We’ve all been watching the absurd antics of Hollywood’s newest self-reflective obsession, the Modern Grifter series like The Dropout, WeCrashed, Inventing Anna, and a host of other shows hold up a mirror to America’s worst capitalist excesses. While there certainly is a bit of moral hazard in painting what is at best criminals as tragic anti-heroes of late capitalism, the entire phenomenon is sparking some much-needed discussion about alienation, economic determinism, and the cost of hypercapitalism.
These Modern Grifter series seem to secretly arise from how dual-class share structures (Facebook, Theranos, WeWork, etc.) create corporate governance problems when CEO-founders are unaccountable to their boards. This phenomenon is exacerbated by a period of historically low-interest rates, an excess of dry powder from the last bull market, and the investor class acting like lemmings chasing unsustainable yield in whatever the next shiny flash-in-the-pan thing is this week. Unsurprisingly this environment is kindling for every aspect of the Fraud Triangle: opportunity, motivation, and rationalization. The antics of how each of these psychological elements manifests in the grifter’s abnormal psychology make for great Hollywood drama.