A fresh wave of ticket fraud has swept the nation, with obsessed fans of a certain South Korean septet losing thousands to digital con artists. The UK government now clamours for a crackdown on these networks. How delightfully predictable.
We stand on the precipice of a new financial crisis, yet our citizens squander their savings on the promise of a fleeting glimpse at manufactured idols. This is not merely a failure of regulation, it is a cultural sickness. The Victorians knew the perils of hysteria, from the Tulip Mania to the Railway Panics.
Today our mania is for men in makeup singing about butter. The parallels to the fall of Rome, where bread and circuses distracted a populace from imperial decay, are too glaring to ignore. A society that pours its treasure into such trivial pursuits invites its own decline.
The real scandal is not the fraud, it is that grown adults willingly part with their earnings for this drivel. Let the government clamp down on bots and scammers, yes. But let us also interrogate the intellectual atrophy that makes such schemes profitable.
Until we cultivate a populace that values substance over spectacle, we shall forever be fleeced by the next digital Pied Piper.