But perhaps no moment has been so primed for grift as our current one. As Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker last year: “At some point between the Great Recession, which began in 2008, and the terrible election of 2016, scamming seems to have become the dominant logic of American life.” The mantras of Silicon Valley — Think big! Think different! Move fast and break things! — encourage harebrained scheming. Venture capital requires business ideas to reap more than profits; they must promise explosive growth. And moving fast is presented not as a shortcut to getting rich but a necessary aspect of any successful venture. The grandiose expectations placed on actual children have grown wildly out of proportion with the economic reality into which they’ve been born. Only a scam could bridge the gap.

One of the greatest modern scams is the entrepreneurial fetish itself, and its marks are getting younger and younger. Silicon Valley has always romanticized the college dropout, from Gates and Jobs to Zuckerberg and Holmes. (The ABC News projects on Holmes are titled “The Dropout.”) Now a broader effort seeks to enlist children into ventures at an age before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed. In 2017, the magazine Teen Bo$$ debuted to set preteens on the fast track to wealth under the tagline “Dream big & learn fast!” And last year, Entrepreneur magazine ran its own issue on teen titans, featuring a 13-year-old candy C.E.O. on its cover. Her secret? “I just felt like I had nothing to lose.” By the time she was 10, Holmes had decided what she wanted to be when she grew up: “a billionaire.”

Meanwhile, the tools of grift have rarely been more attainable. Early chat rooms introduced a generation of kids to the pastime of pretending to be other people online. Now, everyone with a smartphone can create and manipulate images. And in this hyper-visual culture, constructing an image of something can feel like the most important step in conjuring the thing itself. Just ask the Chinese manufacturers that hawk clothes online with images of glamorous magazine spreads, then ship out disfigured imitations to unsuspecting customers.

Holmes was obsessed with the image of a finger-prick drop of blood unlocking a wealth of medical information, and many powerful people liked the picture, too. (“The Inventor” makes much of a photo shoot in which Holmes holds a tiny red vial between her fingertips.) The only thing the Fyre Festival did well was create a viral ad featuring famous models cavorting on yachts and swimming with pigs. At some level, we are all growing familiar with this kind of sleight of hand. On Instagram, we are training to create beautiful images of ourselves with no possibility — or really, expectation — that they be replicated in person.