Rabbit hole #14 - You've Got Swindled

This week’s chat came about after we watched Netflix's Tinder Swindler. Some felt Simon Leviev was very clever, and adored online. Others gave the victims "asking for it" status. The rest of us were shocked he wasn't in prison. So what does it take to get taken in by someone? Is being a con artist an art form in itself? To this day Simon is only being sued by the real Leviev family for identity theft.

This spurred a wider conversation about finding love online.

Emotional entrapment (not always romantic) can occur via exploitation and preying on vulnerability... similar traits to how cults work. Not always illegal, but always very grey. We'd all like to think we'd never be gullible enough to fall for online scams - easy to say when you've not experienced such emotional deception.

In the age of Love Is Blind, people are desperate to be seen for who they are inside, in direct conflict with the visual medium of a reality show or online profile. To quote The Mask "it's about the masks we wear as faces and the faces we wear as masks"... persona is a very murky world...

Mirror mirror on the wall... who is the most authentic of them all? 
Mistakes make us human, to be flawed IS to be human. It connects us, makes us empathetic. Does editing our profile disconnect with this theory? By selecting what we want to show the world, reframing how we see ourselves, can we even reflect if we always deflect in this visual way? Has cancel culture come about because we've become intolerant of mistakes?

Dial in and join us down this week's rabbit hole to see if we’ve been slowly entering the Gotham era of our times…