The Business of Distrust

There’s something peculiar about an era in which nearly everything is designed to capture our attention, extract our money, and make us increasingly dependent on systems we barely understand. Even as people begin questioning the machinery, new personalities and platforms emerge to sell them the answers. Distrust has become another commodity, and independence another thing we’re told we need to buy.

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So the influencer economy is dead. Who’s surprised? No one with any sense. Certainly no one actively developing their skills of critical thinking and literacy. But what’s replacing it is perhaps even more interesting: the post-influencer, all-the-world-is-a-lie economy. And business is booming. I find that hilarious. Clearly, there’s something in the air, and it’s a palpable shift.

The old model was simple enough. Build an audience, cultivate an image, manufacture a sense of familiarity and authority, then monetize the attention. Sell people a lifestyle, an aspiration, a product, a quick fix, or an idea of who they could become if only they bought into whatever you were selling. All the while, the person behind the image might be an absolute hypocrite and an unmitigated mess of a human being. Eventually, the whole thing became so transparent, so saturated with sponsored opinions and manufactured authenticity, that people started seeing through it. The truth has a way of coming to light. Corporations, institutions, and even governments know this, but in an era of instant everything and meaningful nothing, they rely on speed and blanket access to unwitting audiences, extracting and profiting as much as possible before they’re found out.

Now we’re entering a different phase. The new pitch is that everything is a lie. I’ve leaned into that perspective myself in the past, perhaps too often, because totalizing and generalizing is an easy way to sweep all things evil, and man’s propensity for darkness, under one enormous umbrella. But, as we well know, they’re not wrong. The corporations are exploiting you. The government is essentially organized crime. The media is manipulating you. Your technology is spying on you. Nobody has your best interests at heart. And, conveniently, the person telling you all this has something to sell.

Take this YouTuber, for example. Here’s another, and another. Much of what they’re saying is on point, even while one of them is perhaps ironically promoting a subscription to a “free” and “private” email service. I use Proton Mail myself, paying for its basic plan. (You can become a partner, too!) The company’s growth and expanding product suite remind me of where Google was about a decade ago. I remember back when you had to be invited to Gmail. They changed the game, no doubt. But we know how these stories go. We know what it was all about, and how much access to our private information, conversations, and online activities we surrendered along the way. For now, perhaps Proton is at least a little less evil than Gmail, but we’ll see.

There’s something worth considering here. The problem isn’t necessarily the product, the person recommending it, or even the criticism being made. It’s the business model surrounding all of it. We’re increasingly encouraged to distrust one system, only to place our trust in another. We’re sold independence through subscriptions, privacy through commercial platforms, and liberation through yet another carefully packaged product.

Distrust has become a marketing strategy. Skepticism is the new lifestyle brand. Even rebellion can be monetized. There is something deeply perverse about that.

And this extends well beyond the influencer economy.

Today’s economy is built around extraction. Look at the shit being sold as “new.” Products are loaded with technological bloat, often feeling obsolete before you’ve even bought them. Retailers such as Amazon are only too happy to remind you when there’s a newer model available: click here. Products are assembled with parts designed to fail, or software and functionality that can be disabled when you opt out of a subscription. We could ask what C-suite geniuses came up with that idea, but when the same thinking is embedded in corporate policy across entire industries, we’re looking at something bigger than a handful of greedy executives. It’s an operating model. Customer service has been stripped of its humanity, whether outsourced to call centers or handed over entirely to AI. And, of course, there’s the financing: increasingly ubiquitous, insulting, and extortionate offers that turn ordinary purchases into long-term obligations. Consumers are encouraged to spend more by disguising the total cost as yet another manageable monthly payment. Meanwhile, the financial obligations accumulate, and quality of life continues to suffer.

The product itself is almost beside the point. What matters is how much can be extracted from the customer after the initial sale. Ownership gives way to access. Access becomes a subscription. The subscription becomes another dependency. And opting out increasingly means losing access to something you’ve already paid for. That’s the con: a psychological and emotional shell game dressed up as convenience. Far too many people fall for it, again and again.

