The Other Global Victims of Media Scams
While online bubbles burst, other forms of precarity complicate our own
In 2014, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling published an unusual story on Ukrainian digital scam artists. This was still a tough year for writing about Ukrainian sub-cultures (amid Russia’s annexation of the Crimea), but the story became even more difficult to read when republished last year in a Motherboard anthology, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons. A lighthearted tale of the scam artists and fake-news generators among Eastern European civilians struggling to get by, “The Brain Dump” takes on a decidedly different tone when read in the middle of a long, bitter war.
Of you Internet world people, many know our new bad troubles here in Ukraine. Beloved cool techno-culture center "Izolyatsia" is seized by ethnic rebels in city of Donetsk. Armed separatists get real drunk, bust up the art gallery, carry off all our favorite 3DPrinters. No nice gadgets left in Izolyatsia now, just landmines.
We are independent digital culture center from Frunze, Hirske, Borivske (careful not mentioning exact village where we live). In our "Brain Dump" hackerspace we are underground alternative freeware hack scene. Total do-it-yourself. Share everything, build own desks from old packing crates. Way into Linux, Wikipedia and Instructables. Every day we learn something good from Internet community.
…
Because we are open-source freaks, no cash, also no real jobs, we settle inside dead rubber-tyre factory where we "borrow" electricity from local nuke plant. We listen to streaming techno and metal, coding a lot, smoking cannabis and never go into a church. So we are called "decadent" by repressive Russian-Orthodox militia of Donetsk Peoples Republic. Not looking good.
Also, Ukrainian National Guard will probably blow up our hacklab with artillery strikes or chopper missiles. "Brain Dump" is rusty old concrete bunker with young men in and out at any time day and night, to carry big package of laptops also beer. Therefore Brain Dump fits ideal drone surveillance profile for terrorist headquarters. Sure to get blasted by authorities with no warning and no civil rights.
Does the story attempt to humanize these hackers? Yes and no. It offers a sketchy overview of one of the major ports for global online scams, but remains emphatically abstracted. The whole point of the story is for this collective, which speaks of itself in radical and self-emancipating terms, to realize that it’s the problem—that it lives an empty existence even if participants can make some money from its labours—which honestly feels written to soothe Westerners, many of whom are doubtless the victims of related scams. Take these closing lines:
We are rich. We have as much illegal wealth as usual corrupt Ukrainian state politician. We have illegal fortune between three and ten billion dollars.
We were thinking all along we were helpless victims of situation, but truth is now clear to us. We are Internet people, but also major part of the problem. We are serious power player, frankly. We can do anything Internet black global money can do, buy media, hire liars, recruit mercenaries, ship weapons, buy own private jet get the hell out go live in Costa Rica.
We're just like the "Gas Princess" and the "Chocolate King." We're oligarchs. We're moguls.
But how does that help us? The fires are rising all around us anyway. We can give you a million dollars if you have any answer. What do we do?
I have a soft spot for stories that try to put us into other subject-positions and fail. There’s a kind of work these stories are doing for their authors, to help them broaden their sense of self and better understand the world as a whole, that we’re witnessing in progress. If the author doesn’t quite get it spot on, at least they’re trying. At least they’re pushing themselves beyond a comfort zone.
Often, we don’t get even that far along the journey. Often, we’re too consumed by our own sense of outrage to see past how a situation affects us, let alone to deepen in empathy for others struggling in the world.
One good example emerged earlier this year—goodness, how far-off that already seems!—when the SFF industry was hit by spam submissions generated by so-called AI. Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld was especially careful, when he showed stats for this influx, not to name the specific world regions from which they were coming—and so most of the industry, and media picking up on this event, fixated on the technology aspect. The rise of large language models was going to ruin us all!
This hype cycle serves people desperately trying to fund AI projects, in an economic moment where hype alone keeps many financial and business products humming—but it also estranges us from a more grounded look at the problem actually afflicting our precarious worlds of online labour.
Simply put:
Spam submissions preceded the rise of junk AI storytelling.
And they come from parts of the world where people see the earnings associated with short fiction magazines as worth gunning for—even while, in the West, such earnings are famously insufficient for lives in the West. Our major ports of call for spam are slices of Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia: the same as they’ve been for decades. Email phishing consumed the internet once instant global correspondence became possible. Then crypto-scams and more elaborate cyberhacks took over in the 21st century. Now new tools have been added to the age-old grifting business, with the rise of machine learning software.
But all have come about for the exact same reason: because the world is terribly unequal, and because the global economy has a unidirectional structure around financing especially. Money can pour in to Western services easily, but there are many rings of fire that people outside the West have to jump through, to connect with our financial institutions in a way that pays out.
This creates a tension point that cybercrime readily resolves. Even while folks in the West routinely grump about not being able to survive in our industries, the amount of money on offer for our services within the West could easily surpass a year’s wages in other parts of the world. So of course people from all over will try for those golden tickets—and in as efficient a way as possible.
Publishing a short story isn’t the aim. Getting 12 cents a word is.
In our panic this year about AI, though, many in SFF completely lost sight of the economic drivers of this crisis for our industries—and therein lies the bigger problem: the problem, furthermore, that gives me my soft spot for people who at least try to think beyond themselves and their subject-positions.
If even writers of science fiction futures, fantastical alternatives to the present construction of society, aren’t able to see past the shiny new hype cycle of AI, to wrestle with systemic injustices flagged by every online crisis since the launch of the internet, what hope does the rest of our society have?
What will it take for us to start to see these issues holistically?
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