Here is a correspondence I fell into a few months ago when the fooling of the application user was at its latest stage and I as its latest victim. To most people who were targeted in this way the interaction and the language involved appeared very similar, and there are some who to this day have not realised the hoax. The user in question – assuming there was one person behind this – has since disappeared, but the language and the overall effect remain as an example of the intricacies that revolve around human interactions at a time like ours. Here is the first message he sent me:
“Hello, I’m Steven.”
After enough similar kinds of attempts at contact, I have learned that, firstly, nobody is called Steven, and even if someone happened to be called Steven, there is no way any real person would start a conversation with this introduction. In a way, there is everything one needs to know about the situation already present in this first message, and to read into it is to discover a subtext of apology, irony and wilful stupidity wrapped all into one. The overall information is a kind of plea for the world in which we now live, where we cannot have the time to bother to think or worry about the actual human being, the other person, if there is one, or whether there is a real need to know anything more. Certainly an agenda of deceit behind a pleasing façade is much older than anything we discover on a smart phone. In any case, after a few back-and-forths of no noticeable importance, ‘Steven’ wrote this to me:
“Has the pandemic affected your work a lot? I’m in the real estate business, what industry are you in? The pandemic has affected my work a lot, many of my clients have no funds to buy houses, causing my business to become weaker and weaker.”
I had continued in a half-aware manner, possibly out of habit, and there seemed to be something interesting in ‘Steven’ opening up about hisprofessional insecurity. On his profile he was all cars and yachts, great food, traveling, and other such things, but there appeared to be a real person in the pictures, quite probably from California, as he had explained, and I became interested in who this person in the pictures really was, and whether he knew what was being done to his likeness. I asked ‘Steven’ about his week, and this is when he made his first mistake:
“Yes, I am visiting my friends in Dublin now.”
In Dublin? I asked. ‘Steven’ corrected himself quickly.
“No, I’m talking about being in Dublin some time ago and visiting my friends here now.”
Now, in addition to this being on the weaker side as far as correcting arguments go, there are two things that reveal the underlying fraud. The way in which ‘Steven’ simply ignores mixing up two completely distinct cities (Dublin and Helsinki) is telling as such, but it’s really the end of his answer, when he talks about ‘my friends’, that betrays his intent. The lack of detail is something that follows an internet scammer like flies follow a coke can, and anyone who has been paying attention to the way in which a great number of people now refer to their exciting lives – with ‘my friends’, in particular – knows something about the unavoidable conflict in such expressions. Here already can be seen the central problem in trying to deceit people living in such places as Helsinki (and Dublin, I assume), namely that there is such a misunderstanding about how the average local person is living that the floundering approach is that of a pseudo-American fantasy – which is of course what much of life inside social media is about and which is not the inventionof an internet scammer – with cars, wealth, travels, and an altogether instrumental take on human life. To overlook how separate an individual on social media is from this vision is simply symptomatic, since a kind of separation has to take place for any person to refuse their immediate surroundings and turn to the smartphone. In this escape into numbness and perhaps a meek rumble of a more exciting life there are some, and perhaps many more than we would imagine, that eventually surrender to the deception willingly. After a lifetime of anxiety and no cure for it but more videos and images, there emerges a desire for something that can be called real, no more than a break, one chance for the mundane to finally become more meaningful, through one special contact to start to sparkle and move upwards. Strangely enough, this sentiment of the victim is not entirely different from that of the person who is trying to fool him at the other end. At the very least, whatever is happening in the mind of someone dedicated to a life of deception cannot compare to the personal circumstance preceding such a choice.
The story of being fooled is the great story of our time, and people are now being divided into groups and camps simply based on who has the better answers and the morality. And despite this deception is running amok in perhaps more dangerous and inventive ways than ever before. While I was entertaining myself with my latest scam artist by commenting on a theatre production I was working on and enjoying his humanity-challenging responses (“Hope your poster can be made successfully”, “This sounds interesting, hope your drama is going well”), I eventually got to the heart of the matter:
“May go to dinner with friends on weekends, barbecue, and most importantly, check out my wallet for mobile mining.”
Checking your wallet for what? I asked.
“Haven’t you used an e-wallet? Mobile mining is of course making money. I made a thousand dollars in mobile mining today and I’m so excited.”
