Delusions For Sale

I found this story interesting in how it illustrates the intellectual rot our society has developed. There is an infamous internet site that claims to connect people who are interested in extramarital affairs. That site is Ashley Madison, and I have seen their ads appear occasionally when I visit different corners of the internet.

A little while ago, a threat made to reveal the identities of clients visiting  this site, unless certain demands were made. I remember hearing about this on talk radio during my drive from work and I thought it was funny. All those men hoping to cheat on their wives should feel miserable and be filled with fear.

Anyway I forgot all about this sordid affair until I opened up Yahoo finance checking on how the market is responding to the implosion of Chinese fake commodities markets, and there was a related story about Ashley Madison and the analysis of the hacked data from this site. For full story go here. It turns out that of the millions of accounts on this site, 31 million were dudes and only 5 million were supposedly women. Of the analyzed "female accounts" a large percentage belonged to Ashley Madison employees who most likely pretended to be women and tried to get male account holders to spend money on membership fees. When analyzed, many of the "female" accounts were slight variations of the same account name and often led to ashleymadison.com revealing that these accounts were created internally by members of the company staff. Furthermore, analyzing correspondence they found that only 1,500 women ever checked messages on this site versus 20 million men, and same percentages occurred when it came to responding to messages. Essentially a dude's chance of talking to a girl on this site was about 1000 to 1. Using a the chat function and corresponding to a woman was about 5000 to 1. In summary the site Ashley Madison catered to a bunch of frustrated men and sold them the chance to electronically interact with another dude while fantasizing that he was corresponding with a woman.

We do an awful lot of pretending in our culture and Ashley Madison creator got rich selling pipe dreams to people. Same as Obamacare, Chinese stock trade, and Islamic tolerance. In my own line of work I see a lot of people hurt by drug use; this is a very similar behavior where predators sell dreams to people and for a short time they get to imagine that life is better than it is.

Time to wake up folks. Only those who face reality can have a realistic future.