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More than any year in recent memory, 2022 felt like the year of the scam.
January kicked off with the conviction of disgraced ex-Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, and the year ended with the arrest of FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
At each turn, cultural producers pounced on these stories of deception and greed, eagerly detailing the rise and fall of brazen characters like Holmes, Bankman-Fried, “Tinder Swindler” Simon Leviev and Russian-German con artist Anna Sorokin — not to mention the travails of ex-president Donald Trump, who continues to raise millions of dollars off the lie of a stolen election, and who has recently resorted to hawking digital tokens of his likeness.
It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion: You can’t look away. Yet through it all, I started to wonder how much of American cultural and economic life has become saturated with deception. What is it that makes us so easily succumb to promises of a better future, whether it’s through love, riches or power? In what ways are we all susceptible to becoming marks?
In a provocative essay, Texas State religion scholar Joseph Laycock sees connections between the unregulated “Wild West” of cryptocurrency and various religious movements. Many of bitcoin’s most devoted adherents, he writes, “view bitcoin as not just a way to make money, but as the answer to all of humanity’s problems.” Like millennialism — the belief in a coming collective salvation for a select group of people — “some Bitcoiners believe in an inevitable coming
‘hyperbitcoinization,’ in which bitcoin will be the only valid currency.” The “bitcoin believers” will be saved, while those “who shunned cryptocurrency will lose everything.”
Cornell University social psychologist Vanessa Bohns explains how scammers like Leviev and Sorokin exploit “the very essence of what it means to be human.” She points to research showing that people tend to default to trusting others; in our social interactions, there’s a presumption of sincerity, despite the fact that we tend to assume that we’re skeptics by nature.
Artists have long been fascinated by the theme of deception. University of Tennessee art professor Beauvais Lyons tells the story of a little-known artist named Norman Daly, who, 50 years ago, convincingly exhibited a fake Iron Age civilization, with an invented language, a contrived oeuvre of music and artifacts made to look like they’d been unearthed in archaeological excavations. Lyons finds Daly’s work especially relevant in today’s culture, which is
“saturated with misinformation.”
“Fact-checking outlets and algorithms help people spot deception,” he writes. “But art that tests your perceptions of what is real — allowing you to suspend your disbelief, while also giving you the opportunity to recognize the tools of deception — can play a role, too.”
In this newsletter, I’ve also included three of the Arts and Culture section’s most popular stories from the past year: a window into Bob Dylan’s creative process, a study exploring a false memory phenomenon called “the Mandela
Effect” and why women in Western countries have been traveling to South Korea to find love.
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