August 27, 2018

While we’re talking fraud, this NYT piece on people who sell YouTube views is fascinating and enlightening. YouTube counts how many people watch videos, puts the number next to them, and uses this to account for advertising money and decide which videos to promote. It’s therefore worthwhile to program a computer to click on your…

Read More The Inversion: or why everything sucks.

We’ve not done one of these for a while so here goes. Dan Davies’ Lying for Money is an economic history of fraud which emphasises its relationship with the social trust necessary for civilisation. Practices like accounting, auditing, and record-keeping are in some sense technologies that permit us to manufacture artificial trust, and of course…

Read More Boooks