Cheap AI agents, alumni scams, and the Elias Thorne convergence: on the erosion of trust in the startup ecosystem
By
danielrmay
A baker's-dozen of insight crammed into one ring.
Summary
The article examines the convergence of three troubling trends in the modern tech/startup ecosystem: (1) cheap AI-generated cold outreach where agents send plausible but flawed technical pitches for paid fixes; (2) the alumni t-shirt scam phenomenon where scammers exploit institutional trust for small-dollar fraud; and (3) the "Elias Thorne convergence" — a pattern where multiple low-integrity actors independently arrive at the same exploitative business model. The author reflects on how these behaviors become visible only when someone does the unglamorous work of looking closely, and what this says about incentives, trust, and the erosion of craft in the age of agentic AI.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThe email arrived in my inbox at 3:20 AM this morning, with the subject line 'getlikewise.ai DMARC is at p=none.' The from-name was Bruce. The signature, four lines down, was Benjamin.
The technical observation was correct: getlikewise.ai is in fact at p=none. The inferred problem was wrong, because the monitoring phase is deliberate and the configuration lives in Terraform.
For $99 paid via Stripe, Bruce-or-Benjamin would send me the fix.
What gets visible when no one does the work.
The Elias Thorne convergence is what happens when enough people independently discover that the same low-integrity strategy is profitable, and none of them stop to ask whether it should be.
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