Do you sometimes wonder why absolutely everything seems to be a scam these days? From whatever website or gizmo is currently sponsoring YouTubers, to the software that makes your job harder, to the service that lets you access free things for a monthly fee, to the latest passive income grift, to the consultancy firm that makes the business look professional as it fires you. How did we get here? The year is 1922 in the only country on earth and people are excited about three things: Jazz, Art Deco, and the fact that white women get to vote now. Aviation is literally taking off and other things are also surely happening. Amidst this thrilling social climate, the US economy is the first to deindustrialize as the scale of the tertiary sector, which has been steadily growing, meets that of the primary sector, which has been steadily shrinking, at the 30% mark. People are surprised by this despite the fact that Marx predicted it in the 1800s, which is the most consistent pattern in modern anthropology. The secondary sector meanwhile is still growing, but king Belshazzar is already wasted and the writing on wallstreet foretells that this trend too will soon reverse course. A point which will be reached seventeen years later. Other industrialized nations —as always— shall follow the tide. The three sector model of the economy, developed by Clark, Fisher and Fourastié splits a population's economic activity into three buckets: The primary sector, concerned with the extraction of resources both mineral and agricultural. The secondary sector concerned with turning those resources into consumer goods. And the tertiary sector concerned with providing services, i.e. anything that doesn't have some physical product at the end of the process. In later years, other economists have suggested that the tertiary sector should only refer to certain forms of service work while decoupling research- and teaching-work into a quaternary information services sector as well as decoupling managerial work into a quinary sector for "high impact decision makers". Whether these are useful distinctions or merely the result of puffed up CEOs not wanting to be lumped in with gig workers is for you to decide and me to judge. Whatever your leaning, I think there is a different class of professions which should be represented by an additional sector: Those who produce nothing at all. Not goods, no refinement, no convenience. Ironically, some of those puffed up CEOs might get to be decoupled after all. So why does deindustrialization happen? The primary sector, some mode of basic extraction, is an option pretty much anywhere. You don't need the specialised skills and resources required to build a factory and there is relatively certain demand for the product even when your local population doesn't have the kind of buying power to pay for anything but the bare necessities. As you do more and more of this, you accumulate wealth and the kinds of resources that could be used for secondary manufacturing steps. You now get to build that factory which turns your lumps into gizmos and, because not everyone is at this stage yet, the supply is low and the sector profitable. This more profitable sector grows and you amass enough buying power to get those cheaper raw materials from elsewhere. Extraction decreases, since it would be tremendously silly to throw your population at thankless, gruelling labour which isn't competitive given domestic rates for the sake of optics. We aren't there yet. So you get even richer. The basic needs of large parts of the population are sated. Not so sated that they might think about stopping to work —you want the engine to keep spinning after all— but sated enough that they'll start paying for convenience. For services. They reach a point where time is worth an amount of money that someone else could live off. This is fortunate, because you need to keep large parts of your population working so that they can continue to buy things, lest you slip into recession and lest they start revolting. You need to make sure that most of them feel like their wants are not aligned with the unemployed and you also do need a good few unemployed people of course, as a reserve army to keep the cost of labour down, as a threat of what happens if you stop, and as a mechanism of easily replacing someone if they squeak. This is the tightrope industrialised societies walk and for a while it goes fine. Your population is now so rich that paying them for that secondary sector manufacturing work becomes unprofitable for increasingly specialized goods, but by that same token you have enough money to buy them elsewhere. All those people who lose their jobs in manufacturing just enter the ever swelling service sector to produce convenience for everyone else just like the move from the primary into the secondary years before. Everything keeps basically adding up. you can keep most people employed while making less and less... Except there is an issue. The year is 2016. The panama papers are getting published, some backwater island votes to leave the European Union, Dilma Rousseff is suspended from office and the only country on earth elects a fascist. Amindst what one might call "events", oligarch Mikhail Fridman promises the coming indigo era —a new stage of the economy where growth is driven by unprecedented innovation and creativity in science and information services. He named this time ahead after the bullshit-newage-woo notion of indigo children, kids born with special gifts of perception and empathy who would shepherd us into a brighter tomorrow. All of this is hugely prescient and prophetic in ways which are entirely orthogonal to what this idiot meant by it, but still we should take a moment to laugh at the jokes history has written for us. They will not be funny for very long. See, the path you —as in "you, the exemplary nation-state", not "you, the person"— have been treading so far does not extend infinitely into the future. In fact, you can't remember when you last saw any signage. Just like the economists had told you, you modelled humans as things of boundless avarice who will naturally want more so long as there is more to have. You thought that, as they got richer, they would soak up with those bills all of the products and all of the services without in any way diminishing their hunger. But humans aren't like that. The rich have long since run out of things to want. Despite what the occasional yacht might lead one to believe, in relative terms those old dragons barely spend anything, leading to deflationary reserves of dead money cut off from the circulation and rotting away as a numeric representation of power alone. While it