The ecosystem of everything…

Even before retiring I have been more or less giving things away for free or at a loss even (especially when you consider my time). Software, hardware…

Another commenter calls it altruism, I just call it my hobby. (No one expects to get their material bike investment back when they take up mountain biking, right?)

So perhaps 800 hours or so to write a game which nets me about $500 on Steam. You can do the math to figure out my wages on that one—but I was able at least to justify picking up a Steam Deck from the proceeds (which I likely would not have done out of pocket).

More recently: perhaps about $4K and another 800 to 1000 hours invested in an analog computer kit and I'll be lucky to ask for $20 profit and will be surprised if I sell 25 of them.

It's okay though. I know already going into it that 1) it is niche and 2) that, as I said, it's a hobby.

(And when I use AI or clipart for the artwork in the project it's because I'm not likely to find an artist willing to partner with me and lose money on the whole venture, ha ha.)

This isn't exclusive to books, either. If you so much as give platforms a hint of you being an aspiring musician, basically all of your ads on that platform will be Spotify promotion scams that work about the same way.

It's hard not to escape the feeling that there's just plain 'ol too much stuff being made and not enough hours in the day for humanity to actually enjoy it (much less, enjoy it enough to be willing to pay for it). However, I also remember a time not too long ago when even complete garbage would get at least some engagement on socials. It definitely feels like social media platforms are doing a lot more active gatekeeping than they used to. Posts that don't echo the platform owner's preferred sentiments just smack against a brick wall now.

It doesn't help that these platforms actively engage in roughly the same scams the scammers are doing. Spotify has Discovery Mode, Amazon has ad blocks everywhere, every social media company has paid promotion. All of those are vehicles to force creative artists to lower their take and "make it back up in volume".

If I were to sum up the old bargain of the Internet, it was: "give us content for free and we will find people who want it". Going all the way back to the Napster wars, people argued that this is unsustainable, people die of exposure, and you can't compete with free. It turns out, however, that exposure is still useful to a lot of artists - assuming the exposure is genuine[0]. Actually, it's so valuable the platforms would rather not barter it away for content anymore! The new bargain is "pay us to publish and we will find people proportional to how much you pay us".

This even applies to traditional publishing models now. I am told there are a lot of publishers who expect their artists to bring their own exposure. Marketing[1] muscle (and capital) is not wasted on the midlist anymore. So book publishing is about as much of a scam as a record label now.

[0] The dirty secret of all the beggars who want to "pay you in exposure" is that they don't actually have any exposure to give.

[1] Related to the proliferation of promotion scams at the low end, the high end of marketing is chock full of companies willing to give away mountains of cash without being particularly choosy about where it goes. Think how many companies are paying Google for ad spots on their own name, for example.

Oh, excellent! I thought I was the only author (idiotic enough) to give away my books for free. I choose to call it altruism, but the truth is that I got sick of the whole marketing-and-promotion meat grinder a long while back and decided I wanted to write books I wanted to read, rather than writing what someone else thought they could sell. I am now proud to call myself a Hobbyist Indie Author. Perhaps we could start an insurgency together?

Do you have a link to your books so we can check them out?

That's life I'm afraid - no system that rewards participation can be entirely free of people taking advantage of it somehow. It's an unavoidable cost that we pay to get the benefits. The best we can usually do is to incentivize good behaviour sufficiently that the percentage of bad actors is very low, using rewards and/or punishments as appropriate.

The problem is that law enforcement really just doesn't care about international crime.

On the victim's end, there's jurisdictional problems with prosecuting these crimes - you have to work with another country's law enforcement to bring them to justice. Which means a lot of additional bureaucratic hurdles to make sure you have a case that sticks.

And that's assuming the other country's law enforcement even wants to work with you. They have their own problems to deal with, after all. If scammers are targeting foreigners, why would you bother wasting resources protecting people who are not your citizens? It's not not a priority, but it's way lower priority than, say, catching a murderer or something.

Hell, the other country's cops might even be on the take. There's communities of amateur[1] scammer investigators and some of them have gotten so far as to infiltrate and compromise the scammers' operations. Sometimes, they'll even get enough evidence for a raid or an arrest... which almost always results in:

- The scammer being tipped off ahead of time about the raid, allowing them to destroy evidence

- The charges being dismissed after a laughably bad rebuttal by the arrested scammer[2]

Ultimately, scammers don't stay behind bars and continue running their scam.

This calculus works specifically because the crime is international. If, say, Indian tech support scammers were going after other Indians, the crime would be way easier to investigate, and law enforcement would have an incentive to crack down on both scammers and corrupt cops that let them escape justice.

[1] In the original meaning of "amateur" being "someone personally interested in the subject" rather than "someone unskilled at the task"

[2] Lawyers in the room might correctly point out the provenance problems with some of the evidence the scammer investigators obtain. This wouldn't be a problem if the police in these countries weren't telling scammers to destroy evidence ahead of time so the only thing to go off of is some hacked CCTV footage.

Get rid of financial inequality.

Let's start with actually punishing a scammer, ANY SCAMMER with the same gusto as the jackboot of copyright enforcement hits anyone in the world for daring to look an MCU movie the wrong way.

Late-stage capitalism wants sleazy intermediation and get-rich-quick scams. Talk about "honest hard work" is just a tool, for keeping the serfs where they belong.

That's the very next sentence: "Needless to say, real book clubs don’t charge fees to their guests".

You forget some people have dementia or that there were more sophisticated versions. Many people saw it as a means to make a bit of money on the side.