Cory Doctorow used his Pluralistic newsletter on June 19 to argue that the current AI investment boom has borrowed a social mechanism from multi-level marketing: participants publicly insist the system works while privately absorbing losses, layoffs or embarrassment.
The essay, titled “The Big Con,” leans on Bridget Read’s book Little Bosses Everywhere, which Doctorow describes as a chronicle of pyramid-style sales organizations. According to Doctorow’s reading of Read, many people recruited into companies such as Mary Kay, Herbalife and Amway buy inventory and fail to sell much beyond a small circle of acquaintances, while assuming their own failure is exceptional because other sellers claim to be succeeding.
Doctorow’s point is less about cosmetics or supplements than about information control. In his account, the recruit sees conferences, coaching sessions and confident claims from upline sellers, but not the comparable failures of peers. That produces the useful fiction that the business model is sound and the individual seller is defective. Conveniently, the organization can then sell the recruit more training.
He connects that to the older confidence-game term “big con,” in which a victim is surrounded by people participating in the fraud. Doctorow describes the classic setup as a staged environment where each interaction reinforces the false premise. The mark is not persuaded by one liar, but by a whole temporary world built for the job.
The political section of the essay is more polemic than reporting, and Doctorow does not pretend otherwise. He argues that pyramid-scheme money and habits helped shape American conservative politics, pointing to Amway and its founders’ relationship with Gerald Ford. Doctorow says the Federal Trade Commission was close to shutting down Amway in the 1970s before Ford became president, and he links Jay Van Andel and DeVos family money to the Heritage Foundation.
Doctorow then folds Donald Trump and Elon Musk into the same argument. He cites Trump’s New York criminal prosecution over false business records as part of a broader pattern of misrepresented wealth, and points to congressional material on subsidies and bailouts received by Musk-linked businesses. His claim is that public narratives about “self-made” tycoons often hide dependence on legal maneuvering, state support or retail speculation.
The AI comparison is the essay’s current-events hook. Doctorow cites an MSN story about Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi saying executives speak differently in private about AI-driven job losses than they do in public. Doctorow argues that chief executives who fired workers and bought into AI automation may now be facing the same embarrassment as failed multi-level marketing sellers: each suspects the pitch did not work, but assumes others must have made it pay.
That is a useful frame, even if the essay’s rhetoric comes with a flamethrower attached. The mechanism is plain enough. A market can look validated because many powerful people have spent money in it. That spending can also be evidence of herd behavior, bad incentives and fear of being the only executive who failed to clap for the demo.
Doctorow closes by comparing Meta’s metaverse spending to a Bugs Bunny gag in which theatrical commitment is mistaken for proof. The underlying warning is sharper than the joke: capital expenditure is not evidence of product-market fit, and public confidence from people already committed to a bet deserves a fact-check before anyone else buys the costume.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
