Stephen Diehl: the internet became a predatory machine that monetises human weakness

Engineer and writer Stephen Diehl, known for his critical writing on cryptocurrency, has published an essay titled "The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now". Its central claim is that online predation has moved from the edge of the network to its centre — from an abuse of the network to the network's organising principle.

A web built by amateurs

Diehl describes himself as a child of the 1990s and recalls an early internet that was slow, ugly and unreliable: dial-up modems, Usenet flame wars and websites built by obsessive amateurs about Babylon 5, model rockets, train timetables and shareware. Most of those sites had no business model, and that was the point — the web felt like a public square assembled by amateurs. Scams, viruses and spam existed then too, he writes, but predation was an aberration; today the scammer no longer has to find a victim, because the platform finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment and recommends the next scam.

Predation that feeds on weakness

Any insecurity can become a commercial niche, including the desire to escape commercial life itself — there is always a course, a newsletter, a private community or a referral code waiting at the end of the funnel. What troubles the author most is that the grift economy is participatory: ordinary people spend their lives promoting investments they barely understand, products that do not work and political claims they have never examined, usually earning nothing while acting as unpaid distributors for someone further up the pyramid. Consumption becomes distribution, and the mark becomes the salesman.

A selection environment where accuracy loses

The essay describes a brutal selection environment. The honest financial adviser explains diversification and gets twelve views; the crypto enthusiast who predicts a thousandfold return gets twelve million. The physician says a chronic condition requires careful management; the wellness crank claims seed oils are poisoning your soul. One of them has the better business model, Diehl notes, and it is not the one burdened by reality. Addiction, he argues, is the business model itself: the feed supplies alternating doses of outrage, fear, envy and hope, each arriving with something to buy, and the system can never satiate the need it monetises. The grievance merchant cannot resolve your grievance; the trading guru cannot let you become financially secure.

Crypto, language models and disconnecting

Diehl calls cryptocurrency the apotheosis of the grift economy: promotion creates price movement, price movement is presented as proof of adoption, and that proof recruits new buyers — "a pyramid scheme with a podcast department". Language models, he adds, will make the grift cheaper and worse, since the cost of producing plausible lies has fallen to zero. Recommendation loops, he concludes, can optimise engagement, retention and conversion, but they cannot tell us what a human life is for; disconnection is therefore not Luddism but a refusal to mistake a predatory system for a social world.