Naturally, I was hurt, most of all since I had not hinted at financial problems (as he had in his previous message), and after the floodgates had opened in their forever graceless manner, there wasn’t really any reason to uphold the charade. Foolishly I tried to get to the real person behind the messages, as though ‘Steven’ would simply open up to a stranger about his life of crime. His response, however, was surprisingly personal:
“I want to ask you, we just discussed a topic, do you need to be so sensitive? Does the chat have to talk about other topics? Do I have to talk about your favourite topic when I chat with you?”
This reaction is a later development, as far as I can tell, and it is somewhat interesting how ‘Steven’ would not simply drop the conversation as soon as his cover was blown. Why so upset, ‘Steven’? What, if anything, is this reaction about? There are some who can continue to be hooked even after the reality of the situation in all its absurdity has been revealed to them, but for the dispute to become about who is the more selfish of the two is an illuminating turn. Without a doubt many casual conversations between profiles and other lesser-known entities are now stained by self-centeredness and the question what can I get out of this? In this situation, which no participant can truly escape, the most unlikely opposites are brought closer together, and it begins with the choice to delegate human complexities to algorithms and pure fantasy. If everyone else is doing it, one now thinks, if indeed everyone is guilty on one level or another, what can confidently be called a crime anymore? What does it mean to mislead someone in an environment where the very participation is inseparable from self-delusion and foolishness?
Even the Hurting Westerner finds it now in himself to ask: how can these people who fool others so thoughtlessly online sleep at night? And moreover: haven’t I, after all the right choices, the taxes paid, irony acquired and much of life to work less pleasurable lost, haven’t I already suffered my part? And the answer, traveling through zeros and ones, across cultures and continents, from one struggling heart to another, is a resounding no. It echoes through deserts and forests with a force or a hundred hurricanes and throws the Western Victim against his sacred structure, his one and only comfort even in his discomfort, the wall of free markets and social benefits, with faint traces of languages learned and skills attained, and most noticeably with its surrounding water drains clogged by an inexplicable mass, the produce of films and series consumed, moulding into an unspeakable bulk. The beaten man is left to his final frontier, drenched in rain, and armed with nothing besides his singular suffering. And still the question remains, still on his lips, still in his thinking mind: What are the ethical implications of a life of deception? Is there a meaning to be found in it at all? Are we now to be fooled as a matter of course, as we used to walk down a street market and leave it with unknowingly less money in our pockets, or in our folly we tried to help a group of street children, map in hand, and all the while under the cover hands were reaching for our pockets for cash and valuables? These were hands that we knewwould be reaching for something more, we knew we would be poked awake from our trance of safety and privilege. Even getting angry would not quite block it out, since to lose a little bit of money was – we knew it, deep down it was clear to us – no tragedy at all, because before everything else we had been fooled by revealing our way of life. Right then we were faced with a desperation we had always been able to turn away from, but now we had no other choice than to accept the part of the Western Tourist and see that even in the modern European city there is a jungle of palpable survival and within it a morality that crumbles into nothingness when the truer question of living any kind of life at all is brought into its realm. Who is to blame for this? Certainly not the street children. Equally blameless is the scam artist online. While it is now relatively easier to snatch a few pockets of unsuspecting social media users, it is unlikely that given a choice in the matter, someone would turn to it as an enjoyable way to make a living. The ethical question remains, and there is undoubtedly awareness, but what can no longer be overlooked are the hurt and desperation that overturn the gentle approach. If social life is indeed now all, and however locked its graceful appearance, there is a rotting reflection that is less pleasant to behold but as much a part of the social experience as it has ever been, and it doesn’t fade away by scrolling, posting, or with a million hearts and smiles. It is there only to be looked at and accepted.
