Technology

Y-yeah.

I'm sometimes having conspiracy theories that some of such people are not just scammers, and were purposefully planted. Lots of people had unpleasant (for corps and states) ideas about crowdfunding, self-organization, libertarianism, or maybe anarchism, whatever. Cryptocurrencies too are not all bad, they have their uses. Living in the USA you might not see those clearly. Crowdfunding is a good model (when you can sue the living hell out of scammers).

It is an existing strategy, highlight your own mule as a leader, let them siphon the sympathizers of an idea to them, then let them loudly fail. You discover those people and their potential mechanisms which could have stayed hidden, and you undermine trust. Repeat until the field is clean. And by weeding out supporters of unfavorable ideas this way in portions, you gradually reduce those possible to act from people opposed to you. So it's a working strategy for building a totalitarian state (that's what they did in Russia), for creating a monopoly (that's what we had in the last 20 years in the web ; even FB, Google etc would initially play as supporters of some free and interoperable Internet, if you remember, they'd support XMPP and RSS here and there and put on nice faces ; then after siphoning the energy that could have went into building a working decentralized IM infrastructure or working decentralized social infrastructure, they'd stop being nice), for basically everything.

I thought at some point that Russia's regime is some scourge Russia alone was subjected to, until I saw that it was actually one of the first to show signs of a global change. Probably because it had less inertia due to being weakened after USSR's breakup.