The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

Posted on February 21, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      8 Comments

Even if you don’t know what the word “Bezzle” means — yet — you know what it is, because it’s almost a certainty that someone you know, and perhaps even you, have found yourself in that state at one time or another. Cory Doctorow is here now to explain to you what The Bezzle is, and why he found it such a compelling topic for his tale.

CORY DOCTOROW:

Bezzle, n: The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

My Martin Hench novels chronicle the adventures of a two-fisted, hard-bitten forensic accountant who spent 40 years doing spreadsheet-to-spreadsheet combat with technology’s most inventive scammers.

I introduced Hench with last year’s Red Team Blues, which is – paradoxically – Hench’s last adventure, told in the manner of the final volume of a beloved, long-running series. I thought it was a cute conceit and then my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, loved it so much that he bought two more and I had a brainwave: what if I told the stories in reverse? Sure, the reader will always know that Hench survives, but that’s more-or-less true of every long-running series, right? No one really ever bought a new Conan novel thinking that Howard was gonna give the mighty-thewed Cimmerian the axe.

There’s lots to love about this setup. Given that Marty’s career spans 40 years of Silicon Valley history, I can parachute him into any scam in tech history. He’s the Zelig of tech-finance fraud.

Patrick bought three of these: Red Team Blues (Marty’s last adventure, a ripped-from-the-headlines cryptocurrency fraud novel that came out just as FTC was imploding) (though, honestly, I coulda published that one in any month between 2020 and 2024 and there would have been a ghastly crypto scandal to hook it to); Picks and Shovels (Marty’s first adventure, in the heroic era of the PC, set in an early 1980s San Francisco where AIDS is scourging the city, Jello Biafra is running for mayor, and every grifter has invented a new personal computer), and – published today – The Bezzle,

The Bezzle tells the tale of an escalating series of scams spanning the golden age of the scam, starting with Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 buying spree that saw every great, useful tech company bought up with Saudi royal money (funneled through Yahoo! via Softbank) and then torn to shreds by Yahoo!’s warring, venal princelings that pioneered the enshittification playbook.

From there, the book ascends a gradient of ever-more-destructive scams: the real-estate financial engineering that incubated the Great Financial Crisis; the pigs-at-the-trough bailouts that followed; and then, the rise and rise of prison-tech grifters, who filled America’s heavenly overcrowded prisons with cheap Chinese tablets that replaced libraries, continuing education, phone calls, video visits and commissary accounts, with vendors extracting huge sums from prisoners and their families (this scam continues to this day).

I’ve studied scams and scammers for a long time, and despite that, I’ve fallen prey to scams. Repeatedly. This has given me many opportunities to consider the stories that scammers and their marks tell themselves about why scams work.

For the scammer, the principal narrative is the self-serving notion that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” Many of the classic cons involve tricking the mark into thinking that they are committing some kind of scam, and the con-artist smugly pockets their winnings, telling themselves that if the mark had only been honest, they’d have kept their dough.

But not every con involves tricking the mark into thinking that they’re getting one over. The most successful and durable cons rely on the mark simply not wanting to know that they’ve been conned.

This is where Galbraith’s “bezzle” comes in – that “magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” As Galbraith pointed out, the bezzle is an enchanted moment where everyone feels better off: the mark thinks they’re richer, and the con artist knows they are. This was the case during the 2008 housing crisis, when bankers, insurers, and borrowers colluded with regulators and analysts to prolong the bezzle for as long as they could. So long as no one looked too closely at those collateralized debt obligations and other exotic financial instruments, everyone could pretend that the whole world was richer and the line would go up forever.

Same goes for STONKS, cryptos, NFTs and every other vibe-based asset class of end-stage capitalism. So long as no one looks too hard at these pigs-in-pokes, the bezzle can continue and with it, the good feelings it brings.

But the longer the bezzle goes on, the more scam-debt the victim accumulates. Prolonging the bezzle is like going from the bar to a series of speakeasies to avoid your hangover. You’ll have to take ever-more-heroic measures to stave off the inevitable, and the payback, when it arrives, will be a million times worse.

The bezzle is how the con artist enlists the victim to prolong the con, participate in their own victimization and deepen the wound.

It’s damned hard to convince people that they’re being scammed, but not because “you can’t con an honest man.” It’s because we all flinch away from pain and try to keep the party going for as long as we can. It’s because it’s easy to understand how you’re winning, and understanding how you’ll lose is both a lot of dull detail, and a serious downer.

The anti-scam forces have invented many tactics to make it easier to shut the bezzle down. David Maurer, a linguist, turned his glossary of con-artist slang into a gripping anthropological study of con artists (it was adapted for film under the title The Sting). When Adam McKay adapted The Big Short, he had Margot Robbie deliver all the most technical explanations while partially submerged in a bubble-bath. And of course, John Oliver and the Last Week Tonight crew use stunts and comedy monologues to transform even the most tedious scams into rage inducing, laugh-aloud TV gold.

This work is unbezzling. Transforming a scam’s mechanics into entertainment is a way of fashioning a long, sharp pin that can prick the magic bubble of denial that turns a moment’s lapse in judgment into a life-destroying victimization.

This is what makes the Hench books so satisfying to write (and, I hope, to read). Just as my Little Brother books turned the bone-dry business of understanding surveillance and information security into tight technothrillers that inspired a generation of technologists to pursue security and privacy, the Hench books are designed to be a highly entertaining vaccination that inoculates the reader against the raging pandemic of scams that passes for our economy.

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