At the edges of the technological world, people with remarkable connections to the American elite fall in love with scams; some of them perpetrate these scams & two have very dramatically bookended 2022. I wrote about them for my friends at the Acton Institute. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about Miss Elizabeth Holmes being found guilty of wire fraud & conspiracy.
She was the founder of Theranos, a fake technology startup promising that its machine (pompously named Edison for the famed inventor) could conduct a large variety of blood tests from very small blood samples, improving vastly in one sector of diagnostic medicine which would have great consequences—it would make it easy to achieve early discovery & therefore cheap & feasible treatment of many terrible diseases.
Fear of death & greed come together to sell people on fantasies, but they need an added mixture of moralism—since, after all, these are not businesses the elite institutions or business investors expect to come up with technology. Instead of that kind of progress, we get the progress moral fantasies offer/
Come year’s end, Miss Holmes has actually been sentenced to eleven years in jail; surely, she’ll be out quite quickly & will have luxury to keep her company while imprisoned; but it’s some measure of justice.
She has already been forgotten; since her dramatic fall, other scammers have charmed the world of liberal elites. I wrote about the most infamous, Mr. Samuel Bankman-Fried, a much more successful, but just as shameless conman. He’s the progeny of two Stanford Law professors, who suddenly became a crypto guru without any past interest in technology, startups, or that specific area of research.
He turns out to have stolen a lot of money & been incredibly incompetent at the job he made for himself as founder CEO of a trading platform & an associated hedge fund. His advantages as an insider should have made him wealthy, but apparently he was too bad at cheating. Another aspect of the scandal—it was not elite institutions, but outsiders working in crypto who brought him down; elite institutions failed in yet another astonishing show of their incompetence & it took more than a month for him to even be arrested on charges of wire fraud & conspiracy…
"yet another astonishing show of their incompetence" A phrase we'll be hearing a lot.