Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/04/shingy-talks-about-the-real-jo.html
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I especially appreciate that “Digital Prophet” intentionally mocked the anodyne creepiness of the term Google and Facebook were using for the equivalent role—“Evangelist”—and feel rather like I should have noticed that at the time.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. An accomplished grifter has to believe his own garbage, and this line of “we were intentionally mocking the other companies’ evangelists” line smacks of yet another way he’s trying to make himself more respectable than he actually is. This is a man in search of his next sucker employer, after all.
He’s absolutely a corporate talker of the marketing tribe, but what he was saying on stage was not what he was saying behind closed doors.
In other words, it was BS and phoniness all the way down with this clown.
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So he was posing as a poser? That’s giving me a headache!
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The public BS (“pizzled is a mode somewhere between pissed off and puzzled”) made the private truth (" One word, just one word, are you listening? ad tech") more valuable. The “private truth” is BS to many but worth $4.4bn to “Oath”.
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I’m not too proud to admit that until this moment I never knew that Mr. Show’s Shangy was based on an actual person.
Shangy!
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It doesn’t make him any less of a confidence artist. Quite the opposite in fact. And as we can agree, what’s good for Verizon’s bottom line isn’t good for society at large – again, quite the opposite for the most part.
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I rather feel like you’re missing the point, which is that the con you’re interested in (Edit: that everyone was intereted in!) was a distraction from the con that mattered.
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I also think the frame of confidence artistry limits our understanding of what’s going on more than sharpens it. Here let me do a chart.
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Again, my point is that masking one fairly mundane con selling one thing with another, more flashy con selling something different doesn’t make him any less of a con man. And his admitting that he did this in the NYMag interview is yet another con, meant to help shed the clownish AOL image for what he hopes will be a better-paid gig from whichever rube hires him next.
I’m betting that he’ll also undergo a whole style and image makeover to lose the whole AOL prophet garbage. But he’ll still be the same grifter at his core.
“Charts, yeah? Decks, right? Eye-dee-ahhhhs!”
Seriously, if anything this accentuates the fundamental grifts at the heart of the advertising-based business model: everyone involved fooling themselves that it’s worth what they’re paying.
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I was kinda baffled by that character myself – thanks for connecting the dots!
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What’s baffling about the digital nature of time melting? 
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You’re not wrong!
A good analogy is political youtuber types with blandly liberal personas who all turned into Ben Shapiro in 2016. “Youtube” and “alt lite grifters” are intimately connected cons, but different cons, and its hard to understand it if the only dimension we choose is “con”.
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We recently looked at advertising with a fairly big-name website. They gave me price tags and estimated click through rates and the number of impressions we’d be buying. With that information, I was able to calculate that we would be spending $10K for $1K gross rev.
My experience is that there are two successful ways to market/advertise:
- Join, support, and participate in a community where your business is already relevant.
- Follow Google’s SEO guidelines like a playbook, starting with Google’s recommendation that if it’s good for your customers, Google will like it too.
All the big data and social media stuff that goes on is hand-wavy gypsy-hypnosis nonsense that will always cost more than it can deliver.
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Another example: the con of GOP politics and their current president*, America’s foremost public grifter since the 1980s. That he’s a BS artist is as obvious as Shingy being one, and both thrive in the context of late-stage capitalism (the meta-con that rules them all).
So, yes, different but interrelated cons, with one taken to a cartoonish extreme highlighting the inherent and mundane griftiness of the larger system that incorporates it.
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Hundreds of meetings a year. I especially appreciate that “Digital Prophet” intentionally mocked the anodyne creepiness of the term Google and Facebook were using for the equivalent role—“Evangelist”
Oh, the term “Evangelist” in the tech industry predates Google and Facebook. Apple was calling their Mac propagandists “evangelists” even in the 1980s.
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Numeracy FTW. Since I’m not great at reading social cues, I’ve found it’s my single greatest weapon to wield against con artists of any sort who are after money as a material reward for their pathology (which most are). In my career in the media and tech industries, I’ve run into a lot of them, but when they see I can run the numbers they immediately move from trying to sell me to either trying to recruit me as an ally (which I’ll do if they start toning down the BS and start delivering value) or trying to torpedo me (which seldom ends well for them).
I have been fooled, but it’s generally been by con artists who were more numerate than I am or who were in it for a reward that didn’t involve money (those grifters are truly scary, by the way).
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I think understanding this type of con artist who cons people into thinking they are a con artist is important to understanding our whole society. In a society where the majority have a net worth of less than zero and a few are billionaires, obviously you are going to try to steal from the rich because that’s where the money is. The rich people are convinced that they are smarter than the poor people. So the “con” directed at normal people isn’t even really a con, it’s a stage show, aimed at convincing the rich people you are conning the poor people.
It’s like the NRA self-dealing scandals that have been recently exposed. Part of what was exposed is that NRATV and their other political activities were losing money. Sure they were conning a few people out of their money by selling fear, but they were spending more pushing the fear than they were taking it. That was not grift, but they fooled us into thinking it was so the could self-deal.
Advertising is a great place to do this because no one can actually track how advertising translates into profits. So someone like Shingy isn’t even necessarily conning us. If they were a really self aware Machiavellian actor they would know that their bullshit doesn’t fly with the people that it’s supposedly targeted at. But the CEO and billionaire rubes who are willing to pay Shingy to bullshit us don’t realize that the bullshitting doesn’t work.
I feel the same thing is going on with Trump, Facebook, Google. We were told: If you are not paying, you are not the customer, you are the product. But that suggests there is something of value to investors to begin with. I don’t think we are the product, we are the props.
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What keeps them going is an innate understanding that, strange as it seems to us, even grotesquely obvious BS peddled by clownish hucksters will fly in one way or another with 27% of the general public. That’s enough for them to convince their supposedly more sophisticated corporate marks that it flies with 51% or more of the public (because, as you note, they’re already pre-disposed to believe that anyone who isn’t wealthy is an idiot).
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this interview did not improve my impression of shingy.
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Coming from tech myself - would love to hear a couple of these stories. Especially the case of grifters not after money.
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