The Century of the Conman
A companion to Future-Ready for Nothing
The empty sentence has an author. In the first of these essays I tried to dissect the hollow grammar of neoliberal management — address complexity, improve performance, build resilient, future-focused solutions — and to show that its emptiness is not a flaw but a function. But a grammar is not spoken by the air. Someone stands at the lectern. Someone has built a career, a class position, a whole biography out of speaking it fluently, and that someone is the representative man of our new millennium. He is suited and booted. He is smooth, suave, never flustered. He does the right smooth talking with the right borrowed lingo, the academic-sounding vocabulary he has lifted from the glittering, vacuous best-sellers sold at airports. He is, at once and interchangeably, the CEO, the director, the board member, the consulting guru, the go-to mover and shaker. He finds himself one gig after another. He reinvents himself one role after another. He is the conman, and this is his century.
Herman Melville saw him coming a hundred and seventy years ago. In The Confidence-Man, a stranger boards a Mississippi steamboat — pointedly named the Fidèle, the faithful — and works his way through the passengers in a succession of masks, each one asking the same thing of them: their confidence, their trust, a little of their money offered as proof of good faith. Melville understood that the con is not, at bottom, a particular trick. The con is the demand for confidence itself, extended by a man who has nothing to offer in return but the performance of deserving it. What Melville staged on one boat has now been extended to the whole vessel of the world. We are all on the Fidèle now, and the smooth stranger is working the room.
The con is not the lie
We must be precise about what kind of dishonesty this is, because the imprecision is part of how it survives. A liar still honours the truth; he knows what is so and bends his statement away from it, and he can therefore be caught, because somewhere there is a fact against which the lie can be measured. The conman cannot be caught this way, because he has been careful never to assert anything checkable. He did not promise that the strategy would work; he "facilitated a conversation." He did not claim the rebrand would deliver; he "surfaced insights" and "held space for the journey." Notice the grammar — agentless, passive, unfalsifiable, the same evasive syntax we met in the first essay, now worn as a suit. You cannot fact-check a vibe. You cannot audit a man who has made sure there is nothing on the table to audit but his own manner.
This is what raises the con above ordinary bullshit. The bullshitter, in Frankfurt's sense, is merely indifferent to truth; he fills the air. The conman has learned to monetise that indifference. Bullshit wastes a meeting; the con transfers the money. He is the bullshitter who has discovered that confidence, unlike truth, can be invoiced — that if you can manufacture trust faster than anyone can demand proof, the gap between the two is pure profit, and the gap can be made to last forever.
The liturgy and its temple
Every priesthood needs its scripture and its temple, and the conman has both. His scripture is the airport best-seller: the genre in which a single counterintuitive notion is stretched across three hundred pages, the anecdote is dressed as data, and the reader is promised that the secret of everything has finally been distilled into seven habits or five dysfunctions or one big idea. It is a literature engineered for the transit lounge — to be consumed between flights, retained for the length of a workshop, and quoted as though it were thought. And the airport is no accident of setting. The airport is his natural habitat precisely because it is what the anthropologists call a non-place: a space stripped of history, of locality, of relation, identical in every city, belonging to no one and accountable to nothing. The conman is the man of the non-place. He has no roots, no community that can hold him, no street he must answer to. He is perpetually deplaning into the next contract, and his rootlessness is not a personal failing but his core professional asset.
His temple is the facilitated workshop. You know the liturgy. The suited stranger walks in, and out come the sticky notes, the colour-coded pens, the post-its pressed in their dozens onto the wall until the room is papered in a mosaic of other people's hurried sentences. There is a ritual of clustering and a ritual of dot-voting and a sacrament of "alignment," and at the end the wall of coloured squares is photographed and metabolised into a strategy that nobody in the room will recognise as theirs. We should call this what it is: a piece of theatre that performs participation in order to foreclose it. It has the form of democracy and the function of its opposite. It looks like voice; it is voice taxidermied — the posture of listening arranged carefully over a decision already taken. From within the culture-centred approach, this is the most telling move of all, because it does not silence people crudely. It invites them to speak, harvests the speaking, and converts it into legitimacy for an outcome they never chose. The post-it is the perfect instrument of this: it gives you the feeling of having been heard while ensuring that nothing you said can ever be traced, costed, or held to.
