Confidence Games & Pyramid Schemes, There's One Born Every Nanosecond Options Rating

[Jonny Cache]

I'm Re-view-ing the Sit-u-a-tion …

'Cause there's something fishy goin' on here — my nose tells me that much — and just because I don't know what it is yet — especially because I don't know what it is yet — it is necessary to speculate on the various sorts of games that might be in the mix.

So I want to extract a generic theme that arose in another line of inquiry, and abstract it from the specifics of that particular case, because I think there's a bigger picture, however dimly lit, to keep in sight here.

I started thinking along these lines a few weeks back when I saw yet another story on the local news about some Senior Citizen of the Griftedest Generation who sent $20,000 in cold hard cash by Featheral Xpress to some address in Phoenix because some guy on the phone said she had won $10 million from Publishers' Shearinghouse, and, like she said, "But he sounded so convincing on the phone". I was right in the middle of exclaiming — Wow !!! Just how gullible can some folks be !? — when I reflected for a moment on how much of my time and effort I had been conned into x-spending on Wikipedia, all for the sake of a really good line.

Since that time I've been contemplating the ways that the Wikipedia-Citizendium game seems very much like some kind of Intellectual Pyramid Scheme. A couple of distinguishing marks — if you'll excuse the expression — of a long-lasting pyramid scheme are these: (1) a steady influx of newbies who have yet to tumble to the game, and (2) a mechanism to efflux from the system and to render harmless the marks who have started to ask too many questions.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

A Very Shiny Glossary — Terms of Artful Dodgery

• "Confidence Game", Everything_2
• Maurer, D.W. (1940), "The Argot of Confidence Men", American Speech, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr 1940), pp. 113-123

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

Part of my desultory studies in the art of the con last year included watching all the films I could find whose plots moved forward on big or little con feet.

Here are three of the DVD's that I can still find around the house:

• Confidence ¤ Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman
• The Grifters ¤ John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening
• Matchstick Men ¤ Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman

Confidence was far and away the smartest, the sexiest, and the most instructive in the finer points of the confidence art, or so it made me believe. The Grifters delivered a rock solid cinematic thriller-chiller, but it exploited the confidence game theme more as a metaphor for deep dark psychological issues. Matchstick Men was not very convincing in its cutesy contrivances and its inability to tie up loose ends, but it did have its moments of irony and wit and the underlying structure of the meta*con was clever enough.

There was also a very classy scene in Confidence where the conman Jake Vig (Edward Burns) and his protege shill Lily (Rachel Weisz) take a mark by the name of Mr. Lewis (Robert Pine) based solely on the desire of the latter to be the proverbial Nice Guy.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: