I feel like most of the scams profiled in this book where targeted at a very specific demographic - younger Millennials and older Gen Z people with a bit of disposable income and a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out). So if I enjoyed reading Hype, why am I upset that it was so narrowly focused on Fyre Festival? It’s left to the reader to actually know why these two stories are relevant. Theranos gets a couple passing mentions, mainly in relation to how big-money investors get behind scams like Fyre and Theranos. The description on the book jacket talks about the Juicero juicer, but the book never really talks about that scam.
Hype also regularly references other prominent scams without really getting into them in detail. But it’s just not relevant to online scams. It’s loosely tied into the subject of online scammers because Bloomberg did a meme campaign with an agency that also worked with McFarland. Bluestone throws in all these interesting anecdotes and side diversions, and while they’re entertaining, sometimes you’ll have been reading about something for 10 pages and suddenly ask “Wait, but what does this really have to do with the topic of the book?” These’s a whole section about how Bloomberg reneged on his deal to employ his presidential campaign workers for the entire election cycle. The other issue with the book is that it just rambles on and on. Don’t sell me a book that’s supposed to be about why we fall for fraudulent influencers and then tell me stories about how McFarland spent so much of his company’s money on private jet flights that they couldn’t afford decent office furniture. But if your book is going to be primarily about Fyre, say it’s a book about Fyre. Fyre is an interesting story, but since Bluestone not only wrote about Fyre for Vice Media AND served as Executive Producer for the Fyre Netflix doc, it feels a bit like she’s decided she’s gonna ride the Fyre train for as long as she can. Unfortunately, this book is about 80% focused on Fyre Festival and Fyre Media CEO Billy McFarland’s pre- and post-Fyre businesses.ĭon’t get me wrong.
I felt like having a better understanding of how and why people fall for online scammers would help me in my work, as well as making for some interesting reading material. The subtitle of Hype is “How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet - and Why We’re Following.” As someone who has done a fair bit of work around the topic of scams in my day job, both in terms of raising awareness of specific scams and trying to each people how to avoid online scams, I’ve become very interested in the general topic of scams. Hype by Gabrielle Bluestone is a slightly misleading, incredibly rambling, but ultimately enjoyable book.
0 kommentar(er)
