The modern economy is scam-powered - by Izabella Kaminska
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The modern economy is scam-powered<br>GDP measurements do not account for this. But they should.
Izabella Kaminska<br>Aug 13, 2026
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I really don’t mean to make the blind spot a consumer grievance site. But what’s going on in the world of corporate customer relations is absolutely incredible right now.<br>Maybe I’m just super unlucky. Or maybe I’m just more naive or idiotic than most people. I’m open to that! Or, perhaps I’m in the minority because I don’t religiously read the terms and conditions on every single agreement the modern digital economy forces me to sign.<br>But I don’t think so.<br>My former boss Paul Murphy and I cottoned on to the fact that “everything is grift” many years ago. It’s what led to my Alphaville series “The entire economy is Fyre Festival”.<br>So it’s not like I’m not wise to the issue.<br>Something has significantly worsened since then. Back then there was at least a pretence that corporates or start-ups were operating legitimately and cared about their customers. Or that their services were intended to better your life.<br>Today, that’s gone.<br>There is no longer any charade. Corporates no longer care if people consider them bad actors or not. Yes, it’s possible a few small firms still care about reputation and customer satisfaction.<br>For example, I do!<br>But by and large when it comes to mega corporates, everyone is now shamelessly transparent about the fact that their intention, from the get go, is to fuck you. The only multinational I can think of that this doesn’t yet ap ply to is Amazon, but that’s probably because they’re mercilessly actuarial about complaints, and I haven’t yet been judged a problem customer. And also because it’s the merchants they prefer to squeeze.<br>In any case, if you could forgive me this indulgence, I’ll go into the specifics of my tale.<br>First off, I wouldn’t make such a fuss about my Marriott situation if I didn’t think it was indicative of a wider trend. That trend reflects the fact that far too many corporates have stopped trying to differentiate themselves on the core services associated with their brands. I suspect this is because many of these companies no longer consider these their key profit centres. Too often core services are loss-leading operations. The real money is made elsewhere: financial products, undisclosed data commission relationships, client acquisition kickbacks or cross-selling for third parties that the customer doesn’t even know about at the point of purchase. As a result the true point of differentiation increasingly is how skilfully corporates can manage and manipulate their customer flow or upsell it. In other words, the customers are now the product they sell to others.<br>Marriott, on its part, is no longer a hotel company. It is an “asset-light” customer herder that derives income from the assembly of unsuspecting customers on its digital real-estate for the purpose of delivering them to third parties for extraction.<br>The Blind Spot is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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This results in tactical and nefarious schemes not just to misdirect or catch out customers on a continuous basis but to lock them into their platforms in the style of modern-day serfs. The tricks of the trade include fake frictions at all customer exit points, the outlandish (and often illegal) enforcement of increasingly Draconian terms and conditions, or, alternatively, creating the illusion customers are too heavily invested in the corporate’s in-house value system to leave. That could relate to everything from amassed follower count to airline and hotel points.<br>Separately, there’s an endless array of corporates whose only purpose seems to be cornering customers into paying out supplementary fees or invoking company policy in a totally asymmetric way to avoid honouring customer entitlements or refunds.<br>It’s a sad state of affairs. But it’s not new. What is new is that corporates no longer even pretend to care about doing a good job on their primary service or honouring customer relationships. We are all just cattle. A grievance that leads to a refund request, represents a customer that the corporate is unlikely ever to see again. The game theory dictates it’s better to fuck the customer by stealing their money, than caring about reputational fallout. The market power of the operator is just too big.<br>In my case, I had to leave after one night as the facilities were nowhere close to as advertised. But a key part of the decision to do so was based on reception staff unequivocally stating that I was entitled to a full refund bar one night’s notice on the rest of the 7-day stay.<br>I should have smelled a rat when the receptionist refused to put that in writing. I should have noted an even greater red flag when they were fuzzy about what I should do to follow up on it if no payment goes through.<br>But...