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Etymologically, the word tracks back to “phreaking,” a term from the 1970s used to describe the theft of free international calls from phone companies by emulating the tone system then used for dial-up. The “ph” is for phone, and “phreak,” short for “free call.”²⁸³ “Phish” enters the lexicon in the 1990s.²⁸⁴

The Anti-Phishing Working Group is another entity in the distributed and democratically unaccountable structures of global governance which, in the era of digital meaning, have replaced the state. In the absence of global governance of a democratic variety, this is a quasi-private, self-appointed global police force for the internet.²⁸⁵ The Working Group received reports of 268,126 phishes in 2006, and 1,380,432 in 2016.²⁸⁶

In their book, Phishing for Phools, George Akerlof and Robert Schiller use the idea of phishing as a metaphor for the imperfection of markets – not just the deliberate deceptions of thieves, but also the intrinsic deceptions of their normal working.²⁸⁷

Akerlof won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 for his work on the asymmetric information that participants have in markets. It is impossible, for instance, to know whether a second-hand car is a “lemon,” because although sellers are going to know, they are not going to disclose this to buyers. The expectation that cars might be lemons affects sellers of good used cars, because uncertainty and lack of trust is built into the relationship. This is one of the reasons why even the best of second-hand cars is so much cheaper than a new car of the same model.²⁸⁸

In terms of our transpositional grammar, we have cars, drivers, and speech, perhaps also a written description in an advertisement. Underlying all these meanings is a sociable interest in the sale, a differential interest between buyer and seller that is solidary in one meaning function but antagonistic in another. This is intrinsic to exchange and the market, their function as sociable meanings.

Co-author Robert Schiller also won the Nobel Prize, in 2013, for his analyses of antagonistic interests leading to market failure, in his case the “irrational exuberance” that inflates asset prices.²⁸⁹

Akerlof and Schiller show in their book how “the free market system tends to spawn manipulation and deception.” They go on to document a multitude of antagonistic interests in the market. Advertising, for instance, contains systematic rhetorical exaggerations and omissions. In every sale, buyer and seller know that as well as producing a situation of “good-for-me/good-for-you,” markets also “produce good-for-me/bad-for-you’s. They do both, so long as a profit can be made.”²⁹⁰

Nor is it just the little person who has to deal with trickery intrinsic to the market relation, mediated by money and price. The high flyers in the system play the same game of deception, hence the savings and loans crisis of 1986–95, the junk bond crisis of the early 2000s, and the worthless mortgage-based securities and derivatives that without government bailouts in 2008–9 would have brought down the global system of money.²⁹¹

With the Friedmanites in mind, Akerlof and Schiller conclude, “economists … systematically ignore or downplay the role of trickery and deception in the working of markets … [C]ompetitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery.”²⁹² This, in the words of another great theorist of the late capitalist market and aspirant to the Nobel Prize, is “the art of the deal.”²⁹³

The solution, say these two good neo-Keynesians, is regulation of markets by democratic governments. This is not to abolish the intrinsic antagonism that drives interests in markets – they wouldn’t have got their Nobel Prizes if they had gone that far. Regulatory measures are necessary if the antagonisms intrinsic to the market are not to follow their inevitable tendency to self-destruction. So, the market lives to see another day. According to the normal logic of the market, the banks should have been bankrupted in the 2008 collapse of the financial system, but they were saved by government, an unsurprising irony.

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²⁸³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

²⁸⁴ https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/phishing

²⁸⁵ https://antiphishing.org/about-APWG/APWG/

²⁸⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

²⁸⁷ George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, 2015, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

²⁸⁸ George A. Akerlof, 1970, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84(3):488–500.

²⁸⁹ Robert J. Schiller, 2000b, Irrational Exuberance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

²⁹⁰ George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, 2015, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. vii, 150.

²⁹¹ Ibid., pp. 117ff, 124ff, 23ff.; George A. Akerlof and Paul M. Romer, 1993, “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2):1–73. doi: 10.2307/2534564.

²⁹² George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, 2015, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 6, 165.

²⁹³ Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz, 1987, Trump: The Art of the Deal, New York: Random House.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 279–281. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

George Akerlof and Robert Schiller’s “Phishing for Phools” §AS2.4b