The entrepreneurial-success narrative itself, not digital trickery, powered the era’s frauds

Evidence

Perhaps the internet was to blame, with its ability to invent alternative realities that confidently presented misinformation as fact. The celebrated 2010 documentary Catfish examined the new ease with which online personas could be fabricated for seduction and exploitation. But most of the century’s infamous frauds eschewed digital trickery for the age-old long con. Elizabeth Holmes didn’t need deepfakes or bots to captivate her audience. There was no more seductive story in the era than potential entrepreneurial success, which gave Holmes a near-hypnotic control over her prestigious board members. In the most shocking detail of the Theranos scandal, she convinced former secretary of state George Shultz to side with her over his own whistleblowing grandson. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 570

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is this a genuinely distinct mechanism — narrative as hypnosis working through status and deference to entrepreneurial myth — or is it just the timeless con? Worth pinning down what the 21st century actually added.
• XREF: Feeds directly the reader’s counter-thesis that the era does have a signature Marx misidentified — entrepreneurial-heroic narrative as cultural adhesive cuts against the blankness claim.