Chapotraphouse

Dear Ludic,

I saw that you are featured in an upcoming webinar as below:

A Boardroom Guide to AI: Spotting Hype and Managing Costs

Noting this, I would like to bring the below to your attention, as [REDACTED] staged this as a very successful in-person event in June of this year targeting directors.

[REDACTED] is the leading annual event for board directors from publicly traded companies across the United States, attracting directors now for the last 20 years.

Next year's event will take place at [REDACTED]

We expect around 70-80 directors to be in attendance, representing some 200+ boards.

The event is entirely in-person.

If it works for you, I would suggest a short call to discuss the specifics, including positioning Hermit Tech on the agenda (attached) with a commercial opportunity.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

With best regards,
[REDACTED]

After a quick exchange, it became apparent that the deal is as follows: I can wire them money and in exchange be granted access to the fancy room, where I would be allowed to Market to these people. I would turn up in a suit, exaggerate how successful my business is, possibly make some incredibly grotesque comments about women^[https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/#fn:4] ^[https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/#fn:5] depending on the clientele so that the male directors know that I'm one of them, and finally we will Do Business.

Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later. I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged. Even the pleasant and sufficiently skeptical can feel compelled to attend because the truth is that executive compensation and funding is driven by your relationships to other people, but make no mistake, the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege. They are enormously vulnerable — I know many people who fit this profile, and it is disconcerting to see people put the whammy on them. They zone out when Donald Trump is on a nearby television, eyes glazing over, and in private will say "he makes a lot of sense" without being able to repeat anything he said. They buy into things like the prosperity gospel with hardly any prompting, and can more-or-less have absolutely no ability to avoid scams — they'll happily say that they're not technical people but quantum is the future.

To quote Ed Zitron, who later on in this excellent piece quotes me, forming the mythical content promotion ouroboros:

Whatever organization that's burdened you with some sort of half-baked, half-useful piece of shit business app has done so because the people up top don't care if it's good, just that it works, and "works" can be an extremely fuzzy word. It doesn't matter that Microsoft Teams is universally-loathed and regularly threatens to crash every time you load it. A Microsoft salesperson used its monopoly power to cut your boss a deal to either bundle it with a bunch of other mediocre shit or they saw the name "Microsoft" and said "oh boy! I love Microsoft Word!" and pulled out their credit card so fast it left a gouge in their monitor.

Indeed, we've only seen one side of the coin — I get the messages aimed at sponsors, where they trust that I will don the mantle of the wolf and select the choicest morsels from the flock that they have gathered. A friend who wishes to remain anonymous sent me what the prey receives:

[Can't do nested spoilers, so here is an inline transcription of the screenshot:

Sponsorship

www.cshub.com/events-ciso-exchange-april/downloads/spex-prospectus

The Chief Information Security Officer Exchange offers you the chance to do business with some of the most prestigious organizations in the world. The CISO Exchange provides many different platforms for cutting-edge solution providers to increase their market share and awareness to their target audience through leveraging different sponsorship opportunities.

At the CISO Exchange we qualify all attendees based on job function, strategic responsibility and budgeting authority to ensure you're guaranteed to meet and engage with an elite group within the cybersecurity space. To ensure all of our attendees are qualified they must be able to answer yes to the following questions:

• My company's annual revenue is $1 Billion or above
• I sit in the C-Suite or report directly to the C-Suite
• I control or directly influence where the cybersecurity budget is spent
• I manage corporate strategy at the regional, divisional or group level]

This is absolutely shameless. "Ensure you're guaranteed to meet and engage with an elite group in the cybersecurity space". What are the actual questions?

Do you have lots of money? Are you authorized to spend that money? They're just doing lead qualification. That's all this is. I currently run sales and marketing for about twenty hours a week — I know, I know, what have I become? — but I would not be able to ask questions this crass without hiding my face in shame.

The same person sent me the following PDF from a Melbourne-based conference which includes a sponsorship package that they call the "guy at the bar thinks you're cute and wanted to buy you this drink" package.

[Transcription of the screenshot:

Targeted Invitations – $2,500

Want to make sure certain organisations are represented in the room?

We offer a service where we will invite on your behalf individuals from targeted organisations and provide them a free complimentary ticket to the event. If they accept the ticket and register, we will connect them with a representative on your team so they can organise a meeting on-site.

For the $2,500, we will provide 5 complimentary tickets to up to 5 targeted organisations.]

You can straight-up buy people tickets to attend events, and have a concierge deliver them into the eager maw of your marketing machine. I was shocked to see an absolutely trivial price tag too. A$2.5K? Even my tiny operation spent more than that last week buying hardware for one engineer — it's a rounding error to get the person that chooses what technology you're going to be using for the next five years and whether you're being laid off into my sales kill box. I just have to wave my company credit card and bellow forth a wretched miasma of lies about no-code tools and generative AI, and voilà, some of you are unemployed now!