It’s fascinating how their first instinct when granted access to the internet was not to anything fun, or interesting, but immediately to shit in the commons and start scamming people. Had they been there from the start I don’t think the internet would have taken off the way it did.
To paint with a large brush: the third world imperative to scam others, even their own kind, is a hallmark of low trust societies. For all the bureaucratic hell you have to go through in places like India or China, it ultimately amounts to nothing if only your core metropolises get the bulk of representation and funding while the rural areas languish. When India achieved widespread internet access, it was largely
mobile internet infrastructure that was deployed. In South and Southeast Asia, you can be in a rural village that has full 3G internet access for basically dirt cheap despite only having lights on for a few hours a day (assuming you're not using a kerosene generator). With the totality of the world's digitized knowledge at your fingertips, it's
really easy for predatory behaviour to become widespread if there's a monetary incentive attached.
If you're a rural peasant, why would you waste your time and energy selling dodgy produce in a crowded town bazaar for paise on the rupee? It's much easier to follow YouTube tutorials on how to set up Linux, spoof IP addresses and phone numbers, and try to scam stupid old Western people out of their money. Kali Linux experienced a surge in "popularity" in the mid-to-late 2010s thanks to it being featured prominently in Mr. Robot, yet that spike in interest came largely from Indians trying to leverage Kali Linux for "penetration testing" as an excuse to try and hack people. More often than not, no actual hacking takes place and instead just spearfishing until you find a mark stupid enough to press F12 on their browser and give you their cookie/storage keys or however the method goes nowadays. That's not to
excuse shit like this happening, but to merely explain how it emerges.
If we could redo the deployment of the internet, I'd wager every country on the planet ought to have started with a proper desktop/laptop PC and
then pivot into mobile internet. Haphazard deployments like this are how you end up with Quora being filled to the brim with Indians asking blatantly illegal questions with impunity and Amazon tribespeople who've never once lived with a computer suddenly fastforwarding to smartphone addiction. C'est la vie, unfortunately.
