So James Frey has one or two things to say about Dave Eggers and his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:
I await his much ballyhooed A Million Little Pieces with interest… I wonder if it reads as pleasantly as his dialogue.
So I read about this latest mutation of the venerable Ponzi Scheme: Matrix Websites that sell positions at the top of the pyramid to people for hundreds of dollars, disguised as “ebooks” or $500 CDs. These venial morons even have their own bulletin boards where they try to boost their rankings by suckering other people into the scam. Some of the websites even seem to have been written by morons, but sadly this is not the case. They just know their target audience. Some of the would-be scamsters have even had semi-cold feet, while others obviously feel the long arm of the law reaching for them and are trying to cash out as quickly as possible. But there are still many more of them, and they are even pimping for new suckers on Fleabay. Sadly I fear this new bozo invasion will get worse before it gets better and we’ll be seeing a plague of annoying pop-under adverts for these, just as we did for those dumb 100%-rebate pyramid sites last year before they got the smackdown.
In a horrible, startling way of course, these kinds of new media Ponzi Schemes are a weird low-rent version of the Net Bubble and feature much the same hype, boosterism, and self-delusion.
