beware the grift wheel

How's it going,

I loved going to amusement park funhouses as a kid.

Running across sloping mechanical floors that shifted under my feet, getting hit with a cold blast of air after walking through a rotating barrel, seeing my distorted reflection in creepy trick mirrors. 10 minutes of harmless fun between rides? Sign me up.

Of course, today I don’t need funhouses—because I have LinkedIn.

It’s an unhinged bizzaroland of corporate baddies, tech bros posing as thought leaders, and around every corner is another spooky post about job market horrors.

It can be a scary and destabilizing place. LinkedIn has a way of bringing your fears and insecurities into focus. It’s easy to compare your journey to others’, or become acutely aware of just how close you could be to a layoff.

LinkedIn is also the perfect place to perform competence, which makes it every grifter’s dream platform. Every few months there’s a new grift disguised as a great opportunity, and lately it’s the agentic workflow.

If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes scrolling, you’ve probably seen it. They all look something like this:

When you look close enough, all of these grift posts follow the same pattern:

1. The Flex
   
   The grifter makes a credibility-building post by posing as masters of agentic tools, making sweeping claims in the caption about how they’ve built a fully automated email newsletter system with AI that runs itself end-to-end while they sleep.
   
   
2. The Illusion
   
   The grifter attaches a vague, intentionally confusing screenshot or Loom video to show you just how “easy” it is, without actually explaining what they’ve done or how it works. Because, in reality, the system is usually half-functional or manually propped up behind the scenes.
   
   
3. The Anxiety
   
   You’re left more confused than before, ridden with anxiety because you don’t understand how this magical solution works. You feel out of the loop because they’ve figured it out and you haven’t.
   
   This feeling of inadequacy is actually the goal. These grifters need you to feel lost so they can sell you the map.
   
   
4. The Bait
   
   The grifter offers you a lead magnet disguised as a free resource that promises to tell you the secret. It fails to teach you anything usable. Again. Anxiety compounds.
   
   
5. The Payday
   
   Once you download it, they sell you on a time-sensitive deal on a course or webinar where they tell you how it works, but for real this time. Promise! You buy it, and you still don’t have a self-writing newsletter flow, because there never was a usable self-writing newsletter flow.
   
   
6. The Repeat
   
   They rinse and repeat the same grift in a new package.

This, folks, is The Grift Wheel.

Here’s the thing about grifters: they profit, not from what they sell, but from your anxiety and self-doubt.

The LinkedIn Grift Wheel keeps spinning—a self-replicating hall of mirrors where every new so-called “expert” reflects the last. It’s built on borrowed confidence, each reflection promising clarity that never comes.

But when we’re caught in the grift wheel anxiety loop, we also forget to ask the most obvious question, which is:

Do we even want to automate this?

Even if a self-writing newsletter could exist (and it kind of does, but it’s bad) why would we even want to hand it off to a machine? Email is a high-trust channel—newsletters reach the people and customers who opted-in to hear from you. Those people expect care, clarity, and intention, and we owe it to them to deliver that.

When we automate that away, it isn’t innovation.

It’s straight up bad marketing.

So the next time you see one of these agentic workflows on your feed, instead of asking yourself “How can I do that?” Ask “Why would I want to do this?”

The only way off the wheel is realizing you don’t need to be on it to begin with.

Talk soon,

Ines

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