranger a lucrative opportunity.
Here Marx's point about the exploitation of communal nature intersects with Spinoza's about the affective basis of superstition. As Spinoza writes in the opening of the Theological Political Treatise,
"If men were able to exercise complete control over all of their circumstances or if continuous fortune were always their lot, they would never be prey to superstition. But since they are often reduced to such straits as to be without any resource, and their immoderate greed for fortune’s fickle favors often makes them the wretched hopes of alternating hopes and fears, the result is that, for the most part their credulity knows no bounds."
Of course, as is so often the case, with the intersection of Marx and Spinoza, there is some tension between Marx's emphasis on the social or economic situation that turns every need into something to be exploited, and Spinoza's emphasis on the constitutive finitude that makes us prone to superstition. It is not a matter of picking which one, social conditions of the human condition, but of thinking the two together, how particular social conditions can either exacerbate or alleviate our fundamental finitude. Superstition then is not just another word for religion, but encompasses anything to tries to exploit our credulity in times of crisis. Our modern superstitions range from racism to a variety of conspiracy theories. As Spinoza argues, "It follows that superstition, like all other instances of hallucination and frenzy, is bound to assume very varied and unstable forms, and that, finally, it is sustained only by hope, hatred, anger and deceit”
The affective conditions, or causes, of our vulnerability to scams is one thing, but there is also the matter of the affective effects. The real question I want to ask is what does it do to us to constantly be subject to scams and cons. It is difficult for me to know what it must like be for younger generations, those who have lived entirely online, who have received their first fake job offer before their first job, who have an online bot flirt with them before they flirted with a human being. I can only imagine that this leads to more distrust and isolation. People turning to actual chatbots for companionship because they have been burned by people pretending to be chatbots. The paradox is that the more time people retreat and spend online, the more vulnerable they become to such scams. The whole thing makes me nostalgic for guys selling VCR boxes that actual just have bricks inside, at least they are a person, and the personal interaction is real.
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