A college degree? A safe retirement fund? The elections? The American dream? All these pillars of our way of life are grounds where scams can take hold––and some people consider them scams in and of themselves. There are fraudulent schemes that are ancient and others that are exquisitely rooted in the age of digital communication and social media, when the feeling of being swindled applies even more broadly across the spectrum of everyday life.
Scams build on the weaknesses of technological, economic, and social systems. They thrive not only on naivete or ignorance, but also on the shared trust these systems depend on. When a new communication or financial technology is invented, for instance, a new scam is right on its heels, astutely exploiting its socio-technical vulnerabilities. And when our key democratic, cultural, and economic institutions are faltering, it becomes even harder to determine where the scam ends and legitimate reality begins.
Here are some more of the questions that we will ask: Why is everything starting to feel more and more like a scam? Do protections against scams act like antidotes to venoms––each tailored and targeted––or can we build some global immunity response to all scams? Are we willing to give up our privacy to fight against scams? Do scams expose larger, systemic injustices or malaises? What is the role of key political, cultural, and economic institutions in protecting citizens from scams? Are scams foundational to capitalism? Is scamming always malicious exploitation by immoral actors? Or regained agency of the systematically oppressed? How does scamming destabilize systems of power?
Jacqueline Burns Koven is the Head of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Chainalysis, leading the team that tracks cybercriminals and nation state actors stealing, scamming, and extorting cryptocurrency. She spends most of her time combing the blockchain for financial signatures of threat actors and mapping out the underground economy.
Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a critical human geographer and anthropologist whose scholarship explores the intersections of Black geographies, racial capitalism, reparative justice, and economic inequality.
Alexander Stein is the Founder and Managing Principal of Dolus Advisors and an expert in human decision-making and behavior. Trained and licensed as a psychoanalyst, he advises executives, founders and directors across a broad array of industries on issues involving leadership, culture, governance, ethics, risk, and other organizational matters with complex psychological underpinnings.
Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies and Shannon Mid-Career Fellow at the University of Virginia. She studies social and cultural aspects of money to understand the future of financial technology, livelihoods, financial literacy, and consumer protection in the digital economy.
Gabe Whaley is the founder and CEO of MSCHF, the provocative Brooklyn-based art collective. As a practice and as an entity, MSCHF manifests the ambition for a creative entity to wield tangible cultural power as measured against that of world-straddling companies, celebrities, and media entities.
The presentations will be accompanied by the screening of a series of short videos cut specifically for Salon 53.
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