Fraud is basically the only career path in our current fake economy. Everyone is committing fraud on some form or another. Your company, you personally, your government, etc.
1. It’s impossible to compete with free so business that do add real value are at a disadvantage
2. A future where tech adoption slowly was accepted and people eased into being comfortable actually paying for things the value never happened and now feels impossible, as free is expected.
3. It’s created bad incentives. Like keeping people on their devices as much as possible and only show them things that enrage them or confirm their prejudices.
4. None of it is really free because someone pays for it all and those costs are born by society anyways, while having less choice.
5. I think over time this ethos has become mainstream and it’s essentially a fraud mindset. Nothing matters as long as the line goes up.
(This process and the end results are surprisingly similar to academic fraud. “Everything is free” is the same thing as inventing whatever results people want to hear. Both will ultimately lead to the same, unsustainable end result, as people will no longer trust research because everything is fake.)
I’ve seen fudging analytics and subscriber numbers to lie to ad buyers. I’ve seen people intentionally hold items over from one quarter to the next for accounting purposes. I’ve seen events use dubious counting methods to inflate their attendance figures. I’ve even heard stories about hospitals moving patients from failed surgeries back to their floor before they die in order to fudge the surgery survival stats.
A lot of this is Goodhart’s law in action. But also, when these very tiny frauds go unchecked in a competitive marketplace, everyone becomes forced to do them. If law enforcement won’t punish them for being evil, the market will punish them for being good.
Society has at large approved of fraud. I’m not being a lone holdout.
? I thought OP was referring to things like the presidential cryptocurrency, the ultimate endorsement of pump-and-dump fraud.