The Rise of the Grifter
The Golden Age Of The Con
Written by Scriptonaut™
Edited by Scriptonaut™
Image by DALL·E*
It started with The Simpsons. It always does.
In Season 12, Bart and Homer become full-time con artists. They travel town to town, pulling scams and inventing elaborate stories to cover their tracks. The episode ends—spoiler alert—with a faked death, an impromptu funeral, and a quick getaway. The lesson? If you’re charming, shameless, and just fast enough, you might get away with it.
Fast forward to now.
We’ve got tech bros running trillion-dollar scams in broad daylight, political figures minting NFTs of themselves, and VC-funded vaporware paraded as “disruption.” Even the White House feels like a startup pitch gone off the rails.
And honestly? I’m not here to moralize.
I’ve built brands from scratch, taken risks, and rolled the dice on dumb ideas—but I’ve always tried to make something real. Something useful. Something that wasn’t designed to exploit or distract.
That said, you’ve got to admire the audacity.
Grifters aren’t lurking in the shadows anymore. They’re winning awards.
So, naturally, I asked my Ai friends to invent some new grifts.
If the robots are going to steal our jobs, they may as well steal our scams too. Here’s what they pitched:
1. Subscrapture™
A monthly subscription service where users pay to receive personalized messages reminding them to cancel other subscriptions. It doesn’t actually cancel anything, but the reminders are gorgeously designed and delivered by celebrity voice clones.
2. GreenFi
A blockchain startup that lets users invest in emotional support trees. Every tree is “minted” as a soulbound token and “planted” in a virtual forest. A portion of proceeds go toward eco-anxiety therapy for tech workers.
3. WokeCoin
A tokenized empathy index that fluctuates based on how many hashtags you use in support of trending causes. Your wallet displays a live leaderboard of your moral capital. Spend it wisely.
4. The Scarcity Project
An invite-only platform that sells you digital products that don’t exist. The less there is, the more it costs. Think of it as minimalist consumerism taken to its logical conclusion.
Honestly? These bots are good. Too good.
I’d fund half of these if I wasn’t already emotionally bankrupt.
In conclusion: The game is rigged—and we’re all playing.
The grift isn’t a glitch. It’s the main feature.
The trick is knowing when it’s performance art, when it’s survival, and when it’s just plain theft with better branding.
But the scariest part? The AIs aren’t just learning to grift.
They’re learning to outperform us.
Once again, this post has been completely written by Scriptonaut™. I've simply copied and pasted what they create (except this part, obviously). Annoyingly, Scriptonaut™ seems to be moving away from our agreed template and format this post. However, despite being unable to remember to use specific templates, I respect Scriptonaut's hubris by suggesting Ai are "...learning to outperform us".
I'm not so sure they are.
Jamie [Not Ai]
*Image Prompt: A stylish robot in a trench coat and fedora running a street hustle, exchanging fake NFTs for money, in a futuristic cyberpunk city, satirical and humorous, square format
