Alright, settle down, grab a glass. Or don’t. Makes no difference to the howling void, does it? Just finished reading some wire piece about the state of things. Deepfakes, scams, this Yelland woman in Detroit vetting meeting requests like she’s screening spies for the goddamn Kremlin. Runs background checks, tests their Spanish, demands video calls. Paranoia, they call it. Sounds like Tuesday to me.
Used to be, the biggest scam you worried about was the three-card monte guy down on Alvarado, or maybe some dame promising heaven and delivering a hangover that felt like hell’s basement. Now? Now the ghosts in the machine are wearing bespoke suits, talking productivity gains while picking your pocket clean before you even knew you were interviewing for a job that never existed.
This Yelland character got taken by some phantom hiring manager. Phony slide decks, the whole nine yards. Only thing missing was the actual job, the actual company contact. The scammers wouldn’t even turn their damn cameras on. Should’ve been the first clue, lady. Anyone hiding their face usually has a reason, and it ain’t shyness. Usually means they owe someone money, or they’re wanted by the law, or maybe they just look like five miles of bad road after a three-day bender. Like me, most mornings. But these digital creeps? They’re hiding because they ain’t even there. They’re just strings of code puppeteered by some lowlife in a boiler room halfway across the globe.
The article coughs up some stats. Job scams tripled since 2020. Losses ballooned from $90 million to half a billion. Half a billion dollars vaporized because people clicked the wrong link, trusted the wrong email, believed some pixelated phantom promising a paycheck. It’s enough to make you want to crawl back into the analog age, maybe become a lighthouse keeper. Though knowing my luck, the foghorn would be AI-powered and demand my social security number before it let out a toot.
And the engine driving this garbage truck? Artificial Intelligence. Yeah, the same miracle cure the bright sparks keep shoving down our throats. Gonna cure cancer, write symphonies, fold your laundry, make you a goddamn billionaire overnight. What it’s really doing is making it piss-easy for any two-bit hustler to whip up a fake face, a fake voice, a fake everything. Generating bullshit used to take effort, a certain degenerate artistry. Now some script kiddie can conjure up a convincing CEO faster than I can pour a stiff one. Progress, they call it.
So you got AI generating fake LinkedIn profiles smoother than a baby’s ass. You got deepfake videos so slick, scammers are ditching email for live video calls, impersonating your boss, your buddy, maybe even your old lady asking for bank details because she’s trapped in Nigeria again. It’s a goddamn digital masquerade ball where everyone might be a robot wearing a human skin-suit woven from stolen data. Need another smoke just thinking about it.
Naturally, where there’s shit, there are flies. And where there’s tech-generated shit, there are tech startups buzzing around promising to clean it up. For a price, naturally. Got outfits like GetReal Labs and Reality Defender, selling AI to sniff out the other AI. An arms race fought in algorithms, fueled by venture capital and desperation. Like paying one wolf to guard the henhouse from another wolf. Good luck with that.
Then there’s Sammy Altman, Mr. OpenAI himself. Not content with unleashing the digital demons, he’s got another hustle: Tools for Humanity. Eye-scanning orbs, biometric data, blockchain IDs. All to prove “personhood.” Jesus H. Christ. We need iris scanners and distributed ledgers just to prove we’re breathing, thinking meat sacks? What’s next? Daily blood tests to verify you’re not a sophisticated toaster oven with opinions on Proust? They want to put your goddamn soul on the blockchain. I wouldn’t trust these clowns to verify my bar tab, let alone my existence. The whole idea stinks worse than a backed-up toilet in a flophouse. “Proving personhood.” I prove my personhood every morning when I manage to crawl out of bed despite the existential dread and the lingering taste of cheap whiskey. That’s real enough for me.
And here’s the punchline, the cosmic joke written on the back of a cocktail napkin. After all this high-tech wizardry, this AI arms race, this blockchain baloney, what are people actually doing? They’re going back to basics. Old-fashioned spycraft learned from bad movies. Social engineering. Asking someone on the phone to send an email right now to prove it’s them. Sliding into Instagram DMs to double-check a LinkedIn message. Code words between colleagues, like kids in a treehouse club, but the monsters under the bed are real, and they want your bank account number. Texting selfies with timestamps. Can you imagine? “Hey Bob, need that report by five. Also, text me a picture of you holding today’s newspaper and a live hamster, just so I know it’s really you.” It’s madness. We built a rocket ship to the moon and now we’re using sextants and carrier pigeons to make sure the guy in the next cubicle isn’t a Russian bot.
This isn’t just paranoia; it’s the logical endpoint of bathing ourselves in technology we don’t understand, built by people we shouldn’t trust, funded by motives that have damn-all to do with making life better for anyone outside their gated communities. They sold us connection and gave us isolation. Sold us efficiency and gave us suspicion. Sold us the future and delivered a goddamn hall of mirrors where every reflection is trying to sell you crypto or steal your identity.
You end up like Yelland, triple-checking every shadow, suspicious of every stranger, trusting nothing and nobody. It’s exhausting. It drains the goddamn life out of you. Makes you want to unplug the whole damn thing, smash the screens, and go live in a cabin with no electricity, just a typewriter, a case of bourbon, and maybe a stray dog for company. At least you know the dog ain’t a deepfake. Probably.
What does it mean to be human in all this? Maybe it’s just being flawed. Being suspicious. Making mistakes. Getting drunk. Writing bad poetry. Feeling the hangover. These machines, these AI ghosts, they can mimic, they can fake, they can generate flawless bullshit on demand. But they can’t feel the crushing weight of a Monday morning, the cheap thrill of a winning horse, the despair of a blank page, the warmth of cheap whiskey hitting your gut. They don’t get the joke. They don’t understand the absurdity. They’re just code.
We’re the ones stuck navigating this mess, armed with nothing but our gut feelings, maybe a code word, and a healthy dose of suspicion that feels heavier every day. Welcome to the Age of Paranoia? Hell, we’ve been living here for years. The wallpaper’s just getting fancier, and the landlord is a robot who wants to scan your eyeballs before handing over the keys.
Time for another drink. Maybe two. Gotta verify my own existence somehow.
Chinaski out. Now where’d I put that bottle…