Over the last few months, I’ve watched three documentaries on two frauds perpetrated by con artists – Fyre, Fyre Fraud and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
Whenever I encounter stories like this, I wonder why the con worked and whether the success of the con suggests something meaningful about our culture. The people at the center of these stories are not wildly charismatic (or if they are, that charisma is not captured by the camera). They are outwardly bland and unmemorable by the standards of American pop culture, the kinds of figures who you might find occupying a crowd scene in a movie to help sustain the illusion of normalcy. Neither appear to be the next coming of P.T. Barnum or salespeople who could sell water to a whale.
between errors 