The beast of a life spent on socio-virtual platforms, beyond culture, is now too enormous to be tamed or reasoned with, and like a great ocean liner it drags with it many unwanted elements, among them those that make a living out of scamming people. The enormity of the phenomenon reveals its truest nature. Even if a cyber-terrorist caught one person in a hundred and no more, it might still prove to be business worth spending time on. To reach someone, anyone, is now a part of a shadowy existence that covers not only the deliberately dishonest. A much greater mass, quite possibly nearly every engaged user, feels the urge to find relief, understanding, wisdom, and even artistic fulfilment in a post and a reaction. The language of behaviour is not owned by any individual fraudster and therefore he cannot be held accountable for it. To blame him for things having turned sour is as unnecessary as blaming circumstance for one’s personal shortcomings. Whoever is out there fooling the innocents has barely poisoned a well, for all we know not even this. Likely he has simply jumped in, down the same drain everyone else was going, with moralities and personal reasons blown in the surge. The simplicity of a picture collection of cars, yachts, vacation resorts and good-looking, animated people, seems to be enough for the modern victim. The newest demand in a globalised maze of those without and those with more than enough is to create a world of desire, of pure fantasy, sexual as well as financial, and open a door for the unknowing consumer to walk through, past the broken English, through technical, organized non-humanity, into the possibility of wealth and happiness, and then to be met with the most human experience of all: shame, hurt, loneliness and stupidity.
It is evident that ‘Steven’ was not – again assuming there was one person behind the messages – truly hurt or challenged by my questions. There was a mechanised approach to his responses all the way to the defence speech. No pulse was raised, no face flustered. There was not a pause of any kind. The unempathetic quest for an undeniably better life, where one could have a chance at some of the things in the made-up profile, perhaps only a better apartment, was still targeting the well-meaning person, desperate to understand. The ability to accept and understand is among the greatest privileges a person can have, and still it pales in comparison to the pull of the conflict. In the fight for a chance at a truly better life nothing is beyond becoming ammunition, not stealing another person’s identity, lying about one’s whereabouts, sexual orientation, age, background, or name, and to be appalled by such behaviour, to steer towards ‘common humanity’ and a life less criminal is to still bathe in deliberate misunderstanding. Having a chance at allis what needs to be taken as the frame for social enquiry. A conflict of whatever kind is brought about by pain and unfairness, but to live inside a lesser existence, really live in it, changes many thoughts. In our fights with those that are trying to wrong us there is a misplacement of emphasis. We are still looking for the reaction that is like ours, still for some kind of universal diplomacy, focusing on what is being said instead of how it is said.
I can never really understand an online scammer or the circumstance that produces such action because I don’t really need to understand it. I can remove myself from the experience, helpless as I am, and withdraw to the one guarantee I am presented by my own socio-political surroundings, financial security. The deeper unfathomable suffering affects me through these interactions, and it resembles a suffering in me, but never without becoming an existential enquiry, an entitlement to reveal to myself my truer predicament. It is not I who needs to fool another person to get my way. This would be nothing more than a pastime, another example among many of the ways in which amusement can be found within the numbness of being. To understand anything about another person’s experience we must rid ourselves of a notion of the reptilian human, to look beyond a smartphone-using muddled organism and refuse to believe that such devises, pandemic as they are, make us the same. We would have to question the very concepts of lie, truth, morality, and many more, and not only to get a better view of the world, but to be able to look at ourselves, self-satisfied in our analysis, the never-ending operational mind still spinning on top of a pile of waste, still hurting, still anxious.
After we have been entertained for a lifetime, it is natural to begin to see the continuing discomfort as entertaining. It is the consumer marvelling at the stupidity of the world, late at night, alone on the couch, drink in hand, with innumerable versions of entertainment at his disposal. This is his hurt, this his cross to bear, and if in his deepening stupor he ends up losing money in a scamming operation, he can simply use it as fuel for more of what has been sustaining him for most of his life. He can go back to his television, his entertainment. He will not have to suffer endlessly, not he, not in the least. On the contrary, he can now find more comfort inside his own personal take on the stupidity and immorality of the world, no matter how many drinks it takes him. And the thought and the drink and the life that ebbs away while all of this is happening, it all melts into one critical immobile culture veteran, a creature with no door to escape through except for the mouth that still is spewing truth.
Finally, I come back to language. The unimportance of it, the let-down, the absence of a moment of thought in the face of a raging, devastating burst of pure reaction, one to be witnessed and shared and nothing more, a mother of all waves to drown an entire civilisation, left as ruins surrounded by water, still fundamentally there but of no real haven to a living person anymore. To take an example, I remember the first person who tried to fool me with talk of crypto currency. After a few messages where he had explained about his fantastical life in Helsinki, how he was an expert in investing and eager to teach me all about it, I grew tired, and I asked him how his English was doing. He responded without hesitation: “What do you think? No worse than you.” I see now that it wasn’t what he wrote back to me. It was how he did it.
KULTTUURIESSEET 