The Invisible Acid

Why cyber-crime is potentially even more dangerous to global prosperity than Trump’s tariff tantrums and dictator-driven wars

In any ecosystem there are a variety of niches to be exploited and human society is essentially a social ecosystem in which individuals look for niches that match their inclinations. Evolutionary biologists speculate that perhaps the major factor driving the evolution of the human brain has been the arms race between those who lie in order to gain advantage from the labors of others versus those who need to detect lies in order to avoid being taken advantage of.

Lying is not restricted to humans: other intelligent species also invest significant effort in deceiving their peers, because lying — when it works — provides an enormous payoff relative to the effort required. In a way, we can think of liars as predators and those they deceive as prey. But just as in an ecosystem in which actual predation occurs, the balance is unstable. When there are a great many rabbits, predation by a small number of foxes is a viable short-term strategy. But as the number of foxes increases due to their consumption of rabbits, the rabbit population declines. At this point one of three outcomes is possible. Outcome one: foxes begin to starve, presenting the rabbit population with a brief opportunity…