is true that the poor will spend next to everything, you can't let them get too comfortable or your whole scheme of elaborate threats to keep people working breaks down, which only leaves those in between, who also aren't nearly as hungry by default as you would like them to be. Once the masses went out and got magazines to see what things they might want to spend their cash on, but that kind of self-directed, opt-in, live-and-let-live bullshit was barely good enough last quarter and to propose such fripperies to the shareholders today would unquestionably get you stoned to death. What if the masses decide they don't need anything anymore? By the time that Russian oligarch brings up indigo children, the kraken of paradigmatic B2C marketing already has a tentacle around everyone's throat an a screen in front of everyone's face. They've run out of insecurities? Build new ones! They don't want [Thing]? Tie it to social status or show other people with it and let group pressure handle the rest. Actually, scratch all of that. Just show attractive people looking happy and play upbeat music. When's the last time they felt happy? [Product] might help! Alongside this, a second prong is also developing. As people get richer, one thing they might seek is security, though security is an obviously unacceptable boon due to your whole threat-scheme. There are a number of pretty useful programs —things that last forever without needing to be replaced, with a marginal cost of 0$— that would be oh so great to have reliable access to. A patently terrible business model. People mustn't ever be allowed to own such a thing, and so planned obsolescence is streamlined into subscription services. Everything becomes rent while wearing the shrivelling mask of commerce. Some of those digital landlords rent out their loyal base to other, sometimes more traditional businesses, and in turn grow their reach. Yanis Varoufakis would later call this Technofeudalism while others engage in various degrees of failing to notice and failing to care. If you look at the market in terms of simple number-shuffling, everything looks fine —bullish even!— but if you open up those price-tagged boxes of anonymized commerce, you'll find that a significant number of them contain junk for which a primary cost was convincing people that they should buy it, and that another large subset is empty. The year is 2024. Russia meddles in an election again, Israel invades Lebanon again, and the only country on earth elects a fascist again. The same one actually. Nothing if not unoriginal those guys. But, however horrible the direct political impact is, let's focus on what the despot does in his off-time: Notably, a crypto scam against his own base mirrored a mere month later by Milei in Argentina. No one particularly minds. Two billion dollars are lost and no one particularly minds because why would they? A candidate who won thanks to numerous podcasts financed by overpriced, branded-repackage-at-best, snakeoil-at-worst supplements and the social media platform that makes you pay to produce its own, rapidly de-valuing product, cannot plausibly lose trust through griftsmanship. While no one was looking, those perceptive indigo children have arrived and thrown the economy into a new age unlike anything we have seen before. They have pulled away the rug to reveal a void and, in turn, the fact that grounding is optional. No one actually wants anything? Great! Sell nothing and leave the price tag on. Charge for a recolour of a free service! charge for dropshipped garbage funnelled through some influencer! Charge for an ai generated course which doesn't teach you how to become a scam artist yourself! Charge for the plugin that steals your money while making you feel like a canny consumer and let them talk to their fake therapist about it! Pump and dump your shitcoin as they lap up the juices because you have correctly identified that the only thing you need to provide is the dopamine release of clicking "buy". Of ringing the bell for a culturally conditioned dog. Of letting them revel in the vaguely parasocial act of buying that thing that the nice people with the ring-lights were talking about. No one's gonna really mind when the box turns out to be empty because no real food has made it past the fistula in decades. It really is all about the bell these days. The anticipation, the spectacle, the allure of in-group symbols. You need a nothing-sector if the numbers are to keep adding up. Getting one though, that takes some serious infrastructure. Not everyone can be a self made mountebank, few among us possess the sheer predatory energy to make an honest fraudster and fewer still can weather those dread passions of the grindset. No. To turn this whole thing into an economic force that can hold up the weight of our sins, elaborately doing fuck-all must become a sport for the regular Joe. Let's just say the shareholders won't be disappointed. We've made it to a place where any recently laid-off schmuck can open any of the myriad apps that make you pay to get jobs and find a nice little office gig where you write up and file documents that no-one will ever look at, move data back and forth between columns, stand around empty buildings and make someone somewhere feel like work is taking place. This work is mysterious and utterly, existentially, unimportant. Graeber calls it Bullshit Jobs, while those regular Joes get to call it "making a living". Kinda. Almost. The indigo children have done it. With their magic of vibes and glamours they have saved capitalism from its "internal contradictions" yet again. No doubt this isn't to say that there haven't always been scams. Swindling people out their money for cheap is a trade as old as time, but it needs to swell to a certain scale before mandating a whole sector of the economy. Service work wasn't invented in the nineteenth century —prostitution after all is the oldest of professions— but a case could be made that the category of service work as a coherent, unified, contextualised entity was. And besides, the very nature of flimflammery has undergone a change was well. It used to be that the deceit was a flaw, a dirty secret no real businessman would associate with, whereas in the age of the quaternary sector, your ability to keep the money flows going while not accidentally generating value is your actual systemic purpose. Someone needs to keep the wheels turning so no one realizes that the wheels aren't hooked up to anything. Fake jobs to buy fake goods to justify your position in the social hierarchy and keep the model built for endless avarice alive. Congratulations, you win nothing! Welcome to the quaternary economy.