Edel Coffey: Scams, socials, scandals - and the nature of humanity

"...Millennials and Gen Zers have come of age in a cynical and opportunistic world that has influenced their own worldview..."

The icons of social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp, are displayed on a mobile phone screen, in London.

IN 2019, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino published her Trick Mirror essay collection, which included one called ‘The Story Of A Generation In Seven Scams’. 

It’s an impressive work that uses examples of scamming from the disastrous Fyre Festival to the subprime housing collapse to the Trump election itself to interrogate how American Millennials and Gen Z-ers have come of age on a dangerous assumption — that scamming is a way of life.