Not a man — a class
It is tempting to picture the conman as a rogue, a lone shark who slips through now and then. That is a comforting error. He is not an individual; he is a class, and like every class he reproduces himself through networks. The conmen sit on one another's boards. They refer one another into one another's organisations. They validate one another's credentials on one another's panels and platforms and podcasts, until the credential becomes perfectly circular: he is an expert because other experts call him one, and he returns the favour. It is a self-certifying caste with its own revolving doors — out of the C-suite into the consultancy, off the consultancy onto the board, from the board back into the next interim chief-something role — and at no point in the circuit does anyone from outside it get to ask what, exactly, any of them has ever built.
The older critics gave us the tools to name this class, and we should use them. Veblen drew the line between industry, which makes things, and business, which manipulates the pecuniary symbols to extract a cut from the making; the conman is pure business, producing nothing, inserting himself between labour and its product to take his percentage of the value others create. C. Wright Mills foresaw the "personality market," in which a man learns to sell not a skill but a self — the smile, the manner, the bearing of competence — and the conman is that market's finished product, expert in nothing and therefore, conveniently, available to consult on everything. A real expert is bounded by a field that can correct her. The conman's emptiness is his portability: because he knows nothing in particular, there is nothing he cannot be hired to opine upon, and nothing against which he can be measured. In the dialect of the tradition I was raised in, he is the comprador, the dalal, the middleman who grows no rice and weaves no cloth but stations himself at the chokepoint and lives on the toll. Street theatre knew this figure by heart. It always insisted on naming him.
The regime that punishes the question
Here is the heart of it, the trick on which the whole edifice rests. The con does not merely lack accountability; it manufactures a regime in which seeking accountability is itself the punishable offence. Half a million on a rebrand here, a million on a strategy there, the next logo, the next mantra, the next snake oil — and there is no evaluation, no follow-up, no reckoning of whether any of it did what it was sold to do, because the entire apparatus is arranged to make that reckoning unaskable. Ask where the million went. Ask what the last restructure achieved before this one was commissioned. Ask, simply, did it work — and watch what happens to you. You will not be answered; you will be recoded. You will become the difficult one, the negative one, the troublemaker, the person who "raises too many questions," who is "not a team player," who is "resistant to change." The question is never engaged on its merits. The questioner is repositioned as the problem, and the repositioning is the system defending its vital organ. A con that could be audited would not be a con. So the capacity to audit must be destroyed first, and the surest way to destroy it is to make an example of whoever tries.
This is why the con is inseparable from precarity. An organisation of secure, rooted people who know their work and one another is dangerous to the conman, because such people ask inconvenient questions and remember last year's promises. So the con and the cull arrive together. Management finds a new mantra from a new guru, the new mantra requires a restructure, the restructure sheds the people with the longest memories and the deepest knowledge, casualises those who remain, and leaves behind an organisation more frightened, more fragmented, more inefficient than the one before — which is precisely the condition in which the next con can be sold. The dysfunction is not a side effect of the con. It is the con's product and its renewable fuel. The parasite, as I argued of the resilience-merchant in the first essay, needs the wound; the restructuring conman simply makes the wound himself, on a contract, and bills for the bandage.
Who pays
We must, in the end, refuse to let any of this stay abstract, because abstraction is the medium the con swims in. The half-million on the rebrand is not a line in a budget. It is the tutor not renewed, the cleaner's hours cut, the position frozen, the care not delivered to the community that was promised it. The million for the strategy is wages someone did not receive so that a stranger in a good suit could paper a wall with their colleagues' sticky notes and fly out before the consequences landed. The con is, stripped of its liturgy, a transfer — upward and outward, from the many whose labour is real to the few whose product is the performance of managing it. Every dot-voted priority that goes nowhere was paid for in someone's foreclosed future. The bodies are always there, underneath the abstraction, holding up the platform while the smooth man on top points at the horizon.
So I will say plainly what the century of the conman makes it costly to say. To be called the troublemaker, in a regime built to punish the question, is not a charge to flinch from; it is close to the last form of accountability that remains. The conman's entire art is to make four questions unaskable — for whom, against whom, who pays, and who decides — and to ensure that anyone who asks them is recast as the difficulty rather than answered. Our task is the same as it was at the end of the first essay, only harder, because now it must be done against a man who has organised the whole room to discredit us for doing it. Ask the questions anyway. Ask who was paid and what was delivered and where the memory of last year's promise has been buried. Refuse the demand for confidence that has not been earned. Stay rooted where he is rootless; name the relation where he dissolves it into "stakeholders"; keep the receipts he is counting on you to lose. The Fidèle is sailing, and the smooth stranger is working the room — but a steamboat full of people who have stopped extending their confidence is a steamboat the conman can no longer work. That refusal, multiplied, is where his century ends.