In our era, there’s little real innovation happening in the ways that matter to ordinary people. Plenty of technological advancement, certainly, but precious little of it translates into genuinely better, or even useful products, greater independence, or meaningful improvements to everyday life. Were you excited when Musk sent a car into space? Hopefully not. That was obviously fake, as is all space travel, but that’s a topic for another essay. Were you excited when he recently revealed the rocket-boosted Roadster? Good grief. It’s difficult to imagine a less useful spectacle being sold as innovation. Elon is about investor-maxxing, if that’s a thing. He’s about the spectacle, the sleight of hand, the false projections and moronic, if not entirely ridiculous, technocratic promises, solutions, and aspirations. He’s exceptionally skilled at capitalizing on the delusions of those who want to believe him. Meanwhile, the only consistent innovation seems to be happening in the methods of capturing attention, creating dependency, and extracting more and more money from people who are already stretched thin.

It’s all superficial, driven by hype, and we’re tired of the bullshit.

This is the environment in which the post-influencer economy thrives. People are losing faith in institutions, corporations, media, products, and the people selling them. It’s a positive trend in my view. But rather than stepping outside the machinery, we’re often redirected toward another personality, another platform, another paid newsletter, another private community, another subscription promising to tell us what’s really going on.

The faces change. The sales pitch changes. The underlying machinery remains largely intact. I’d recommend you hit pause before you jump on another bandwagon again.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with earning a living, recommending something worthwhile, or building a business around genuine value. But there’s a difference between helping people become more independent and cultivating an audience that becomes dependent on you for its next dose of disillusionment.

At some point, we have to stop outsourcing our judgment, even to the people telling us not to outsource our judgment.

I’ve written about this broader cultural and economic shift in my “Great Rejection” series (Preface, Deep Dive), as well as in “The Entrap-and-Extract Economy: Selling Our Future, Stripping Our Past.”

The answer, in my view, isn’t to find a better machine to feed, or a more trustworthy personality to follow. It’s to recognize the machinery for what it is, reclaim some agency, and become a little less dependent on all of it.

Keep What Works

There’s another way to resist this logic, and it doesn’t require a new platform, personality, or product. Sometimes it’s as simple as keeping what works.

I switched to Apple machines back in 2010, albeit reluctantly. I haven’t missed Microsoft since. Looking back, I can’t believe how much frustration, wasted time, and energy went into dealing with those unreliable, perpetually buggy systems. The experience did, however, instill in me a vigilance toward wasted system resources. These days, that means disabling or uninstalling unnecessary features and software, while minimizing invasive or hidden forms of tracking and surveillance. It’s annoying, but worth the effort in my book.

My studio machine, which I use for music production, video, graphics, photography, and watching shows and films, is a 2013 27-inch iMac. I paid $500 for it in 2021, upgrading from my battle-worn 2009 iMac after its display finally failed beyond repair. Relying on an external monitor just wasn’t the same as that beautiful screen.

I’m writing this on my 2012 MacBook Air, a UK model no less, which I’ve owned for four years. Sadly, unlike the iMac, it’s not upgradeable without pulling out a soldering gun. But it’s not necessary. I recently updated both machines to macOS Sonoma using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. That’s a genuine innovation in an otherwise massively wasteful industry, enabling people to extend the useful life of hardware that manufacturers would rather see replaced. Both machines run perfectly well and do everything I need. The MacBook is primarily for reading, research, writing, editing my website and books, and watching videos and other interesting content wherever I happen to settle in for a few hours. Perhaps amusingly, I’ve had to downgrade my Vivaldi browser to an older version because the latest update is bloated, dysfunctional crap.

I recently bought a “new” Samsung S21 phone, which is already five years old according to the marketing. My previous phone was basically falling apart after seven years, so it owed me nothing. I drive a 2002 Subaru Outback. It needs some repair work, but it’s roadworthy and safe. Most of my everyday clothes are thrift store finds, some practically new. I prefer buying used books from local bookshops.

I’m certainly not unique in these matters, nor do I consider myself superior in my thinking or perspective. But I think more and more of us are returning to a way of living that was fairly ordinary a few generations ago: reuse, rebuild, repair, recycle, upcycle, repurpose, refine, and simplify. We’ve been sold the lie of material abundance and prosperity while quietly selling ourselves to the machine in a thousand little ways. We’re conditioned to desire the new, the shiny, the promised. But, as we’re beginning to see, we’ve been deceived. And deceivers come in many sizes and configurations.

Keep what works. Repair what you can. Stop mindlessly feeding the machine.

Eyes open.

Lux et veritas